Porn and spectacle

PINOY KASI

Porn and spectacle
By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 00:31am (Mla time) 12/06/2006

Published on Page A15 of the December 6, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

THE day the "Nicole" verdict was to be handed down, I happened to be at the Department of Health on Rizal Avenue in Manila with a fellow faculty member from the University of the Philippines and some students. After the meeting, I suggested a visit to Quiapo. I’ve been working on a research report on Filipino sexuality and wanted to look at the type of videos being sold in that area.

It wasn’t difficult convincing my companions to come along. For Diliman creatures, a trip to Manila is like a safari, and a trip to Quiapo is, well, extreme safari, almost like inviting people to walk with lions and tigers.

Inferno

Or maybe a better metaphor comes from the Italian writer Dante’s Inferno. In Quiapo, there’s a particular building that could have come straight out of Dante’s magnum opus.

The street itself is filthy with stagnant water and every imaginable kind of litter, but this is nothing compared to the interior. The stalls facing the sidewalk all sell pirated videos, but fairly wholesome stuff like Baby Einstein and Disney cartoons. Enter the building and you know it’s going to be different inside. Oppressive heat engulfs you. The miasmas of the street’s trash assault you, now mixed with human sweat. The videos being sold become raunchier, lots of violent action films but still mixed with Korean "telenovelas" [TV soap] and local tearjerkers, and some soft porn. This isn’t quite Inferno yet, maybe Purgatorio, with videos of the most inferior quality, many copies of copies of pirated copies.

It’s a labyrinth in there and as you get into the deepest recesses, even the vendors’ faces begin to change. There are gaunt-looking women carrying emaciated children. I learned later that some of them actually live in here.

Move further in and you don’t see the women anymore. The vendors are all men now, and the stuff they sell is hard porn.

It’s an international X-rated bazaar in that Inferno. Name it, they have it. The vendors ask what you want: "Pinoy?" [Filipino?] "Kano?" [American?] Japanese? They tout videos with women on the cover, literally in your face, and can quickly tell if you’re interested or not. If you’re not, they ask, “M2M?" which means male to male. And if you’re still not interested, they have more varieties to offer, from "ladyboys" (male transsexuals who’ve had hormone therapy but not the surgery itself) to “barely legal” videos, referring to very young “stars.”

The Filipino productions seem a bit tamer, but try to make up for this with every other title carrying the word “exposé” or “scandal,” usually named after a place. In fact, I think this whole genre started out with something like “Dumaguete Scandal,” supposedly secret videos taken in dormitories of students, and they certainly weren’t working on their homework.

Cities were soon joined by provinces, and, curiously by schools, with titles like “UST Scandal” and “Perpetual Help Scandal,” although that fad seems to be fading, too. When I asked last Monday, the vendors said those titles had been “phased out.” But one of them, desperate to make a sale, went through his whole stock and dug out two videos: “Ateneo de Zamboanga Scandal,” supposedly taken with a Nokia phone and, to the feigned dismay of our team, “UP Scandal.”

Voyeurism

Porn thrives because of the voyeur in humans. Some of these scandal-and-exposé tapes are extremely blurred, but this, I guess, is part of the thrill that’s pushed through the title, a chance to peek in, via digital technology, at the most intimate of human behavior.

And whom are we supposed to be peeking at? The students are popular, partly because young people having sex is so terribly transgressive. The X-rated videos, supposedly of dorms, are there to poke fun at society. The wrapper of one X-rated tape, “Bacolod Sex Scandal,” has this come-on: “The people and leaders of Bacolod have neglected the proliferation of sex videos of the city’s young. The young now are overwhelmed with lust, ready to do it anywhere any time. Wake up! Witness these ... [I’ll omit the colorful adjectives] shots taken in Bacolod.”

In a country so plagued by political scandals, it’s inevitable that the videos begin to take on some of those national themes. The vendors told me one bestseller these days is “Davao City Police Scandal,” supposedly footage of trysting between a police officer and the wife of a junior military man. “As seen and reported in TV Patrol and 24 Oras,” the cover declares.

Then it happened. “Nicole! Nicole!” one vendor offered, waving a video. I found out they were selling two videos, one called “Olongapo Scandal” and the other “Nicole.” The videos feature a Filipina and a Caucasian. The videos play on the Nicole tragedy, even as it maligns her, insinuating that she had a sordid past, culminating with the rape.

Still porn

The "Nicole" case, and its strange convergence with the X-rated videos, reminds us of the many battles that still need to be fought around gender and sexuality issues.

First, throughout the trial, there was a lot of gossip, pretty much similar to the “Olongapo Scandal” tapes, of a “liberated” (used in its negative Filipino-English sense) woman who was asking for it because she had gone out with the Americans and had been drinking. I even heard talk about how “sweet” Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith looked, which unnerves me because it shows how naïve we can be at times. My psychologist friends will tell you about the paradox of the sociable sociopath: the most devious, the most lecherous of sociopaths are able to get away with bloody murder precisely because they can be warm and amiable.

Lost in the portrayal of "Nicole" and the corporal is this simple definition of rape: forced sex. It’s important that we Filipinos, the men especially, learn that there is such a thing as date rape, and even marital rape. In fact, there’s something even more bestial with date and marital rape because in such cases, you violate someone who has come to trust you.

Second, the coverage of the rape incident often took on qualities of those cheap Quiapo porn videos. In fairness, many media practitioners were conscious about the ethics of reporting on rape, for example using the pseudonym “Nicole” even if it was not legally required, but much of the coverage was clearly intended to titillate, as the legal definition of porn goes.

Now that the trial is over, "Nicole" will fade from public memory. If she is remembered, it will be as “the one raped.” There’s the risk we might end up forgetting all the other important issues, from national sovereignty and the Visiting Forces Agreement, to our still twisted concepts about sex and sexuality.

To remain fixated on the sensational aspects of the rape is to reduce this whole incident into another seedy porn production, like what’s sold in Quiapo, turning us into a nation of voyeurs craving for cheap public spectacles.