The republic woke up one morning to a video of a middle-aged man, masturbating, his act captured by the newfound technologies that spread news like virus. Viral, as they say.
The man was known to a small sector as a critic of the government. It was a small sector that knew his ardor and accomplishment if one considers—and assumes—that out there, a few kilometers from the metropolis, many did not really know him and what he stands for. Out there in farms and hills, no one even bothered with that video. It was not up to the standard that young people would consider as scandals.
There first was a denial, as expected. Then there was the admission, which was not expected. The admission made this man a brave man. I don’t know if I would do that were I in his place, and were I, in a sense, caught in that manner.
Everything should have stopped there. But people came to this man’s defense, or so they thought. The vociferous voice was a wind that fanned the news and contributed to the news—the video and the admission—being spread all over. It would not stop, and would not be stopped. People who, we can say, were on the man’s side kept on talking and each word, each sentence, each defense made even more preposterous the situation.
Many invoked the privacy of the man. That a video of one masturbating was solely for the benefit of the man getting the pleasure negates the very fact of a moment of documentation. But it is an old concept of privacy and one’s desire to be private. We know the world has changed and technology has inserted itself already into human activities. I am not condoning these technologies; rather, I am asking us to rethink certain ideals and principles in the face of technologies that are invasive.
There was also the status of the man. The admission, if we are to be candid about it, has not made him any better. It brought back his profile, a feeling of privilege common to people belonging to his economic station in life. He must be saved—this was almost the wail of similarly situated individuals, forgetting that he does not represent us. He is not the movement, he is not the knowledge that we profess against an administration that can only celebrate the fall from grace of one of its critics.
Why a fall from grace? It is because we have always been duplicitous and hypocritical about sex.
If there was a good thing arising out of that revelation of one’s realization of private passion, it is that we started talking about sexuality. Masturbation became an in-your-face term; recording of one’s fantasy had been liberated from its silenced and hidden bedroom, with only the computer, the Internet and the moon as mute witnesses.
People came out admitting that they, too, masturbate. Of course, we know that. We know that we all masturbate but that sheer admission can open to non-sequiturs.
I masturbate but I don’t kill. Why do we say that? It is because, in the face of a President and his trolls tapping into our psyche, sexuality is a danger zone.
The qualification between pleasure and annihilation is a serious giveaway of a collective psychology.
I masturbate and I don’t kill. I masturbate and I am a good citizen. I masturbate and I love my country. Drop the “but” for heaven’s sake! And rejoice.
But, no, we have to add the “but.” We have to celebrate the caveat because we know, given our culture and a faith that reeks of colonialism, that Heaven still frowns on masturbation.
Listen to priests telling us that sex is clean and given by God, and sense the quivering falsity in that claim. The institutional Church can negate my statement but, at this point, it is what we believe in that matters. It is what had been hammered into our heads that counts.
To the generation of Catholic-educated men, let them count the number of times they had to confess their masturbation, and you see the power of that video.
We cannot escape the morality that is imputed to sexuality.
If we are going to fight this government or what it stands for, then we should speak its language. We cannot prescribe the vocabularies and glossaries from our own comfort zone.
There are no more comfort zones. We have to revel in the discomfort that is foisted by the spokesman of this administration.
If not for this column, people in my circle may have forgotten already about that video, and the man may have collected himself already into whatever strength that lesson may have given him.
But the republic cannot rest. Just a few days ago, the President bragged about the size of his penis. Even in a society where things that used to shock us are happening, a President being proud of his penis was just too much.
And so, again, we started to stammer and grope with words before we can tell him witticisms after witticisms how we are not interested in his penis. That we are not interested to see his penis but the true declaration of his properties. That we’d rather see up-close the tattoo on his son’s back. But all this noise was lost. As were the noise that day when the video was revealed.
The masturbation distracted us; the penis even more.
It was tragic that day when we opted to be bothered by a video and not pay attention to farmers in some distant agricultural areas. They would not be bothered by videos of any kind. Technologies would not play a part in their lives. Well, not anymore when some of them were massacred, and their families left helpless and alone.
But we were not to be bothered. We were out to defend the cold maxims about privacy. We were caught in preserving the sense to the private of this man.
Michel Foucault, in his History of Sexuality, said: “Sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered.”
We have an administration who is adept in managing sexualities. This administration knows our frailties and foibles. This administration knows that we quiver at the thought of things that we have placed in our bedrooms or toilets or dark nooks displayed out there in the open.
What this administration has not realized is that we, from now on, will start using the language of sex to battle the silence that can be used to stifle the truths when they are spoken in whispers, in cowardly murmurs, in quiet fear.