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Heresies
Sex is good
P.N. Abinales

Review of Michael L. Tan, Ma Theresa Ujano Batangan, and Henrietta Cabado-Espanola's Love and Desire: Young Filipinos and Sexual Risks (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Center for Women’s Studies, 2001), xv+, 137 pp.

There you have it. Anthropologist and Chair of the UP Anthropology Department, Michael Tan, with the assistance of Ma. Theresa Ujano Batangan and Henrietta Espanola, has confirmed two continuities in our sexual life as a people – first, that not much has changed between generations when it comes to the suppression of our libido and the prohibition to discuss sex in public; and second, that the Pinoy macho is alive and well.

What I heard from my uncles and aunts when they talked about making out behind the Church’s sacristy (the last place any vigilant parent or old maid auntie would check to find where itinerant young ones try to relieve themselves of their urges) or the highest balcony seat at the movie theater, had found resonance two generations later, as indicated by the survey findings that Tan and company published recently as part of a series by the UP Center for Women’s Studies.

The data presented in Love and Desire: Young Filipinos and Sexual Risks may be a bit outdated and limited (the research was conducted in 1994, covered only Manila and Iloilo, and with a limited sample of interviews), but what the authors found out is that hardly has there been any change in the sexual attitudes of young Filipinos.

On the one hand, while they are expected to be horny – who would not be if you are between 16 and 24 – today’s young is also constrained from talking about sex openly or expressing their sexual preferences and promiscuity. Libog is alright but it has to be contained, and those who do otherwise would most likely get the ire of elders, school and Church (and God, of course).

Libog is also okay as long as young couples refrain from going full speed with the relationship (i.e., be immersed in the wonderful but risky world of the motels and pre-marital sex) or, if they do so, commit themselves immediately to marriage and life ever after.

(This particular social sanction is not exclusive to conservatives like the all-male – some gay – leadership of the Catholic Church and the male-centered Filipino family. Local communists are also quite apprehensive about pre-marital sex, issuing an edict titled “On Marriage” that contains, among other things, a provision that enjoins cadres not to “roll, roll in the hay” lest they charged with “sexual opportunism” and penalized accordingly. This caused a friend to make the observation that Gloria Arroyo and Jose Ma. Sison via mouth pieces Igancio Bunye and Teddy Boy Casino, respectively, have something in common after all. So why not talk sex and shop instead of exchanging machinegun fire and strutting one’s military virility?)

But the deliberate containment of libog has created a contradictory, quasi-schizophrenic mentality that destroys the beauty of sexuality and turns it into a tasteless, garish act, shrouded by a misplaced sense of sacredness and purity. This is music to the ears of reactionaries like Cardinal Sin and Gloria Arroyo, but alas, something that has major negative repercussions on the young.

For one, because these people in power have abdicated from their responsibility to educate the young about sexuality and labeled sex as bad, or as something only appropriate for those married, they have distorted the young’s understanding of this basic human act. By criminalizing sex, they have also forced young people “to go underground,” i.e., to seek hidden places (motels) where they could – with intense fear and apprehension – explore each others’ bodies. And without the proper education from their seniors, their trysts would often inevitably lead to unwanted pregnancies (and unwanted abortions), not to mention haphazard decisions to marry at an immature age.

The social criminalization of sexuality (this, I would suggest, is the real theme of Tan and company’s survey) has also forced young males to seek sexual knowledge and satisfaction in the risky world of the prostitute. Already deprived of any proper sexual education in the family and in school, and still imbued with the stupid notion that condoms are uncool and an insult to the manhood, many of these young men engage in sex-for-pay unaware and unprotected against infection.

They would also come to regard sexual satisfaction as simply a matter of ejaculation and release, a mechanical act devoid of enjoyment. The woman becomes a robot, a mere receptacle of the male semen, and a partner that is not expected to show pleasure, much more show her enjoyment in being an equal sexual partner. For how else must one regard her, given that she is being paid for her “services”?

All of the above, in turn, help perpetuate the macho and the homophobe in many of the young, two of the most reactionary ideas that – argues Tan et. al. – have allowed homophobia and the illusion of male superiority to persist to this very day, despite the efforts of feminists, gay and lesbian activists, and other decent people to combat these pernicious attitudes.

The book seems to suggest that unless sex becomes part of the public conversation, and is accepted as part of a human being’s every need, the homophobe and the macho – together with the careless bisexual couples – will persist. The failure to bring about this shift accounts for the resilience of these “risky” attitudes across time. Here lies the reason why there seems to be no change in the sexual attitudes of different generations.

The book is not without some problems. The argument that male-gay arrangements are specific only to the lower classes because among middle and upper income classes, these “would be severely condemned” (p. 74) is not true. I doubt it, going by the open displays of love and sexuality by notable rich baklas and lesbians in the fashion worlds, among prominent hairstylists, actors and of late stage hands, that harm will befall these elites. Gender and class are still very much entwined with each other, pace the arguments of radical feminists or gay-lesbian activists that the former trumps the latter (or alternatively, of Leninists, Stalinists and Maoists who insist on the opposite).

Tan et. al. also need to explain to us why sex is almost always equated with food. That seems to be a consistent sub-theme in many of their respondents, who talk of sex using culinary metaphors. Is it because of the satisfaction these two acts bring, or is it simply because the use of gastronomic satiation makes public discussion of sex easier to do, particularly given the prying eyes of conservative institutions and elders?
Or is it also possible that by equating food with sex, young people are expressing their resistance to the attempts by their elders to make sex a sterile subject?

The historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto describes in his latest fascinating book Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (Free Press, 2002) that advocates of vegetarianism like Sylvester Graham, wanted to promote “clean food” like bran bread and pumpkins because he “believed that sex was not only immoral; it was unhealthy…because sexual emissions were debilitating. Society was threatened by the indiscipline of an unrestrained sex drive. Consciousness of one’s sexual organs was a sign of disease. Sex was paroxysm and orgasm resembled an attack of diarrhea.” Is it possible that the young of today, even without reading Armesto’s description of the views of the founder of Graham crackers, have encountered similar sentiments from their elders and thus took the opposite road to express their defiance?

These are questions which, if elaborated further by the writers, would have made the book more interesting. But the present edition will suffice. For despite its out-datedness and limited areas of exploration, it is still a work that reminds us that we still are a long way from becoming a tolerant and open society.

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Updated September 25, 2002
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