SEX teaches.
School began this week for many of us.
Returning to the world of syllabi and prerequisites, I surfed
the Net in between classes and found a seemingly more efficient
teacher prowling out there.
This month, U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner catapulted to the top of
several Internet searches after he exposed himself as a serial sharer
of self-taken photos.
In the Age of Facebook, a fondness for one’s mug hardly
merits a reaction.
However, the congressman became infamous after he posted on the
micro-blogging site, Twitter, a “Blackberry photo of an underwear-clad
erection,” which he sent to a female college student.
After first denying the crotch shot and claiming his Twitter
account was hacked, Wiener later confessed he was behind the
cyber-exposure. He also admitted sending sexually explicit photos to
other women before and since his marriage to an aide of Hillary
Clinton.
On one hand, the self-destruction of another womanizing and
lying politician isn’t any loss.
And yet, Weiner’s quick descent into public burlesque (the
man himself cracked “weiner (a popular Austrian hotdog)” jokes with
reporters covering him) made me pause because, as a “prolific and
savvy user of social media,” he used the Internet to get in touch with
constituents.
How many politicians personally use the online portal to not
just reach the public but also push advocacies, account for their
performance, and generally keep communication lines open and two-way?
However, Weiner, too, was undone—as he pointed out, the
jokes and puns just seem to write themselves in his case—by the
so-called “freewheeling” nature of the social media.
The “freedom” of a limitless and uncontrollable Web enabled
not just Weiner, an archetype of the economic and political elite, to
bend the rules but also Cordova cybersex operators typifying the
so-called digitally disenfranchised.
Authorities recently arrested a couple in Cordova for using
five children, aged three to 15, and their 13-year-old niece in their
home-based cybersex operations. The police confirm but have yet to act
on reports of similar cybersex activities in the town.
Decades ago, when computers and then the Internet began to
revolutionize the exchange of information in the affluent West,
critics warned about the so-called “digital divide”. The resulting gap
of online resources and opportunities will create a new class of haves
and have-nots, they warned.
Then, no one foresaw the Internet opening backdoors for
those who are pushed by need or lack of scruples to pursue whichever
ends. Asked how he could stomach pushing the children to disrobe and
pose sexually in webcam chat sessions with customers, the Cordova male
partner blamed their poverty.
Getting the old and entrenched to adopt the new, or
motivating those in need of resources and skills to learn a new
skill—these are the conundrums classically challenging classrooms.
How can students be prepared for lifelong problem-solving?
“Think out of the box” is our mantra.
Sex—primal, undeniable—seems to be quite the efficient
mentor, breaker of walls.
To recall an old copy-editing lesson, “efficient” implies
a high ratio of output to input, optimum production with least waste
of time and effort.
Yet a Tweet that causes the collapse of a marriage, a
reputation or a career seems hardly “effective”—the second “F” that
asserts it’s not always about the maximum output but also the desired
or intended one.
A home computer bringing in cybersex dollars may
efficiently return one’s investments but it ineffectively breaks the
cycle of poverty. It creates new victims and sinks the criminally
affluent into a hidden poverty of soul.
In classrooms, getting an “F” means bad news. In life, it
matters which “F”.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in the June 12, 2011 issue of the "Matamata" Sunday column of Sun.Star Cebu
Showing posts with label Sex talk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sex talk. Show all posts
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Fallout
WHEN I met Cecille the first time, she blended in with her batch: smart, confident, promising. (Real name withheld.)
I saw Cecille in another light when she, along with two other coeds, was a news source for an article about one-night stands.
For fact-checking, the writer submitted the names of his anonymous sources. I couldn’t associate the articulate and witty Cecille with the person so confused by self-doubt, she slept around because she thought nobody wanted more from her beyond that one night.
I asked the writer to probe why Cecille sabotaged all her relationships by equating every male’s interest in her with sex.
The answer came from Cecille herself: she said all men had to be like her father, a philanderer, but she wasn’t going to be like her mom, who acted blind to his infidelities and always took him back after his “whoring.”
I remembered Cecille again when I read about the proposal that Rep. Pablo Garcia (Cebu Province, 2nd district) will file again. If Garcia’s bill is approved, persons getting a church annulment will have this automatically recognized by the civil courts.
According to the July 24, 2010 article by Sun.Star Cebu’s Justin K. Vestil, the bill promises less cost and inconvenience to couples who want to go their separate ways. At present, it requires time, money and lawyers to process the separate annulment one has to secure from the Church and the State to be finally and truly free to remarry.
This view was countered by a judicial vicar who handles annulment cases in the Metropolitan Matrimonial Tribunal, which evaluates if a petition for nullity is valid. According to the same article, Fr. Raul Go cautioned that if the bill becomes a law, this may be abused by some parties as an alternative to divorce.
Annulment cases may increase, he warned.
According to a Feb. 11, 2008 article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) found “alarming” the rise of petitions filed for annulment of marriage: 7,138 cases in 2006, 7,753 in 2008. Before 2006, the OSG noted that the number of annulment cases never exceeded 7,000.
The OSG attributed the trend to the relaxation of society’s attitude toward separated couples. On the other hand, the State urged the Church to help couples save their marriage because break-ups also scarred the innocent, the couple’s children.
The human desire for closure in relationships is far too complex to be grasped by institutions like religion and the State.
Cecille’s mother’s decision to keep their family intact was not without cost. Had her parents opted for separation or annulment, would this have nipped in Cecilia the same weakness she hated in her mother?
In 2006, Sun.Star Cebu published a three-part special report entitled “Going Solo”. As a member of that special report team, I interviewed multiple sources who went through the familiar tale of love-marriage- disillusion-dissolution (or not quite).
All my sources were women through no deliberate intention of mine. All experienced a form or combination of different forms of abuse: physical, sexual, financial, emotional, psychological.
Those who pushed on successfully with their petitions to nullify their marriage said they wanted the annulment to signify an empty, clean slate with which to begin anew even if they did not have a new lover or were uncertain if they could sufficiently trust themselves to fall into another commitment again.
As a child of parents who mutually decided to separate, I can say there is no empty, clean slate. As lovers, parents, sons, daughters, friends, we humans are a messy lot.
The only consolation, if it is one, is that we have a hand in writing our lives.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 25, 2010 issue of “Matamata”
I saw Cecille in another light when she, along with two other coeds, was a news source for an article about one-night stands.
For fact-checking, the writer submitted the names of his anonymous sources. I couldn’t associate the articulate and witty Cecille with the person so confused by self-doubt, she slept around because she thought nobody wanted more from her beyond that one night.
I asked the writer to probe why Cecille sabotaged all her relationships by equating every male’s interest in her with sex.
The answer came from Cecille herself: she said all men had to be like her father, a philanderer, but she wasn’t going to be like her mom, who acted blind to his infidelities and always took him back after his “whoring.”
I remembered Cecille again when I read about the proposal that Rep. Pablo Garcia (Cebu Province, 2nd district) will file again. If Garcia’s bill is approved, persons getting a church annulment will have this automatically recognized by the civil courts.
According to the July 24, 2010 article by Sun.Star Cebu’s Justin K. Vestil, the bill promises less cost and inconvenience to couples who want to go their separate ways. At present, it requires time, money and lawyers to process the separate annulment one has to secure from the Church and the State to be finally and truly free to remarry.
This view was countered by a judicial vicar who handles annulment cases in the Metropolitan Matrimonial Tribunal, which evaluates if a petition for nullity is valid. According to the same article, Fr. Raul Go cautioned that if the bill becomes a law, this may be abused by some parties as an alternative to divorce.
Annulment cases may increase, he warned.
According to a Feb. 11, 2008 article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) found “alarming” the rise of petitions filed for annulment of marriage: 7,138 cases in 2006, 7,753 in 2008. Before 2006, the OSG noted that the number of annulment cases never exceeded 7,000.
The OSG attributed the trend to the relaxation of society’s attitude toward separated couples. On the other hand, the State urged the Church to help couples save their marriage because break-ups also scarred the innocent, the couple’s children.
The human desire for closure in relationships is far too complex to be grasped by institutions like religion and the State.
Cecille’s mother’s decision to keep their family intact was not without cost. Had her parents opted for separation or annulment, would this have nipped in Cecilia the same weakness she hated in her mother?
In 2006, Sun.Star Cebu published a three-part special report entitled “Going Solo”. As a member of that special report team, I interviewed multiple sources who went through the familiar tale of love-marriage- disillusion-dissolution (or not quite).
All my sources were women through no deliberate intention of mine. All experienced a form or combination of different forms of abuse: physical, sexual, financial, emotional, psychological.
Those who pushed on successfully with their petitions to nullify their marriage said they wanted the annulment to signify an empty, clean slate with which to begin anew even if they did not have a new lover or were uncertain if they could sufficiently trust themselves to fall into another commitment again.
As a child of parents who mutually decided to separate, I can say there is no empty, clean slate. As lovers, parents, sons, daughters, friends, we humans are a messy lot.
The only consolation, if it is one, is that we have a hand in writing our lives.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 25, 2010 issue of “Matamata”
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Bad girls don’t
WHEN our all-girl high school batch dispersed soon after graduation to different colleges, the grapevine kept us connected.
These days, Facebook chats and SMS-organized reunions help us keep tabs with who’s now promoted to grannywatch or who’s maintaining which medication.
In the 1980s, the grapevine issued more dramatic bulletins: who had to get married.
Whenever the verb “had” walks into a phrase, it always leaves a scene.
Having to get married meant jilted studies, derailed ambitions, aborted expectations except that which, nine months later, always fulfilled itself.
Initially, as news of hasty marriages trickled down the vine, our gushing was romantic, even tinged with envy: she gave up everything for him!
Then a pattern emerged. Those who reportedly got pregnant were not the ones known for behavior our high school teachers always said would get a “bad girl in trouble”: staying out on weeknights instead of untangling the aphorisms of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, reading a paperback with a thin plot and much thinner chemises that was secretly stashed inside a tome about mitosis and chromosomal coupling, or possessing that most serious obstacle to self-actualization: a BF.
About the wild ones, the grapevine was silent. It was less restrained about the “unlikely ones,” the quiet nice girls who always sat in front and never holed up in the last seats, slouching or cracking gum or practicing microscopic penmanship in tiny notes responsible for frequent eruptions of giggles in a room silently drowning in trigonometry.
According to the grapevine, the ones who took the nursery-and-wedding-aisle detour while negotiating the wild wild world of coed life were the ones who behaved in high school: their t’s were crossed as neatly as their ankles, their high school skirts fanned out chastely so not even a low-flying bee could read their “book”.
Many hypotheses were forwarded for this fall from grace into the “baby trap”. One that got the sorority clucking was the belief that “bad girls don’t”.
Sure, bad girls stay out late, can quote from memory pages of Harold Robbins when they can’t even spell Siddhartha, even pet like born acrobats—but! Bad girls don’t get pregnant.
Like the rest of us, they studied sex dressed up as different subjects: physical education, health, biology. We discussed how rape spared neither the Doña Pia Albas nor the Sisas of Rizal’s time. How could we forget Dick and Jane and Mother and Father, a first-time reader’s poster models for the nuclear family and responsible parenthood?
But while the rest of us memorized the vas deferens and other theoretical parts of the abstract male anatomy, the so-called bad girls picked their way out of the academic thicket into more practical knowhow: how to negotiate, how to be safe, how not to be who you don’t want to be, such as being a young girl scared by a missed period.
While many of us learned how to spell epididymis and explain its role in boy-meets-girl, our batch was generally innocent, naïve—let’s face it—ignorant about sexual politics.
Isn’t that why we’re already a couple—so he can decide for me?
Should I give up everything for him? My first love will be my last so it should be fine.
My parents don’t understand me. My teachers don’t accept me. He’s there for me. Always. I hope so.
Nothing can spoil the first time. So I can’t get pregnant if we just stop after that first time.
Thus, my sympathy is for the irate mother who recently sued a young lover for texting her daughter to take aspirin and 7-Up so she would be “safe” after having intercourse.
I can sympathize because, nearly 30 years ago, these were already the enduring “morning after” myths: douching with Coke or 7-Up washes away leftover sperm and drinking 20 aspirins knocks out any semen-surfing spermatozoa trying to spurt out of the epididymis and vas deferens.
But if I had a daughter, I’m not wasting my time on that poor ignorant son of Adam. Girl, it’s your life, take over.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 13, 2010 issue of “Matamata”
These days, Facebook chats and SMS-organized reunions help us keep tabs with who’s now promoted to grannywatch or who’s maintaining which medication.
In the 1980s, the grapevine issued more dramatic bulletins: who had to get married.
Whenever the verb “had” walks into a phrase, it always leaves a scene.
Having to get married meant jilted studies, derailed ambitions, aborted expectations except that which, nine months later, always fulfilled itself.
Initially, as news of hasty marriages trickled down the vine, our gushing was romantic, even tinged with envy: she gave up everything for him!
Then a pattern emerged. Those who reportedly got pregnant were not the ones known for behavior our high school teachers always said would get a “bad girl in trouble”: staying out on weeknights instead of untangling the aphorisms of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, reading a paperback with a thin plot and much thinner chemises that was secretly stashed inside a tome about mitosis and chromosomal coupling, or possessing that most serious obstacle to self-actualization: a BF.
About the wild ones, the grapevine was silent. It was less restrained about the “unlikely ones,” the quiet nice girls who always sat in front and never holed up in the last seats, slouching or cracking gum or practicing microscopic penmanship in tiny notes responsible for frequent eruptions of giggles in a room silently drowning in trigonometry.
According to the grapevine, the ones who took the nursery-and-wedding-aisle detour while negotiating the wild wild world of coed life were the ones who behaved in high school: their t’s were crossed as neatly as their ankles, their high school skirts fanned out chastely so not even a low-flying bee could read their “book”.
Many hypotheses were forwarded for this fall from grace into the “baby trap”. One that got the sorority clucking was the belief that “bad girls don’t”.
Sure, bad girls stay out late, can quote from memory pages of Harold Robbins when they can’t even spell Siddhartha, even pet like born acrobats—but! Bad girls don’t get pregnant.
Like the rest of us, they studied sex dressed up as different subjects: physical education, health, biology. We discussed how rape spared neither the Doña Pia Albas nor the Sisas of Rizal’s time. How could we forget Dick and Jane and Mother and Father, a first-time reader’s poster models for the nuclear family and responsible parenthood?
But while the rest of us memorized the vas deferens and other theoretical parts of the abstract male anatomy, the so-called bad girls picked their way out of the academic thicket into more practical knowhow: how to negotiate, how to be safe, how not to be who you don’t want to be, such as being a young girl scared by a missed period.
While many of us learned how to spell epididymis and explain its role in boy-meets-girl, our batch was generally innocent, naïve—let’s face it—ignorant about sexual politics.
Isn’t that why we’re already a couple—so he can decide for me?
Should I give up everything for him? My first love will be my last so it should be fine.
My parents don’t understand me. My teachers don’t accept me. He’s there for me. Always. I hope so.
Nothing can spoil the first time. So I can’t get pregnant if we just stop after that first time.
Thus, my sympathy is for the irate mother who recently sued a young lover for texting her daughter to take aspirin and 7-Up so she would be “safe” after having intercourse.
I can sympathize because, nearly 30 years ago, these were already the enduring “morning after” myths: douching with Coke or 7-Up washes away leftover sperm and drinking 20 aspirins knocks out any semen-surfing spermatozoa trying to spurt out of the epididymis and vas deferens.
But if I had a daughter, I’m not wasting my time on that poor ignorant son of Adam. Girl, it’s your life, take over.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 13, 2010 issue of “Matamata”
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Unbearable brunt of baring
I ADMIRE, for a change, the politically incorrect spokesperson of the Cebu Archdiocese, Monsignor Achilles Dakay.
Just when the furor over the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC) “surgery scandal” seemed to abate, Dakay barged in again and ruffled a lot of feathers by stating that the “main issue” was not the medical professionals’ lapse of ethics but the patient’s homosexual act.
“We are asking everyone not to forget or to bypass the main issue: The wrong act of a guy with another man,” newsinfo.inquirer.net quoted Dakay as saying during a Radio Veritas interview. “People are not talking about what happened before the operation—the homosexual act that was done very badly.”
As expected, the bias and judgment read into Dakay’s pronouncement—against the victim, against homosexuals—whipped up another tempest. On top of the social and sexual discrimination suffered by “Jan-Jan,” the alias given to the VSMMC patient, gay rights activists have pointed out his third-time victimization at the hands of this perception, aired publicly by the preternaturally unflappable monsignor but privately expressed by many.
Being blamed for “inviting” the YouTube “rape” adds to the trauma of the abuse made public via Internet and TV replays. A friend recently reacted with derisive amusement to a lead that “Jan-Jan” had been “raped.” His “what?” expressed the depths of his incredulity that the patient would resort to this tactic to swing more sympathy, or the resolution of his P6-million suit for damages from the medical team and the hospital, in his favor.
But besides betraying the predictable lie of his perceptions—both of his person and the Church that he represents—Dakay’s sentiments point the public to a more productive line of scrutiny: the issue of safe sex.
Rough sex leads to more than tissue damage and an emergency surgical procedure, as traced in the history of the spread of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Aids).
Although “Jan-Jan” was the first to publicly bring the sobering consequences of rough sex to Cebu, it must be disabused that his sexual preference is to blame. Rough sex can be done by homosexuals and heterosexuals.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causing Aids is mostly spread through sexual contact. According to many Aids/HIV fact sheets, the biological probability of transmission is higher in anal than in vaginal intercourse.
While “insertive” is less risky than “receptive” anal sex, medical authorities still caution that the partner doing the insertion can also become infected.
Rough sex and rape cause lesions, which increase the probability of HIV transmission. “Barebackers”—homosexuals and heterosexuals that refuse to wear a condom during intercourse—are public health hazards.
There is also increasing evidence that the male-to-female transmission risk is higher in young girls aged 16 years and younger than in older women approaching menopause. Experts theorize that there is “higher biological vulnerability” due to immaturity of the genital tract, specially the cervix.
A person with mouth abrasions or gum disease faces a small chance of being contaminated with HIV through oral sex.
Studies have also shown that HIV risk increases with substance abuse, particularly intravenous drug use and alcohol intake. Drugs and alcohol impair a person’s ability to decide and negotiate for safe sex, which makes one more at risk of acquiring or transmitting the virus.
“A sober barebacker is far less risky than a meth barebacker, who will have sex for days on end with multiple partners,” longtime activist Peter Staley was quoted by New York Magazine in its June 5, 2006 article, “Aids in New York: A Biography.”
“And the sex is rougher. There is more tissue damage.”
The Church has its reasons for desiring that its flock sticks to the straight and narrow. But staying away from rough lovin’ is also sound for your health and your partner’s.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s April 26, 2008 issue
Just when the furor over the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC) “surgery scandal” seemed to abate, Dakay barged in again and ruffled a lot of feathers by stating that the “main issue” was not the medical professionals’ lapse of ethics but the patient’s homosexual act.
“We are asking everyone not to forget or to bypass the main issue: The wrong act of a guy with another man,” newsinfo.inquirer.net quoted Dakay as saying during a Radio Veritas interview. “People are not talking about what happened before the operation—the homosexual act that was done very badly.”
As expected, the bias and judgment read into Dakay’s pronouncement—against the victim, against homosexuals—whipped up another tempest. On top of the social and sexual discrimination suffered by “Jan-Jan,” the alias given to the VSMMC patient, gay rights activists have pointed out his third-time victimization at the hands of this perception, aired publicly by the preternaturally unflappable monsignor but privately expressed by many.
Being blamed for “inviting” the YouTube “rape” adds to the trauma of the abuse made public via Internet and TV replays. A friend recently reacted with derisive amusement to a lead that “Jan-Jan” had been “raped.” His “what?” expressed the depths of his incredulity that the patient would resort to this tactic to swing more sympathy, or the resolution of his P6-million suit for damages from the medical team and the hospital, in his favor.
But besides betraying the predictable lie of his perceptions—both of his person and the Church that he represents—Dakay’s sentiments point the public to a more productive line of scrutiny: the issue of safe sex.
Rough sex leads to more than tissue damage and an emergency surgical procedure, as traced in the history of the spread of the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Aids).
Although “Jan-Jan” was the first to publicly bring the sobering consequences of rough sex to Cebu, it must be disabused that his sexual preference is to blame. Rough sex can be done by homosexuals and heterosexuals.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causing Aids is mostly spread through sexual contact. According to many Aids/HIV fact sheets, the biological probability of transmission is higher in anal than in vaginal intercourse.
While “insertive” is less risky than “receptive” anal sex, medical authorities still caution that the partner doing the insertion can also become infected.
Rough sex and rape cause lesions, which increase the probability of HIV transmission. “Barebackers”—homosexuals and heterosexuals that refuse to wear a condom during intercourse—are public health hazards.
There is also increasing evidence that the male-to-female transmission risk is higher in young girls aged 16 years and younger than in older women approaching menopause. Experts theorize that there is “higher biological vulnerability” due to immaturity of the genital tract, specially the cervix.
A person with mouth abrasions or gum disease faces a small chance of being contaminated with HIV through oral sex.
Studies have also shown that HIV risk increases with substance abuse, particularly intravenous drug use and alcohol intake. Drugs and alcohol impair a person’s ability to decide and negotiate for safe sex, which makes one more at risk of acquiring or transmitting the virus.
“A sober barebacker is far less risky than a meth barebacker, who will have sex for days on end with multiple partners,” longtime activist Peter Staley was quoted by New York Magazine in its June 5, 2006 article, “Aids in New York: A Biography.”
“And the sex is rougher. There is more tissue damage.”
The Church has its reasons for desiring that its flock sticks to the straight and narrow. But staying away from rough lovin’ is also sound for your health and your partner’s.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s April 26, 2008 issue
Sunday, September 23, 2007
I am not a sex guru
FOR the first time in my life, I understand Manny Pacquiao.
After the boxer recently became a columnist, he has had to parry worse hits from any Mexican ring foe when even fans doubted he was writing the columns attributed to him.
I’ve never been able to sit through a fight, but I winced from similar punches after I accepted the invitation of the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas (KBP) to join the Sept. 18 forum on “Sex and the Journalist.”
I had an inkling of the theme’s suggestiveness when my student asked me, in a rather quizzical tone, when and where would be the forum where I would be discussing my sex life.
I’d like to think her face registered utter relief when I clarified that the discussion, one of the activities lined up for Cebu Press Freedom Week, sought to probe how media covered the topic of human sexuality, not sexual calisthenics.
Yet my student was not alone in this misperception. My editors ribbed me, one asking if my “erudition” on marital dishonesty stemmed from personal experience.
Two former classmates I met after the forum asked me how “that sex thing” went. But before I could arrange my thoughts, my college chums bombarded me with many solicitous questions about my present state, fearing perhaps that I had either become a Cebuana Deep Throat (of the Happy Hooker/Xaviera Hollander, not Watergate, fame) or was about to launch a new career as local sex guru.
I know, Manny. Believe me, I know.
When I showed up early at the forum, I met one of my idols, Dr. Margarita Holmes, whose honest, smart and humorous discussion of sexuality in her newspaper columns in the 90s opened my eyes to a way of thinking and feeling about sex that was not a patchwork of uptight upbringing, repressed education, romantic myth and pornographic excursion.
Though married for 15 years and having two sons, I still found myself scratching my head when Margie asked me for the Cebuano word for “sexuality”.
When Fr. Fidel Orendain, a co-panelist, arrived, we found ourselves swapping a few terms—“panghilawas,” “iyot,” “kayat,” “ger-ger”—that left us Cebuanos feeling dissatisfied. Not only do the terms refer only to the sexual act, not sexuality—which the Vatican defines as the “intimate nucleus of a person,” not just the biological function and reproductive system—three of the terms that immediately came to my mind are part of street slang, used certainly for negotiating commerce on the streets and brothels but never mentioned in front of children or parents.
Although I have no formal, deep grasp of Bisaya, it still struck me that I could only fall back on the crudeness of slang to answer Margie.
For language is everything. Language does not only communicate information and ideas but it reveals attitude and predispositions.
For my sharing on print journalism’s coverage of sexuality in the forum, I had reviewed my paper’s archives and Internet sources. I decided to stress that print journalists can redeem their sensationalism of sex by rescuing reportage and journalese or reporting jargon from sexism and stereotyping, as well as conducting explanatory reports to probe and inform the public on crucial issues like adolescent reproductive health, sexually transmitted infections and even the rights of solo parents.
But Margie’s one question undid me. Why does “sex” conjure only the randy (full of sexual desire) and salacious (extreme interest in sex)?
I was titillated but also instructed after reading Margie’s columns and listening to “Verboten,” the popular radio program of broadcaster and educator Dr. Filemon Alberca, also a co-panelist in the KBP forum. Like Margie, lambasted for corrupting the young in the 90s, Alberca was tainted by his program’s association with the forbidden and the prohibited in the 80s.
Yet, sandwiched by Margie and Dr. Alberca during the Sept. 18 forum, I recalled the “life-lesson” I absorbed from these two sex gurus.
It is not the clinical psychologists, journalists or moral guardians that should have the last say on sex. Only a person fully alive to his or her being—that “intimate nucleus”—can be the true guru.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Sept. 23, 2007 issue
After the boxer recently became a columnist, he has had to parry worse hits from any Mexican ring foe when even fans doubted he was writing the columns attributed to him.
I’ve never been able to sit through a fight, but I winced from similar punches after I accepted the invitation of the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas (KBP) to join the Sept. 18 forum on “Sex and the Journalist.”
I had an inkling of the theme’s suggestiveness when my student asked me, in a rather quizzical tone, when and where would be the forum where I would be discussing my sex life.
I’d like to think her face registered utter relief when I clarified that the discussion, one of the activities lined up for Cebu Press Freedom Week, sought to probe how media covered the topic of human sexuality, not sexual calisthenics.
Yet my student was not alone in this misperception. My editors ribbed me, one asking if my “erudition” on marital dishonesty stemmed from personal experience.
Two former classmates I met after the forum asked me how “that sex thing” went. But before I could arrange my thoughts, my college chums bombarded me with many solicitous questions about my present state, fearing perhaps that I had either become a Cebuana Deep Throat (of the Happy Hooker/Xaviera Hollander, not Watergate, fame) or was about to launch a new career as local sex guru.
I know, Manny. Believe me, I know.
When I showed up early at the forum, I met one of my idols, Dr. Margarita Holmes, whose honest, smart and humorous discussion of sexuality in her newspaper columns in the 90s opened my eyes to a way of thinking and feeling about sex that was not a patchwork of uptight upbringing, repressed education, romantic myth and pornographic excursion.
Though married for 15 years and having two sons, I still found myself scratching my head when Margie asked me for the Cebuano word for “sexuality”.
When Fr. Fidel Orendain, a co-panelist, arrived, we found ourselves swapping a few terms—“panghilawas,” “iyot,” “kayat,” “ger-ger”—that left us Cebuanos feeling dissatisfied. Not only do the terms refer only to the sexual act, not sexuality—which the Vatican defines as the “intimate nucleus of a person,” not just the biological function and reproductive system—three of the terms that immediately came to my mind are part of street slang, used certainly for negotiating commerce on the streets and brothels but never mentioned in front of children or parents.
Although I have no formal, deep grasp of Bisaya, it still struck me that I could only fall back on the crudeness of slang to answer Margie.
For language is everything. Language does not only communicate information and ideas but it reveals attitude and predispositions.
For my sharing on print journalism’s coverage of sexuality in the forum, I had reviewed my paper’s archives and Internet sources. I decided to stress that print journalists can redeem their sensationalism of sex by rescuing reportage and journalese or reporting jargon from sexism and stereotyping, as well as conducting explanatory reports to probe and inform the public on crucial issues like adolescent reproductive health, sexually transmitted infections and even the rights of solo parents.
But Margie’s one question undid me. Why does “sex” conjure only the randy (full of sexual desire) and salacious (extreme interest in sex)?
I was titillated but also instructed after reading Margie’s columns and listening to “Verboten,” the popular radio program of broadcaster and educator Dr. Filemon Alberca, also a co-panelist in the KBP forum. Like Margie, lambasted for corrupting the young in the 90s, Alberca was tainted by his program’s association with the forbidden and the prohibited in the 80s.
Yet, sandwiched by Margie and Dr. Alberca during the Sept. 18 forum, I recalled the “life-lesson” I absorbed from these two sex gurus.
It is not the clinical psychologists, journalists or moral guardians that should have the last say on sex. Only a person fully alive to his or her being—that “intimate nucleus”—can be the true guru.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Sept. 23, 2007 issue
Monday, September 25, 2006
Hold on to it
“SEX on the mouth is the safest (sic).”
Of several text messages sent in reaction to last week’s column, I saved only one, which I quote above.
To horrified readers, I want to clear up that I don’t subscribe to the writer’s murder of the English language or to his/her argument that, aside from sex education and abstention, oral sex effectively prevents early and unplanned pregnancies.
I saved this particular text because, despite the arguable premise and trying construction, its unspoken and unspeakable messages still resonate.
Last week, I wrote that, based on government statistics and anecdotes from the young, many teenaged pregnancies could have been avoided with timely information about sexuality, its commitments and risks.
Intended to be an appeal for parents and mentors to be more open to listening to and discussing with the young about their bodies and choices, the column entitled “Sex lives of cats” created unanticipated reactions.
Nearly all the text messages were sent by young people. Except for one, all the message senders asserted they were sexually active.
Two different mobile numbers offered sex services, with one making the selling spiel after lecturing me first for raising a topic that offended Catholic “wholesome sensibilities and the Holy Trinity.”
Disregarding the confused and confusing ones, the general feedback sought sex advice. Most poignant was the short message sender wanting to know about abortion and its “% success & where& how (sic).”
Except for the two offering “free trials,” I texted back that it was best to discuss sex with a mature friend. Having children can hardly be considered as training for advising in this area.
While dispensing this referral, I felt as sincere and useful as the “Surgeon General’s warning” flashed a few seconds after riveting cigarette ads. There is a real demand for open-minded but concerned counseling that’s just, as the ads go, a “text away” for the young.
Reading the SMS of an 18-year-old bragging about blow-job records, I wondered how much of that is driven by consensual desire as much as a raging insecurity to “prove love” to one’s partner and be cool like everyone else. In the age of sexually transmitted diseases, cool can kill.
Family planning experts refer to the sexually active but naïve young as the “lost generation.” “Lost” here does not refer to being morally adrift. This generation was simply deemed too young then to be included in the net of information drives and education campaigns.
But although population is a public issue, it cannot be addressed solely in the jargon of planners and ”extrapolated growth” experts.
When I read that police have monitored more underaged sex workers operating in Carreta, Sawang Calero, Suba and Pasil, I wondered how police intelligence missed out on the very young girls patrolling certain mall coffee shops frequented by aging foreigners.
For a certain group, materialism, not poverty, is the Pied Piper luring one to early sexual initiation. Studies show though that premarital sex predisposes women to cervical cancer.
According to Vanessa Balbuena’s report in the May 21 issue of Sun.Star Cebu, multiple sex partners, smoking, absence of Pap smear screenings and use of oral contraceptive pills put women at risk of the cancer that kills 73 percent of diagnosed Filipinas.
Only one reader, Rhea, said last week’s column strengthened her resolve to remain a virgin. Delaying sex and keeping one partner in your lifetime may still be “so far out” than in among the young and the restless.
But hold on to “it,” Rhea. You might just live longer.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com or 09173226131)
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