Sense and Sensibility : The laughingstock of Asia
Bambi Harper
Inquirer News Service
REMEMBER how we liked to point out that we're the only Catholic country in Asia and how millions of us showed up for Pope John Paul II's visit? Come to think of it, I even remember seeing Ernie Maceda being one of the first to receive communion during the Pope's visit. I think he was on the dais with all the other VIPs. We take pride in the fact that our churches are filled to the brim on Sundays, First Fridays and other holidays of obligation, compared to the near empty churches of Europe. We love to begin our seminars and conventions and workshops with invocations, together with the National Anthem no less.
That being the case and given that we revel in the image of this God-fearing people who support orphanages and feeding programs and all sorts of projects for street children, haven't you wondered why the gap between the haves and the have-nots has evolved into a humongous chasm these past three decades? How come some people have a dozen cars on their driveways (not to mention owning submarines and yachts) so that these look like used-car lots, while there are entire communities living under the South Superhighway? Or that we have one of the highest poverty indexes in the world (nearly half the population subsists on less than $2 a day)? It wasn't always like that, so what happened and when did we begin to lose our bearings?
GQ Magazine in its August issue has an article, "Pleasure, at Any Price" that discusses the sex trade in Luzon (and elsewhere, true) but the near-nude colored photos are of Filipinas. The trade is illegal here, unlike in South and Central America where perhaps the former Spanish colonies are less hypocritical. According to the article by Sean Flynn, the bars are everywhere in our cities with signs that say, "Thank you. Cum again," (wink ... wink) and there are girls in every one of them waiting. You can buy a girl for a couple of drinks, a different one every night and even every hour -- there are so many of them.
One of the reasons the politicians wanted the American bases out (before the Pinatubo volcano blew its top and settled the matter effectively) was the prostitution it allegedly fostered. If you think the trade has stopped, you've got another think coming. Along Fields Avenue in Angeles City, there's Club Fantastic, Camelot and Stinger and a host of others. On the sidewalks vendors sell shirts that proclaim: "I f--k on the first date." In a bar called G-Spot Lounge, there's a girl gyrating onstage in a bikini. Her birth certificate states that she's 19 but actually she's only 13. Most of the girls onstage, serving the drinks, fraternizing with the customers, are all underage (if you start at 12 or 13, you're old in five years' time and the only place for you is some roadside establishment outside the provinces of Bulacan or Tarlac). The girls are paid P120 to wear bikinis from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m., dance for half an hour and work the room until their turn to dance. If she leaves with a customer, she makes $9.
Yes, it is economics and, yes, according to religious mores and feminist theory, this is wrong and sinful and oppressive, but then what are the options? And who's providing them? In high-end clubs in Manila, according to Flynn, a girl works nine hours, entertains five or six men and earns $30. I don't know if that's net or whether you still have to give your pimp or the "mama san" a cut.
It hasn't quite squared in my mind how we can justifiably state our Catholicism with a straight face and yet achieve the No. 2 (or is it No. 1?) position on the list of most corrupt countries. Or the fact that there are over 200,000 street children in Metro Manila alone. Yet the government does little to curb a runaway population growth, frightened of a Church backlash in the next election. We may have anywhere between 500,000 and 800,000 prostitutes, and certainly we aren't the only Third World country in the world with that problem. Of course in those countries, the churches aren't crawling with the faithful going to Mass and communion daily.
But that isn't the only reason we should put on sackcloths and ashes. This past week, CNN ran a short exposé on children below the age of 10 sharing jails with hardened criminals who beat them up if they refuse to have sex with them. There are, in case you missed the documentary, 20,000 of these children, one of them as young as 5 years old. This is not the first time any of us has heard of it; one wonders what social welfare secretaries have to add that would be any different from Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez's pathetic whimpering about resenting being asked the question of what government was doing about it. (Remember the 70 congressmen who went abroad for conferences or whatever recently with a per diem of $300 a day?) On the other hand, what could Gonzalez say in defense? The government has a lot of priorities "daw" [so they say] and no money. (No, I won't remind you of those 70 morons again who don't appear embarrassed about the horrors poverty has bred here.) But I will mention that despite the wave of development sweeping our neighbors, we remain extremely poor, mismanaged and still predominantly agrarian when we were second only to Japan in the 1960s, so why shouldn't we be laughingstock of Asia?
So before getting on your high horse the next time someone makes a disparaging remark about the country, ask yourself how true it is and what the government is doing about it.
