The uproar over the sex video tape involving a famous doctor and an equally famous film and television personality, who is known more for her voluptuous body rather than for her acting talents, had me scampering for the safety of Gunter Grass, the German Nobel literature laureate who, in his memoirs, “Peeling the Onion”, was so candid, literate and poetic about sex as a personal experience.
In this book, Grass described the need for sexual satisfaction as the second of three kinds of hunger, the first being the hunger for food and the third, the hunger for self-expression: one’s art.
As a World War II prisoner-of-war, he not only experienced severe hunger at the camps, but also, as a 17-year old, longed to satisfy his—which is mankind’s—desire for sexual intercourse, a most natural requirement for the preservation of the human race.
Describing his first sexual experience with a peasant woman’s sister-in-law, on a haystack along the road to a train station, Grass writes:
“Of course, the hay smelled sweet beyond compare. As I was too eager, because starved, she had to teach me not to rush, not to buck, to use my fingers, use them all and gently, the way she did. There was so much to discover. Moist and fathomless. All there, waiting to be touched. Soft and round. Yielding. The noises, the animal sounds we made.”
From a master story teller, this written description of the human act of copulation is so profound, so evocative, and so emotionally powerful that one can only ask if Haydn Kho, the doctor being accused of spreading in cyber space the visual record of his sexual conquests—three videos are circulating—so done in poor taste, is illiterate? Or a man with a twisted sense of pride?
Deranged is a more accurate description of the mind of the person who recorded the sexual tryst between Kho and Halili and a commercial model and another nymphet and . . . . The Philippine Daily Inquirer headlined that Kho has 40 videos of such perversity.
Yes, perversity because there is no word more apt to describe Kho’s libertine act of surreptitiously filming his inability to keep under the lid his libido and the sexual starvation of his partners who now, after realizing the magnitude of the viewers of their encounter in bed, and therefore, the magnitude of shame the videos must have inflicted on their persons, are crying “Wolf!” They said they were victims.
I agree. They were victims of their own naiveté; of their own hunger and insatiable appetite for sex that, naturally, relieves them of their body heat.
Ramon Revilla, Jr., an actor before he became a senator and whose sympathies unmistakably lie with Halili, said in a privilege speech that Kho is a pervert of the highest kind.
Of the highest kind? Is there a pervert of the lowest kind? What elevated Kho to that pedestal? Is it because Kho and his “victims” in the controversial videos are famous and moneyed? What are we to make of the drug-crazed ordinary mortals who record in videos their sexual drunkenness and peddle these in cyberspace? They are perverts of the lowest rank?
If Revilla has judged Kho as a pervert, then he is a pervert. Period. No wordy appendages to his name or adjectival narration of his action are necessary to illuminate us on what he did, which are graphic, yes, but neither poetic nor literate. One cannot call films of sexual moans and grunts signs of literacy.
And this is what I am driving at. This is not the first time, and certainly not the last, that a sexual video has whipped up a furor. Revilla knew that. The newspapers who feasted on the news because it was so commercially profitable knew that. We all knew that.
So, why are we so agitated? Why the extraordinary verbal nausea that, if it was water, could have already drowned Kho? Why the media frenzy about so basic a human act as tangling and entangling in bed? Was it because of envy that Kho had the gambler’s luck to conquer in bed so many women? Was it because the videos were grainy and the sound of poor quality that the shrieks and the animal sounds were barely audible?
It’s none of the above. The reason for the heat that the Kho videos generated is simply hypocrisy. Come on. Don’t peddle the moral angle because it will not wash. Philippine society’s sense of balance is so warped that it notices the speck of dust in other people’s faces, but completely ignores the mote in its own eyes.
If this is untrue, then, go to the Internet porn sites and see for yourself how Filipino women are being treated as sexual merchandise; see how the word Filipina, Bocaue, Manila, MILF, etc. are being equated with women cavorting in bed with lights and camera on.
Why hasn’t anyone raised hackles about this perversity of the “highest kind” which are present in many Filipino homes’ living rooms through the power of the Internet? Can Ramon Revilla and those who sympathize with Kho’s “victims” do something about this? Why single out Kho when he has millions of perverts in company stomping on unguarded grounds and preying on unsuspected women with their video cameras?
I sympathize less with Halili et al than with those whose privacy in their sexual feasts have been violated, but which violation—the invasion of privacy—had not been taken up as a cause by the moralists and non-perverts simply because they didn’t have a name; didn't have the money; and certainly, didn’t have a media to scream to their story.
But this isn’t a problem at all. Time is a great equalizer. In the next few weeks, we will all forget about Kho and his sex videos; forget Halili et al and their bed acrobatics; treat the episode as a normal course of business, for isn’t sex a normal habit like brushing one’s teeth? I am sure that in the future, we will remember this brouhaha as if it was just like a mosquito bite. A minor, but nonetheless valuable, distraction. For all we know, Kho had served us a plate: one full of perversity which could be a mirror for posterity.
I’ll go back to Gunther Grass.
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