I like reading Friendster Bulletin Board surveys and “repost this” stuff.  For one, people’s answers are kind of funny.  Especially those love-related surveys.  I got a “28 things” BB post today, and man, do I disagree with a helluva lot of them.  So for today’s romantic experiment, here are 28 things most girls don’t know about guys, and why I think that this BB post is dead wrong.

   This is going to take a while, so I’m waiving Rule #1 of TMX: write an entry in an hour.

1.  Guys hate sluts even though they have sex with them!

   Here’s the thing: all guys love sluts.  Deep inside every guy’s head is the irresistable urge to have sex.  Look at it this way: a rapist would sexually assault anyone from a possible FHM cover girl to an 80-year-old woman.  Deep inside every man, there is a rapist-in-the-making.  To many men, sex is a completely impersonal activity.  Passion is something girls look for, but men don’t.  Because of this, emotional factors like “love” and “hatred” don’t mean anything to men who have raging erections (figuratively and literally).

2.  Guys may be flirting around all day but before they go to sleep, they always think about the girl they truly care about.

   Like heck they do.  First, “flirting” is a female thing: a guy who flirts is not a guy.  Straight men will always steer clear of actions that will compromise their machismo, like hanging around with girls.

   More importantly, girls: if you think that guys think of you before they go to sleep, you are so deluded.  We men are faced with the burden of this patriarchal society as much as you women: when we sleep, we are confronted with problems like wages and the economics of things.  In this patriarchal society, we are confronted with the challenge of changing the goddamned world by thinking of theories to explain humanity, the origin of the universe, and looking for the lowest and highest prime numbers in an infinite set of numbers.

3.  Guys go crazy over a girl’s smile.

   Oh please: that’s just a cover-up to what we really go crazy for.  We go crazy for hot, tight, rockin’ bodies.  We men have mastered optical deception: when we look at your faces and “admire your smile” or “admire your eyes,” we’re looking at your cleavage.

4.  Guys will do anything just to get you to notice him.

   This is a woman thing: we won’t dress in our best clothes or expose our best assets just to get you girls to notice us.  We play basketball games for two things: win the game because our coach is going to kill us if we lose, and for cheerleaders at halftime.  We won’t jump off a plane with a parachute made out of a used condom just because we “want to be noticed.”

5.  Guys hate it when you talk about your ex-boyfriend or ex love-interest.

   Here’s where I can partially agree.  If you consistently rant and rave about how big your ex’s penis was, we would hate it: we hate going to the bathroom carrying a tape measure (but we do like it when we go to the bathroom carrying a ruler).  But outside of sex, we like it when you talk about your ex: we take mental notes into the mistakes your ex did that we shouldn’t do.  But we would really hate it if that ex is someone we know.

6.  Boyfriends need to be reassured often that they’re still loved.

   Maybe: we spend too much money on you girls that if ever we get married, we get entitled to beating you up for our money’s worth.  Just kidding!  But really, it’s often the girlfriend who needs the kind of animal-like reassurance that a dog needs to know that he’s still man’s best friend.

   Look at it this way.  You text us at 3:00 in the morning to ask if we still love you.  You ask us all the time if we love you, and to appease your paranoia, we send you elaborate quotes just so that you would be appeased.  All the reassurance we need that we’re still loved is to please give us a damn “Thank you” for that teddy bear-perfume combination we bought from the Blue Magic store.

7.  Don’t talk about your guy friends to your boyfriend.

   We do like you talking about your guy friends.  To men, having more guy friends is an advantage, especially when we want to expand the drinking circle a bit to cover the tab for an extra bottle of gin.  So talk to us about your rich guy friends.

8.  Guys get jealous easily.

   I have to admit, we do.  You girls look at hot men all the time, and we silently let it pass knowing that Jake Cuenca already has his own love triangle.  But we look at hot chicks all the time: like I said before, we have mastered the art of optical deception.  When we want to have a date with you on this nice restaurant, we’re really after the hot-looking waitress.

9.  Guys are more emotional than they’d like people to think.

   We’re not.  FOR CHRISSAKES, WE’RE NOT!

10.  Giving a guy a hanging message like “You know what?!..uh…nevermind..” would make him jump to a conclusion that is far from what you are thinking. And he’ll assume he did something wrong and he’ll obsess about it trying to figure it out.

   For all intents and purposes, we men are stupid (so much for solving the problems of humanity).  We don’t jump to a conclusion: we don’t know the difference between “conclusions” and “concussions.”  When you give us a hanging question, we’d rather let it pass than hang ourselves on our closets figuring it out.

   More importantly: if a girl asks a hanging question, we men always have that stroke of genius that you did something wrong.  Girls are more articulate with their feelings than men.  So if you say “nevermind,” we already know that you’re having an affair.

11.  Guys are good flatterers when courting but they usually stammer when they talk to a girl they really like.

   I have to agree with this one.  All men court through text messaging: we don’t “talk.”  We send you elaborate love quotes when we court you.  When we are confronted with the demand to talk to you girls in person, we start stammering and stuttering like cows chewing cud… or something like it.

12.  A usual act that proves that the guy likes you is when he teases you.

   We men tease you girls for a good reason: because you’re tease-able.  When we like you, we don’t talk to you at all: we admire you from a distance, source your cellphone number from somebody, and then we start sending you the text message-barrage of inspirational love quotes from Romeo and Juliet.

13.  Guys love you more than you love them if they are serious in your relationships.

   I have nothing for that one because it’s true.

14.  Guys think WAY too much. One small thing a girl does, even if she doesn’t notice it can make the guy think about it for hours, trying to figure out what it meant.

   Again, we men are stupid.  So one small thing a girl does will not make us think for hours, we think for weeks.

15.  Guys seek for advice from girls not other guys. Because most guys think alike, so if one guy’s confused, then we’re all confused.

   We seek advice from guys, all right.  All men think the same way: the answers to the most basic of romantic questions is not found in advice: it’s found in drunkenness.  If one guy’s confused, we’re definitely all confused: which means we’re drunk.

   These days, we guys seek more advice from gays.  Gay people have that unique situation of knowing both sides.  We do this very, very discreetly: the least we want is to be spotted by our girlfriends talking to gay dudes.

16.  When a guy asks you to leave him alone, he’s just actually saying, “Please come and listen to me.”

   Let me get back to the “we men are stupid so we think about sex all the time” theory: when we ask you to leave us alone, there’s a good reason for us to be left alone.  One: leave me alone, because I’m with my guy friends and we’re talking about what it’s like to have sex with you.  Two: leave me alone, because I’m with my best friend between my legs and I’m asking him what it’s like to have sex with you.  Three: leave me alone, but I’m actually saying, “Please come… and please be honest about it this time!”

17.  If a guy starts to talk seriously, listen to him. It doesn’t happen that often, so when it does, you know something’s up.

   YES YOU SHOULD.  When we men talk seriously, we have emerged from our usual stupid state and have fulfilled our intellectual duties to the patriarchal social orthodoxy.  We have discovered some extremely important things: that the rings of Saturn will actually collapse because of the planet’s gravitational pull.  That one can create a singularity with an eggbeater, three magnets, and an electric motor.

   We also talk seriously when we have that inadvertent erection.  By talking seriously, we take our minds off sex and will Mr. Happy back into his placid, flaccid state.

18.  If your best guy friend seems to avoid you or is never around when you’re with your boyfriend, he’s probably jealous and likes you.

   Girls: stop inflating your own delusional idea of how much guys like you.  To us men, it’s a matter of mutual respect: when our guy friend is with his girlfriend, we will give him all the space necessary to make your relationship work for the day.  We men live by a macho sense of honor: as jealous as we may be, we just think of our friend and you having sex.

   The mental image of our friend’s clenching ass is enough to rid us of all feelings of jealousy.

19.  When a guy tells you that you are beautiful, don’t say you aren’t. It makes them want to stop telling you because they don’t want you to disagree with them.

   Got nothing for that one because it’s true.

20.  When a guy looks at you for longer than a second, he’s definitely thinking something.

   One: you’re extremely hot and we’ll wait for you in Maxim centerfolds.  Two: we get so amused by that pimple on your nose, because it looks like Mars from a distance.

21.  Guys don’t like girls who punch harder than they do.

   No duh.

22.  A guy has more problems than you can see with your naked eyes.

   Let me rephrase: a naked guy has a lot more problems than you can see with your eyes.  In architecture as well as visual art, there’s this thing called “single-point perspective.”  Given any naked man, you would see some, uh, problems.  Every man has problems with proportion, angular perception, and so on and so forth.

23.  Don’t be a snob. Guys can be intimidated and give up easily.

   I don’t get it: why do girls keep underestimating men?  Man, in his infinite stupidity, gives up only when he’s in the kind of rut that he cannot escape from.  I have this theory that Cupid’s arrow is tipped with some sort of psychotropic drug that messes around with neurochemicals, thus inducing an obsessive disorder.

   Really, men don’t get intimidated from girls playing hard-to-get.  My suggestion to girls, however, is don’t test the shark-infested waters when it comes to men.  The more you play to the Tantalus in man, the more you put yourself in all sorts of trouble with the guy.

24.  Guys talk about girls more than girls talk about guys.

   How true.  Nothing for that one.

25.  Guys hate rejection, but they hate being led on even more.

   Spot on.

26.  If you are going to reject a guy, just do it. Don’t say they are like a brother or just good friends, it just hurts even more. Tell them that you aren’t interested in a relationship and they will respect you.

   Really, this is the biggest piece of romantic bullshit I have ever heard.  No woman will ever reject a guy in a straightforward fashion.  To all guys, any independent clause that would lead to rejection hurts just as much as dependent clauses with all sorts of excuses or qualifiers.  Ever watched “Just Friends?”

   Besides, if you say you’re not interested in a relationship, the truth is guys won’t respect you and think you’re an third-rate economy-class sanctimonious bitch.  Trust me: I’m a guy, so I know.

27.  Guys really think that girls are strange and have unpredictable decisions and are MAD confusing but somehow are drawn even more to them.

   OK, this is true.

28.  When a guy sacrifices his sleep and health just to be with you, he really likes you and wants to be with you as much as possible.

   Hell no!  A guy sacrifices his sleep and health for better reasons than that… OK, maybe he doesn’t. 

   I find myself extremely amused: in yesterday’s issue of The Philippine Star, the Kilusang Mambubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) found themselves turned down by Angelina Jolie.  According to the article, Miss Jolie turned down the invitation by the KMP to come to the Philippines to check out the plight of internal refugees displaced by military operations.

   Point of amusement #1: I thought that lumping the “Entertainment,” “Philippines,” “Politics,” and “Sex” categories will not happen until 2010, or when Joey de Leon and/or Willie Revillame will file their candidacies for the Senate.  Point of amusement #2: it’s hard enough to score a date with Angelina Jolie, much less a political engagement such as this.  Point of amusement #3: she’s Angelina Jolie.

   The militants and progressives will probably hate me for this, but I find this extremely funny.  It is, after all, a time ripe for thinking about Valentine’s Day dates, and every red-blooded man would like to have Angelina Jolie as his Valentine.  I suppose that I could write Make-a-Wish right now and say that my wish is to have a dinner date with the star of “Tomb Raider,” “Girl, Interrupted,” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” on Valentine’s Day.

   Here’s a piece of advice for the KMP: in that long list of celebrities who can come to the Philippines at any time to speak out on the injustices of displacement, you need not look up at the Hollywood A-list.  Consider these options:

• Jean-Claude Van Damme: the star of such films as “Jihad Warrior” and “Universal Soldier” is the perfect mouthpiece for military operations in the country.
• Chuck Norris: the iconic Hollywood karate legend who starred in such films as “Braddock III,” “A Force of One,” and that commercial for Total Gym.
• Steven Seagal: this Hollywood action hero who starred in “Under Siege” and “Exit Wounds” can speak out on issues of injustice with a voice heard by millions.
• Michael Keaton/Kevin Costner: who better to stand for the issue of social justice than the very actors who played Batman?

   I know what you’re thinking: action stars who probably would have done a better job than Sylvester Stallone in the latest “Rambo” movie would not suffice.  The people demand Angelina Jolie, but consider the alternatives:

• Justine Joli: former Penthouse model, star of “Barely Legal 50,” “Carnival Sluts and Circus Dicks,” and ”House of Ass.”
• Aurora Jolie: adult film star, star of “Whattabooty 2,” “Bikini Booty Bounce,” and “Culos Gigantes 2.”
• Ginger Jolie: former Hustler model, star of “Thrilling Stories of Chloroform Girls in Danger!” “Limo Confidential,” and “Secretaries in Bondage.”
• Jenaveve Jolie: adult film star, star of “Latina Crack Attack,” “Tits Ahoy 3,” and “Cheatin’ Chicas.”
• Ariana Jollee: adult film star, star of “Dripping Creampies 2,” “Best Deep Throat on the Planet,” and “White Butts Drippin’ Chocolate Nuts 3.”

   But let me get serious for a second: this isn’t about exposing the world into the injustices - perceived or actual - of displacement.  What gains are to be gotten in making Angelina Jolie a poster girl for the goings-on of displacement, when you can have somebody like Marian Rivera do it?  I think that the people, protected by the freedoms provided by the Constitution, are free to speak about the issues without having to use Angelina as a propaganda prostitute (although I think you’re free to do it with Justine Joli or Ariana Jollee).

   This, to me, is a matter of movements employing the tried-and-tired way of speaking out against the government: walking on a major thoroughfare carrying banners and burning effigies.  The Sumilao Farmers went the extra mile by walking from Bukidnon to Manila, and were subsequently imitated by other farmers’ groups.  Next thing you know, Tom Cruise will be preaching Scientology in Quirino Grandstand and Leonardo diCaprio will endorse a Presidential contender in 2010.

   Wake up and smell the roses, people!  Even movements that pride themselves about the issues now subscribe to the idea that it’s not about the steak, but about the sizzle.

   Like many people, I have a big problem with e-mail spam.  Compared to most people, however, I get more than my own fair share of penis-related spam.  Maybe it’s a consequence of penis jokes and sexually-charged blog entries.

   Here’s a short list of strange penis-related spam I got from my GMail account:

• This is your thingy… this is your thingy on meds.  Any questions?
• Bigger size means more masculinity!
• Don’t feel shy about your penis size anymore!
• A penis is a terrible thing to waste.
• Your new schlong will win more prizes!
• Reach out and bone someone!
• Lengthen your male device and become sex hero!
• Become a real man, increase your machine.
• Hear her scream your name in passion!

   I know that these shouldn’t be taken seriously, but come on!  Do I really have a sizeable problem that I deserve all these penis-related spam mails?

   Worse yet… how do they know? 

   I’m lazy, so let me do this entry in bullet-points.

• Mahal, Paglutuan Mo Ako Ng Tahong 
• Pitasin Mo Ang Kamias
• Hinog sa Pilit
• Sinampalukang Manok
• Extreme Papaya
• Buko Salad
• Mahirap Buksan ang Bote ng Kaong
• Ube, Macapuno, Pandan
• Kita Mo Na?
• My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend
• My Boyfriend’s Boyfriend
• Kapihan sa Sulo
• Sana’y Muling Makasiping
• Darna Meets Xerex Xaviera
• Sinukat Ka Ngunit Kulang
• Eseng Balondo: Filipino Gigolo
• Ang Bilis-Bilis Mo, Babes
• Ang Tagal-Tagal Mo, Babes
• Ang Tigas-Tigas Mo, Babes
• Ang Laki-Laki Mo, Babes
• Amoy sa Dibdib ni Sugar
• Marami Ka Pang Babayuhing Bigas
• Balahibong Aso
• Babangon Ako’t Papatungin Kita
• Papatong Ako’t Babangunin Kita
• Huwag Mong Silipin ang Sugat Ko
• Kunin Mo Ang Ulo Ni… Machete!
• Butong Pakwan
• Ipinagpalit Sa Halagang P100,000 Ang Nilalaman Ng Bayong
• Kung Tuturbohin Mo Lang Ako
• Zaldy, Pulis Pangkiskisan

   I was watching some sleazy softcore flick at Pinoy Box Office last night (I think it starred Roi Vinzon, who lost his bid for the Baguio City Council last election) where a stripper came on and danced to the tune of “Lady in Red/The Way You Look Tonight.”  It wasn’t particularly erotic: it reminded me of Wendy Valdez in “Margarita.”  And shedding your clothes (OK, taking off your bra from under your negligeé) to the tune of bad karaoke music doesn’t help, either.

   It’s not like I’m a morally-upright person: I’ve been to more than a few strip clubs before (because they serve cheap beer, and not because I’m a sex addict).  Not that I can say anything about floor shows that involve lathering up the dancer with a bar of Mr. Clean.  I can tell you about floors sticky with spilled beer, the unappealing aroma of Hope and smoke machines, and the unmistakable smell of sweat and semen.

   One thing I’ve observed is that the Filipino stripping catwalk has transformed from being something confined to bra-and-panties routines to accommodate fetish.  This involves everything from leather-and-lace to lingerie to traditional costumes.  Japan is particularly known for enjo-kōsai, subsidized dating that involves Japanese schoolgirls.  This has been adapted to in local erotic tableaus, with entertainers dressed in sexed-up versions of parochial schoolgirl uniforms.  Akin to what you would see in animé.

   Music also adds to the tableau, but it’s something generally confined to slow music from the days of the jukebox.  It’s not unusual to see strip show routines that involve Tom Jones hits, from something as obvious as “Kiss” to something as dubious as “Green Green Grass of Home.”  But that has given way to Lito Camo dance music, trance, and lately, Sean Kingston (damn “Beautiful Girls”).

   Oh, you should check out Pablo Francisco.

   Marshall McLuhan was wrong: the penis - not the media - is the extension of man.  Might as well name your penis, then.  Especially if you’re an exhibitionist.

   Given the season for American politics, I wonder if “Mike Huckabee” or “Barack Obama” are good names for penises, in that they lend themselves quite well.  After all, you have to keep up with the times: “George Bush,” while funny, will be out by November 2008.  In the Philippines’ near future, I think that more penises will be named “ST” (after Manny Villar) and “Mr. Palengke” (after Mar Roxas).

   Back in my UP Diliman summer days, I’ve seen men picking their needles from the haystack at the vacant lot near the church, of all places.  Go forth and multiply?  Moses tapping the rock with his staff and poof, water?  And then there are the bunch at the Engineering building.  Capillarity?  Do we sink this caisson or float it?  Wait: I think you named your penis “Bernoulli.”

   I’m serious about the “needle in the haystack” thing.  It takes a bit of visual combing to look at the mother louse.  Or beating around the bush.  This is the classic case of the bird killed with one stone.  I’ve smoked bigger cigarettes, picked my teeth with longer toothpicks, and eaten fatter longanissa.  Heck, I chewed on bigger Tic-Tac’s.  Bring on the guava leaves, folks, because this guy is long overdue for a date with the machete.

   I’ve come across my own fair share of exhibitionists: some of them gay folk who think that just because I have long hair, I’m part of the federaccion.  I would rather have voluptuous Russian lady spies go after me and momentarily knock me out unconscious by parting their trench coats.  Nah, women in miniskirts and plunging necklines aren’t “exhibitionists” as much as they would call themselves “liberated.”  Try that on a jeep.

   Here’s a question: why on earth would an exhibitionist call his package a “pututong” or a “butuytuy?”  Have you lost your mind, man?  I would understand a “Danny DeVito” or a “Tom Cruise,” and I understand your overcompensation by showing me your “donkey” and tell myself you probably drove one too many L300’s in your past life as a driver for some short Congressman who named his penis after Marcos.

   The furthest I have gone was to see somebody actually climax and ejaculate, sowing the oats somewhere near the Rizal Memorial fronting Burnham Park.  Padre Damaso?  Padre Salvi?  Ah, Camaroncocido!  And this is what Rizal died for?

   ¡Adiòs pene patria, tu tamaño es caramba!

   Disclaimer: I’m not a sexual beast, nor am I sexually preoccupied. 

   Yesterday’s entry was about a hypothetical porno movie about lechon, and it makes me kind of rethink the whole idea of porn in general.  Even if pornography is a multimillion dollar industry, it’s still pretty much illicit.  “Immoral,” even.  The conservative right would rather have it that the mere possession of porn be made illegal and criminal: Sen. Loren Legarda, for example, made waves in shutting down BoyBastos.com.  “Investigative reporters” with weekend shows make headlines out of busting porn rings and nightclubs.

   Like marijuana and herpes, having porn is one thing: hiding it is more important.  DVD hawkers, for example, sell X-rated DVD’s behind displays of pirated martial arts movies that feature Jet Li or Chuck Norris.  In Internet shops, surfing porn means really small browser windows.  Internet-sourced porn are hidden in folder trees or in ZIP files.  There’s no shortage of gay and lesbian MPEG files in the Internet.  This basically means that if you really have to have porn, you have to hide it.

   Rather than talk about porn movies, I delimited this experiment to kinds of porn accessible to many people: novels, magazines, and Internet porn.

Smut novels

   Before the Internet, “porn” was more of “smut.”  This basically meant sexually-charged novels.  (Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is not “porn” per se, but a classic piece of 20th century literature.)  Novelists like Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace, for example, became famous in discount bookstores for their very libidinal works that dealt with showbiz and sex: Robbins, for example, peppered his novels with sex on every chapter, and Wallace’s formula for sexing up his novels was to do it in each quarter of the novel.  Sidney Sheldon’s familiar solution was to put mild descriptions of sex in the beginning and towards the end, but puts graphic detail in the middle.

   But even before the romantic American novel, there were really “pornographic” novels that surfaced and made their marks in literary history.  The French are particularly famous for this, like Pauline Réage and Anaïs Nin are particularly good examples.  Réage’s “The Story of O” dealt with sadomasochism, and proved to be the quintessential model of hardcore porn films in the 1970s to the 1990s.  Nin’s “Delta of Venus,” considered by many literary critics as the most erotic novel of the 20th century, was basically a collection of short stories that talked about sex from a feminine viewpoint.

   While Réage and Nin are considered to be the mistresses (no pun intended) of porn, I think that “real porn” was “invented” at the turn of the 19th century by the Marquis de Sade, in his works “Justine” and “The 120 Days of Sodom.”  “Sodom,” in particular, would have even the most perverted of Literotica.com subscribers cringe with its graphic descriptions of torture, rape, and murder.

Tijuana bibles, “Heavy Metal,” and smut periodicals

   “Playboy,” “Penthouse” and “Hustler” are tame, and even classy: there’s nothing morally wrong with the photographic portrayal of nude women in my view.  There are, however, certain exceptions to the rule: in this section, I tackle a few of them.

   Tijuana bibles - or “Playboy of the 1920s” - are short pamphlets that tackle such sexual themes as bestiality and interracial sex, among others.  In “The Green Mile,” for example, a Tijuana bible is shown being read by one of the prison guards, concealed under a thick book.  Basically, a Tijuana bible is like a “Bazooka Joe” strip.  With the advent of glossy magazines, porn really came to fruitition.

   In the 1990s, the comic book “Heavy Metal” was the dirty little secret of many an elementary school kid: back then, some of my classmates were corporeally punished for having the magazine.  It’s more like hardcore sci-fi that involved muscle-bound women and machines.

   For the masses, though, P5 street tabloids became their dirty little secret.  Until now, sex tabloids represent a powerful force in shaping public opinion.  While “Bulgar” and “Tiktik” represent the archetypal smut tabloid, more and more tabloids have surfaced that serve the public right to be informed… about sex.  You have “Nightlife,” “Ang Playboy,” “Toro,” the list goes on.  National issues take fourth fiddle to the things that matter more to the readership: showbiz, sex crimes, and sex.  The reportage encompasses rape, sex scandals, and tips on sex.  There is no shortage of “news” in 75-year-old women getting raped on a news week.  “Xerex Xaviera” and “Roma/Amor” became part of Filipino popular culture for sex stories.

Internet porn

   With the Internet, porn became much more ubiquitous, even omnipresent.  Havoc was wreaked in flash drives and computers all over the world for viruses that came from searching porn.  With the Internet, porn became readily available and readily consumable: it’s no longer like an awkward moment in a drugstore to buy condoms.

   Internet porn made even illegal and morally-bankrupt porn readily available, raising global concerns on the proliferation of child pornography.  Global legislation and action made watchdogs like Cyber Angels and the End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT).  This raised - and continue to raise - debates on the matter of censorship and free speech (more on that next time).

Porn: quo vadis?

   The debate on porn raises so many questions: is porn the cause of sexual crime?  If we see porn as an effect, what causes porn?  With the Internet, new directions for porn have risen that it almost becomes a Quixotic struggle to battle pornography.

   As a passing “anthropologist,” I look at porn as not a dysfunction of society, but has become a function of it.  I did not define porn here because there is a certain stigma attached to porn: a moral stigma, an ethical stigma, a political stigma.  Sex, hidden from view for so long, has taken the character of the monster under the bed.

   Like I said before, if you have porn, you have to hide it.  Not because it is meant to be hidden, but because the function of it in society is to be hidden and deemed to have a corrupting value.  Porn is like many things we hide: corruption, Angst, among others, that contribute to how our society works.

   Eliminating porn, to me, is not only a matter of factoring out porn from the complicated equation that is society, but to reconfigure society in general to situate where porn belongs in the order of things.  This will involve a lot of critical assessments and debate: meaning we should take all sides into account.

   The dirty little secret that is porn will continue to hamper free and open communication.

   This isn’t about that old French porn movie shown in MEGA that involved erotic acts surrounding cheesecake and French actresses play-acting and role-playing Japanese geishas in a lesbian scene.  Nor am I saying that you can make a Filipino art-porn movie that involves lechon.

   If anything, I like lechon.  Yet whole roasted pig can only go so far: there’s a certain limit to the consumption of it.  The crispy skin eventually degenerates into a chewy unappealing mass, and the meat becomes a chore to eat.  There really isn’t anything you can do to resurrect an appetite for lechon, when all there is to do after is to make lechon paksiw.  As such, as a holiday dish, it is overrated.

   Of course, I’ve been known to despise a lot of foods in my time: pizza, cake, banoffi pie made by chain restaurants, gourmet coffee, pancit canton.  Lechon should be served sparingly: piling it into your dinner plate is not only scandalous, but strangely unappetizing.  I wouldn’t have problems eating the head, however.

*     *     *

   I have the feeling that this will develop into a sexually-charged entry.  A sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.  After all, I started it: on this day of days, of all days.

   I can’t get the image of making a pornographic film centered around the theme of lechon out of my head, but of FAMAS or MMFF material (the latter sounded so wrong).  Something like “Lechon de Leche,” perhaps.  I’m not talking about another gay indy film that revolves around “Brokebacking” the whole idea of lechon roasting, but the kind of bomba film that would draw dirty old men into dank back-alley cinemas and have another taste (so to speak) of the 80s.

   Films like “Kangkong” and “Itlog” were disappointing: water cabbage or eggs didn’t really develop as central themes in both movies.  What I’m planning to do with “Lechon de Leche” is to capitalize on the heat of the roasting yard, the stench of the pigs, and sprinkling in liberal amounts of raunchy, filthy sex.

   I’m thinking of the kind of dumb porno in Filipino sex films: perhaps a scene near a pit of smouldering coals, a kinky scene involving a roasting spit.  For those who like idiotic seductive scenes, I have plans for my leading starlet to dance with a crispy roasted pig and end up so oily, greasy, and dir(r)ty.  I even thought of some really, really stupid dialogue involving a jock selling the lechon and the starlet buying it:

Jock: Malutong.  Kaluluto lang.
Starlet: Malaki.  Mauubos kaya?
Jock: Mauubos yan.  Masarap ang sarsa ko.
[Jock and Starlet lock eyes, then have sex on the chopping block]

   And then there’s this:

Starlet 2: Pakitanggal mo naman yung bituka.  Gusto ko laman lang.
Jock 2: Sandali lang.  Kikiskisin ko lang sa loob.
[Starlet 2 and Jock 2 lock eyes, then have sex on top of the lechon]

   This will resurrect careers.  Or kill them.