Kinuryenteng culture

There’s nothing quite like a Pinoy Christmas: It’s when EDSA turns into a parking lot. It’s when you breach your credit card limits. It’s when the malls are so packed you end up exchanging pink parts with random people.

But let me not be the Grinch in your underpants (wait, I think I’m mixing my Dr. Seuss metaphors) this holiday season. In fact, I’ve got a Christmas gift for all my three female readers, my No Girlfriends Since Birth (NGSBs) and my DOMs that they can place snugly under their Christmas balls: I give you the gift of culture!

Here are a few excerpts from my upcoming book on travel, deportations and other international incidents where I try to culture myself like a bacteria in two different types of museums: one museum would like to take you as a specimen, while the other museum would like to take a lot of specimens from you.

Knives to meet you

For the sake of human civilization, no trip to Taiwan is complete without paying a visit to the Museum of Alien Studies, which is tucked into an inconspicuous building in the Shilin market. According to their website, the Museum is here on earth, “To assist humanity — to assist human evolution of body, mind and spirit. To assist aliens — to conserve the extraterrestrial genetic pool and help extraterrestrials learn new methods of doing things.”

But this raises the question, why is the Museum of Alien Studies specifically in the Taichung, Taiwan district, an area that is proximate to hundreds of life-threatening stinky tofu stands? Simple. It’s because “The Feng Jia District in Taichung, Taiwan is home to the central axis of many galactic extraterrestrial energy streams. It is also the central headquarters for extraterrestrial ascension. On Earth, 10 percent of the population is of extraterrestrial origin; they have alien souls that incarnate into bodies because of fate, body-soul connections, soul activation and guidance and training,” according to the museum literature. 

(Tom Cruise is on to something here.)

“In the future, school education, societal education, even national and governmental education will need to be a space age education, outer space education, and even alien education in order to keep up with contemporary educational needs and face and solve contemporary problems.”

But if that is the case, then why do we need to pay an entrance fee to the museum if it is for the benefit of the human race? “Therefore the Museum of Alien ‘Extreme Species Evolution Theory’ exceeds Earth’s ‘Natural Species Evolution Theory’ 100 to 1,000 times and above in terms of wisdom and ability to solve various problems in humanity’s existence, and understand various unusual and mysterious phenomena.”

So, for the sake of intergalactic harmony, what is the best way to introduce the next step in human evolution and human-alien peaceful co-existence? By welcoming visitors with an Alien Knife Massage.

The Alien Knife Massage Therapy is touted “as a unique skill and the power of advanced alien technologies in practice.” This advanced alien technology involves a woman wielding a pair of butcher’s knives and chopping away at the client’s head, back and shoulders. But before any chopping takes place, the client is draped with a thin sheet of cloth presumably for sanitary purposes (say, for example, when the client spurts blood, at least he will not spurt blood all over the upholstery). But incredibly enough, nary a mark was left on the client after the treatment session.

According to the therapist, many clients even describe this as a “very unique and relaxing experience.” Of course it is. If an advanced scout for an alien invasion is sent to Earth to check on what is the meatiest part of the human anatomy, I’m sure at the very least they would like to provide us with a “very unique and relaxing experience.”

And what is the cost of this advanced alien technology, you may ask? A measly hundred Taiwanese dollars (about a gajillion pesos). For about 10 minutes.

When my yaya saw the Alien Knife Massage, she gladly volunteered for me for a trial massage. She also volunteered to do the chopping. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember much of what happened during my trial massage since I passed out after 30 seconds after I started screaming. However, I think all my major body parts appear to be intact.

Although I might have inadvertently left a little piece of meat, este, me for posterity in that Alien Museum in Taiwan.  

Sex on display

The Erotic Museum (or, if you want to sound more cultured the same way that bacteria is cultured, Musee de’ l’ Erotique) is a museum found along La Rambla — an iconic tree-lined pedestrian street in Central Barcelona that is popular among locals, tourists, street performers, rallyists, pickpockets and those in search of pink parts.  

As we clambered up the staircase to the museum, we were greeted by the sight of a man-sized wooden penis. That wooden sculpture left me both awed and emasculated at the same time. Little did I know that this would be the first of (literally) hundreds penises sculpted fashioned from marble, metal, clay, bubble gum, kryptonite, adamantium and plutonium that you could feast your eyes on for the duration of the visit. I warn you, though: there are more penises in this museum than a heterosexual man should legally feast his eyes on for several lifetimes.

But if you think about it, there is nothing a well-adjusted man should fear over the feast of phalluses (let us use another word for our favored member lest the CBCP get involved in this column). In fact, phallic symbols were present even since the first D.O.M. crawled out of the sea to represent different meanings in various religious and socio-cultural contexts. For example, citizens in ancient Rome wore little wooden phalluses around their neck as protection to ward off the “evil eye” (I have tried the same with the phalluses that you purchase at the Baguio tourist markets, but they’re just too darn heavy). Phallic symbols were also used as virility symbols during Roman orgies.

After having had my fill of phalluses, I needed to sit down and relax. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the only chair available was the pleasure chair. The pleasure chair was a steampunk-inspired massage chair that held down both your arms and legs with metal cuffs and secured your head with a metal clamp. Then once you were comfortably strapped onto the chair, a large metal phallus protrudes from the center of the chair into the appropriate or inappropriate body part(s). (It’s really a judgment call.) Attached to the pleasure chair was a prehistoric device that resembled a rotary phone. I wasn’t sure if the dial was there to control the pleasure or to dial up “911.” Upon further study, I could not tell whether this was a device from the Victorian era or from the Spanish Inquisition.

The next portion of the exhibit was dedicated to erotic porcelain figurines from our favorite neighbor, China. The museum commentary explained that these porcelain figures from the Qing Dynastry (1664-1911) in various stages of, um, prowess, served a didactic function (I’m not sure what didactic means, but I hope it doesn’t mean you put porcelain in areas where they don’t belong). These porcelain figures were offered by mothers to their daughters as a circumspect way to teach young brides how to make their husband’s heads rotate 360 degrees. When I got back to Manila, I secretly rifled through my wife’s personal belongings to check if she had any figures — porcelain, terracotta, Play-Doh or otherwise. Apparently, my wife was not a beneficiary of any heirloom. But my father-in-law did give me a porcelain chastity belt right before my wife and I got married. Up to now, my father-in-law is wondering how his daughter had two immaculate conceptions.

We closed our tour of the pink parts of Asia with a visit to the favorite room of Guru Shivaker: the Mallanga Vatsyayana Kama Sutra room.

(D.O.M. representative: You had me at Kama.)

For those who are not Guru Shivaker initiates, the Kama Sutra is a 2,000-year-old Indian Hindu book that most Westerners have compartmentalized into a “sexual position” handbook.  

(D.O.M. representative: Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

But taking the Kama Sutra as a whole, the museum commentary tells us that it really presents itself as a guide on the nature of love, conduct of wives and family life, among other things. Only one of the seven existing chapters in the Kama Sutra have been turned into pin-up pages by D.O.M.s for thousands of years.

(D.O.M. representative: So that’s what the other sections with no pictures in the book were all about.)   

The room featured pictures of reliefs from the Khajuharo group of temples — a UNESCO World Heritage in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh — depicting full-bodied figures in elaborate states of intimacy that were achievable only if you did not have a spine (or if you had a good chiropractor). In most of these reliefs, I also noticed that there was always a third person who was part of each scene. I have been trying to figure out if that that third person was the coach, the saling pusa, or the cheerleader.

The museum commentary explained, “According to Hindu philosophy, any sexual activity has an intimate relation with soul and spirit, and for this reason the Kama Sutra was written as a multi-sensory experiment to enjoy our sexual life and not get carried away with monotony.” When I told my wife that it was our duty to battle that monotony, she bought me a Kama Sutra coloring book at the museum gift shop. 

After taking in all the pictures and sculptures and portraits and plates and torture devices, I turned to my wife and said, “That was like going through the Small World ride in Disneyland. But with naked people.”

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For comments or suggestions or a second-hand chair, please e-mail ledesma.rj@gmail.com or visit www.rjledesma.com. Follow @rjled on Twitter and @rjled610 on Instagram.