MANILA, Philippines - Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel, Jr. denounced yesterday the members of a college fraternity who walked naked at the University Belt in Sampaloc, Manila, which violated the country’s anti-obscenity law.
Pimentel expressed outrage and shock at the sight of several male members of the Alpha Phi Omega Fraternity going around naked in front of the Far East University Tuesday.
“What redeeming social value does displaying the male genitals to prurient or innocent audiences, young and old, possess to justify it?” Pimentel said during the weekly news forum Usapang sa Daungan Hotel in Quezon City.
He said this blatant display by misguided young men are seen only in some closed-circuit television shows or bars that cater to audiences who pay for the show.
Pimentel said there are laws that penalize frontal nudity of women and men or the outright depiction of the sex act.
“These laws and rules send the message that not all pictures, not all parts of the human body, not all acts of men ad women are fit for public viewing. That is why, I guess, some parts of the human body are called private parts,” he said.
Pimentel said that in ancient India, “the Raj or the absolute ruler was compelled by custom to be paraded on a carriage atop an elephant with his male ‘member’ exposed in all its glorious strength for all the subjects to admire. It was apparently believed that if the Raj could sustain that rigorous display for minutes on end, he was truly worthy of ruling over them.”
He said that was in India of old and he does not think that the tradition is still being practiced today.
“Unfortunately, it is being replicated in more blatant, more wanton, more callous exhibitionism that appears to flout our society’s rules of decency,” he said.
Pimentel called on the Senate committee on education to conduct an inquiry on why such obscene exercises are allowed to take place. He said the committee should find out what justifications, if any, make them acceptable.