Sex

I’ve been feeling a bit out of the mainstream lately. All of my friends, it seems, have seen the Katrina Halili-Hayden Kho video and I haven’t.

Even those who I’d think would come to my desk and talk about the improvement in our balance of payments numbers would now rather talk about the sex video. A privilege speech was delivered in the Senate about it. Politicians are jumping over each other to put in his two cents worth on the matter.

One senator has called on the Philippine Medical Association to suspend the license of the male partner in the controversial video. It turns out this guy is a medical doctor, former boyfriend of a high-profile cosmetic surgeon.

I have long suspected this: the doctors are having all the fun. They make a pile, live a life of glamour and produce sex videos on the side.

A sociological treatise might be built on why this is so. Doctors apply the same learned skill over and over on different patients. Other professionals — those who have to do financial or political analysis, journalists, and the like — have to learn something new each day. They cannot apply old formulas to new situations. In a word, they have little time left for fun.

I am whining, of course. The guys I hang out with hit little white balls into a vast expanse of grass and then trudge after it. They fret over their imperfections. They curse mightily after every other shot they make. Yet they come back each day to resume their search for the zen of golf.

True, there is one doctor in this group: an ophthalmologist. All he talks about are the finest details about rhythm and tempo. Between peering into ailing eyes and looking out to where his ball had gone, I doubt he does anything else. If he ever pulls out a sex video of himself from his bag to brag, I doubt if any of us would want to see it. We would rather see the color of his money.

Which brings us to the other thing about this sex video controversy: it is not just about sex. It is about celebrity. It is about celebrities having sex on the record.

With all the gadgets now available, sex videos proliferate. I have a friend who “harvests” sex videos from pawned phones and has built up a collection that has absolutely no commercial value. We all collect videos of birthday bashes; why not videos of trysts?

What gives sex videos of celebrities value is that we could all talk about them. These are not intimate moments of anonymous people. These are the most private moments of the most public faces. Remember Paris Hilton’s sex video?

Why do the paparazzi manage to make good living out of what they do? Are they simply voyeurs recording the most unguarded moments of the most guarded personages?

I suspect we all want to see the pictures paparazzi take because we want to reassure ourselves that the rich and famous are just like us. Behind the glitz, the make-up, the expensive clothes, they have wrinkles just like we have. They fumble in bed like we do. What they do, we do too.

What I am trying to say here is that there is an overarching sociological phenomenon here, in this intense public interest over a badly produced video. It is a conversation piece. The popular culture is built on the stilts of conversation pieces. Without them, there would be no popular culture.

I mean, what else is there to talk about?

Do we really want to talk about the C-5 controversy? Over lunch, do we really want to talk about that strange new fungus threatening to make endemic Philippine frogs extinct? Or debate the swine flu pandemic? Or resurrect all the dead ideas about why the financial crisis happened?

I tried doing an essay on other things; but who would want to read anything other than Katrina Halili and sex today? Except for the senators who want to talk about an absent road, everybody else wants to talk about this video.

I tried to do, ehem, research too. Early in the morning, I walked around and found our friendly neighborhood porn peddler. I asked about the Halili video. He said he had none. Showing some irritation, I pressed him: how could everyone else have that video and he didn’t?

Frantic, I began to drop names — like Pareng Edu. Maybe I should not have done that. The friendly neighborhood porn peddler seemed like he was preparing to dash off. Edu Manzano, we all know, has this impossible job of suppressing undesirable video in an age when digital material of whatever sort could be simply downloaded and copied endlessly in various media formats — like, I could be carrying contraband material in my minuscule flash drive. We live in an age of video anarchy.

Just before he finally dashed off, my friendly neighborhood porn peddler dropped a nugget of great wisdom: maybe my friends have not really seen the video. They just talk about it.

Aha! Yet another great sociological truth picked up from the streets!

Of course, we do not have to see the video to talk about it. What is in it is generic anyway. Or so I presume. It is the conversation about an iconic thing that seals the social bond: we are part of the community because we weave a shared memory, even of things we have not really seen. We do that everyday with sordid talk about corruption.

The self-appointed moral guardians of nations will have their usual thing to say. The women’s rights advocates might have their usually valid thing to say about abuse of trust. The nuns will frown over the fact that this conversation is happening at all.

 But the best insight I gained today I gained from our friendly neighborhood porn peddler.