EDITORIAL - Two can play the "lingam" game

There wouldn’t have been so much controversy over this thing called “lingam” if only there had been a little less hypocrisy in dealing with it. For what is “lingam” but masturbation masquerading in an alias.

Those who opened or seek to open “lingam” establishments are not any less moral than those who do “lingam” on the sly. They are simply more enterprising business people who felt the need for a market trial of their more direct approach to a service long kept under wraps.

The problem here is that too much focus has been directed at the name “lingam” when in truth and in fact, shorn of the name, it is just masturbation, an act that happens everywhere, from the cramped confines of a brothel to the privacy of the home.

“Lingam,” or however one may call it — call it “praying mantis” for all its manipulated adherents may care — is just a spin-off incarnation of good old prostitution, which is very much alive and thriving that nobody pays attention to it anymore.

The hypocrites can cry as many crocodile tears as they can, but for as long as the human need for sexual gratification remains, there will always be prostitution, and its masturbative derivative. Only the names, venues, and parties involved change, depending of the circumstances.

The problem actually is that “lingam” operators chose to stonewall instead of humor the hypocrites with ruffled feathers by simply getting rid of the name “lingam” and change it with another. After all, what's in a name. “Lingam” doesn't even sound sexy anyway.

Maybe they should rebrand the service, calling it “ding-a-ling.” And when the hypocrites get wise on that too, they can call it by another name again, like “what-a-bort-pet” or whatever. There is simply no limit to where the game of cat-and-mouse can take its players.

But two can play the game. The masturbation entrepreneurs cannot be left to their own devices. Wherever they set up shop, authorities can also post policemen by the door, you know, not really to make arrests but to just lend good old police visibility.

A similar modus has worked before. In the 1980s, when authorities seemed helpless against an irrepressible moviehouse operator who dedicated his business to the showing of smut, nuns and women's groups started hanging around by the entrances. The patronage eventually dried up.