Updates from around the country
follow Sun.Star on Twitter

ePaper
Pacquiao vs Cotto

Section


Weather Bulletin

Issued At: 5:00 p.m., 29 November 2009

  Northeast monsoon affecting Northern and Eastern Luzon.

Metro Manila

Partly cloudy to at times cloudy with isolated rainshowers
24°C to 32°C
Moderate to Strong:
Northeast
Manila Bay:
Moderate to Rough

More


PCSO Lotto Results
Lotto Results 11/28/2009
6Digit: 4 7 8 6 5 4
Lotto 6/42: 19 05 15 42 27 40
PowerLotto: 38 41 42 33 50 03
Swertres: 006 * 314 * 393

More results

Obenieta: With fun intended

Myke U. Obenieta
So to Speak

LET there be ejaculations of praise as someone plays an organ.

Hands down, that would be orgasm to Juan Bolo’s ears. The Cebu Provincial Board (PB) member, I believe, is an upright man.

That’s why he prays the airwaves would be sucked dry and dainty, or purged from the hellfire of indecency. He’s hot with a resolution in harmony with the trumpets of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) against sexually suggestive songs that they believe would make a videoke devotee out of the devil. You know, those leaping with naughty lyrics that “promote wrong values and immorality among listeners.”

Sun.Star accepts donations for victims of Typhoon Ondoy

Epiphany may speak in tongues, but Bolo would rather cock his ears for revelations that come straight to the point. Oh, how he finds trouble in songs that suspiciously make him hear double: “Kung ayaw mong nabibitin sa taste/ I-try mo to banana ko babe/ I'm selling today/ Ito ay long, di ka magsisisi sa size/ Masarap, matamis at mahaba at panalo pa ang price…/ Para malaman mo kung bakit ba/ Paborito ng lahat aking banana/ Kaya ang bumibili ay pila-pila…”

Who cares if the song “Banana” may be nothing more than the unbridled enthusiasm of a fruit vendor, instead of someone in the flesh trade patronized by matrons and gay men? Did the Savior cringe in the presence of prostitutes whose mouths, for all intents and purposes, were not meant to echo a book of etiquette?

Ditto with another ditty, “Nagmamahal Ako ng Bakla,” which might be pushing the envelope of acceptance far from macho indulgence into the manicured finger of the traditional sexual outcast. What’s more moral than love with a wider elbow room for embracing the transgressive?

We’re no angels, sure. But it’s dragging God’s grace and its preference for sinners’ deliverance down the mud of smugness if it whips up the high and mighty on the wings of intolerance.

Unlike the ear drum of alarm that goes bang with the gang of knee-jerk do-gooders, however, the complex acoustic inside the head is prone to take things—-even the scandalous moans of human nature—-light and easy.

“The brain likes to take it slow,” says Dr. James Geer, a Louisiana State University psychologist, “when it comes to processing sexual information.”

Amphiboly or double entendre—-French for words or phrases that sticks out its tongue with more than one meaning--took longer to respond to with its erotic component. Thus Geer wrote in his report in the “Archives of Sexual Behavior” after an experiment with men and women who were subjected to series of sentences with a word that could be sexual or not, depending on context.

In language, as in life, it’s obvious from Geer’s study that sex is complex. And even if Geer’s findings are not gospel truth, simplifying the matter with a politician’s resolution or pulpit rhetoric is just nitpicking. Or, worse, evading a host of other issues that are far more infernal.

Let them sing “Lupang Hinirang” or “Bayan Ko,” for crying out loud, and uncover obscenity by seeing how many, particularly the small gods of this country, have been religiously screwing its lyrics.

A pun, even if it is intentionally politically incorrect, is puny compared to the chorus of double-talk and holier-than-thou proclamations. Where the plot thickens with soap-operatic treatment of vice and virtue, it’s better to listen to the poet W.H. Auden’s quibble: “People do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”

Let the subversive do better than froth in the mouth with an invective. In lesser frequencies of fury at the powers that be, come on, let’s run the risk of having fun.

(geemyko@gmail.com)


Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on October 20, 2009.