Prostitution, Tourism and Prostitutes

Exhibit A

Let me piece together a few case studies in lawyerly fashion as I establish the foundation for the argument I'm going to make later.

• The first case was a tragic fire in a small hotel in Olongapo, near Subic Town, that killed seven people, three of them Americans whom I fairly or unfairly suspect of engaging in those activities popular among American visitors and sailors. In the vernacular of the polite, they were cuddling. And possibly their girls were among the other deaths. There are a lot of rooms in Olongapo and Subic that did not burn that night, but were occupied. Subic is what Subic is, and she has a sister named Angeles.

• The second case was reported in a recent Los Angeles Times story about an FBI agent who is in hot water for arranging for girls for other agents visiting the Philippines, and who admitted to having sex with a girl himself. The trip was paid for by the US government. He met the girls at a karaoke bar in Manila. He said he did not pay for the sex but gave the girl $80 so she could help her family. His fellow agents also "met" girls. The FBI agents were in Manila to investigate gun trafficking operations.

• Third case. In doing research for an earlier article here, I discovered a Wikipedia report that said there are something like 800,000 prostitutes in the Philippines. That's almost one percent of the entire population.

• The fourth case:  US Ambassador Harry Thomas got in trouble in late 2011 for referring to Philippine "sex tourism" and was . . . er, encouraged to apologize by Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Del Rosario.

• Fifth and final case, Top Blogger Raissa Robles published a recent Department of Tourism video that featured something called "romance". The ad resulted in considerable discussion about racial profiling. But my point is the boy girl connection in the video, where the boy appeared to me to be non-Filipino. Like, American. I've put the video at the end of this blog so you can punch it up and make your own assessment of what it is selling, and to whom.

I am fascinated by the artificial constructs we use as guideposts for life.

What do I mean?

We live in a world of deceits and mistruths. Sometimes for good reasons. If someone has recently experienced a death in the family, we may want to know what happened, but we refrain from bringing the matter up for fear of causing further emotional pain.

But the truth is we are curious as hell. We just avoid the truth.

It is not okay for Ambassador Thomas to characterize a broad, loose, boy-girl industry as sex tourism, but it is okay for the Department of Tourism to advertise romance. And all that it conjures up in the minds of single guys.

Or take politics, where simplistic slogans are used to characterize a whole man's character, his past and his likely future. "Obama is a socialist." Or "Romney is a flip-flopper."

Or slogans to live by "guns don't kill people, people do."

Or, in the Philippines, "Americans are arrogant."

Not to other Americans. What do you make of that?

Libel is a stupid accusation a lot of the time because it tries to make finite and literally truthful that which was intended as something else. Because, you see, the TRUTH is often not the words explicitly, literally, as said or commonly defined; it is in the anger behind them.

"Senator Sotto is an idiot."

Well, the truth is that Senator Sotto is not an idiot. The truth is "I am angry that he won't accept responsibility for plagiarizing".

All words are truthful at reflecting what the writer meant. Maybe just not what the words mean in a dictionary, or what words mean to the reader, but what the words mean between the lines, or what they mean in expressing truthfully the emotions of the writer.

That's why JoeAm frequently refers to the Humpty Dumpty New World Dictionary, where he can define a word to mean what HE wants it to mean, not what convention says it means.

So our success in dealing with life depends in large part upon knowing who to listen to and who to ignore, who to trust and who to shun. How to read between lines and draw unstated deductions. And it depends on our ability to skate the edges of truth in what we say or write or read. We live in a world of lies and deceits and hidden meanings.

By the way, another article I read says that creative people make better liars than non-creative people. So there is some substance to JoeAm's warnings not to take anything published here as truth. (Asterisk, unless it is written by Edgar Lores who undertakes the admirable effort to write only truths.)

JoeAm admits he's blowing it out his pipes half the time. For literary effect. And neither you nor he can always tell which half it is.

Back to prostitution.

This is not a nation of servants. This is not a nation of prostitutes. This is a nation that does not produce enough conventional jobs in manufacturing, financial services, utilities, recreation, agribusiness, law, or medicine.

Exhibit B

The embarrassment, the outrage, ought not be directed at someone who speaks an unkind truth.  The embarrassment, the outrage, ought to be that those who complain about Harry Thomas keep electing the same dynastic zeroes and putting them in the position where their poor sense of nationhood and overabundant sense of serving themselves makes them incapable of getting more "honorable" jobs into the country.

One is inclined to ask if is not a real PROSTITUTION when VOTERS sell their principles for money or to the most famous name or the biggest thug in town.

Well, of course not. Most people vote earnestly if not very deeply or well informed. And the newer, kinder JoeAm, a diplomatic outsider, would not make such a rude accusation "that this is a nation of prostitutes, and they call themselves voters." He'll leave that to others.

But I do think that women performing sex for a living are simply doing what they have to do. And it is far more constructive than what a lot of voters are doing. And far more constructive than what a lot of public officials are doing.