“Certainly, if the Senate did not butt its nose into Dr. Hayden Kho’s virtual bedroom, Katrina Halili may have preserved a bit more of her dignity and privacy. “
by Ducky Paredes
“I’m a little worried over how the media is mishandling the issue on sexuality and pornography. The deeper discussion should be how we are looking at sexuality, how we are portraying it, what we are saying about people’s sexual rights,” said Dr. Sylvia Claudio of the UP-based Center for Women’s Studies on ABS-CBN’s “Media In Focus.”
Heck! I worry more over why our senators think that they have a right to look into the private lives of copulating citizens, no matter what their status may be add why the Senate can investigate the minutiae of what they did in the privacy of their trysting den. The media is only following the lead of our honorable senators.
Certainly, if the Senate did not butt its nose into Dr. Hayden Kho’s bedroom, Katrina Halili may have preserved a bit more of her dignity and privacy. The fact that a Senator went out of his way to bring this issue out in public made it irresistible to the press. Thus, what Katrina Halili is going through is really her own fault. Her bad judgment led her to choose a fellow actor now living the real-life role of a Senator of the Land and the Senator chose to make political capital out of her sorrows, the better to put himself in the public eye. Too bad for Katrina but, in a sense, she deserves whatever she is getting.
Dr. Claudio is right when she says: “There is ‘vanilla sex’, and there is kinky sex. And I think we should just talk about adult consent and be sure that if it comes out, we should stay out of it.” But, she should be telling this to media? Shouldn’t she be telling this to our honorable senators?
Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano laments what he calls the media’s penchant for giving blow-by-blow accounts of the sex video scandal. He said the issue may have made “peeping toms out of the public.” Cayetano should ask his colleagues in the Senate how this mess got into the session hall of the Senate and who started it all. It was not media that made an issue out of this private copulation but his fellow senator.
Cayetano, who heads the Senate Committee on Public Information and Mass Media, cited recent news reports that highlighted the emotional outbursts of Halili during the Senate probe as well as an incident when an angry spectator doused her former lover and co-copulator with water. These incidents, he said, were given live coverage and were replayed again and again.
Hey, Alan Peter, remember who was running the Senate show. It was not media but the Senators assembled. The Senators put on a circus. They allowed all these things to happen. If better persons were n charge, perhaps, the witnesses may not have been allowed to become so emotional and the general public would not have had a chance to get near enough their witnesses to do them harm. What can the media except to do but report it as it happened and reflect on the way that the Senate presented its sex circus.
Comments that media exacerbated the issue by not analyzing it properly and clarifying the real issues seem to give media more responsibilities than the Senate has.
This is how silly our senators are, Listen to Alan Peter explaining it away: “There’s a difference between live coverage [and] not live. So in live coverage, the Senate has a bigger role on which issues to raise. With the media, the problem is they focus on what is saleable. I didn’t want them (Kho and Halili) to be invited, but I wanted to invite the institutions involved instead. So if the two personalities were not there, it would not be as lively. But the media should have prudence and handle it with care.”
Cayetano adds: “When you have so much publicity like this, it’s like putting gasoline on a fire. I think the media should move on, along with a profile for reform, change, and mature discussion of all these issues. They should focus on substantial issues.”
Hey, Senator Alan Peter, what about a Senator or two starting that focus on substantial issues that you want to see rather than Katrina’s tears and Hayden’s show of contrition? If we do not have anything to report except silly things, we, in media, are helpless to clean up the act of the Senate.
Cayetano goes on: “We should not pry into what happened between Hayden and Katrina. Why do we have to include it in political investigations? Senators were starstruck, so rather than asking the right questions, you’re just satisfying curiosity.”
Precisely. But, please don’t expect media to behave more correctly than our senators do. If anything, our senators should be our guides in how to look at issues such as these. But, which Senator has looked at this not as voyeur but as a guardian of the virtues we should be holding dear?
If anyone should be chastised, it is the Senate – for letting itself be used to increase the notoriety of the principal players in this sex drama.
* * *
Golf is both a sport and a social event. Recently, I was at a golf club where a tournament in honor of a high official (among those in the line of succession to the presidency) was scheduled.
When he arrived, he decided that he would not be playing in the tournament. Instead, he wanted to play in the longer course, not in the course where they were scheduled to play. So, with some close friends, the official teed off, not where the tournament was playing but in the other course.
Of course, no one squawked. How could they against someone so powerful? My own take on this is that golf is a sport for gentlemen and, as far as I can figure out, when a gentleman is invited to play in a particular course with 40 others and he has accepted the invitation, he plays where he was invited to play. He does not rebuff the organizers by playing where he likes. It would have been better – etiquette-wise — for him not to accept the invitation at all if he did not want to play that particular course or if he did not want to play with those who paid good money for the tournament.
As a fellow golfer put it: “If you are invited to Max’s, you do not decide to eat instead at the Jollibee.” In fact, if you were this high official, you might even send the bill from the Jollibee over to Max’s to be paid by the one who invited you! That’s how gross his offense looked to me.
At any rate, the official’s golf game was rained out and so was the tournament in his honor. So, the whole thing was a wash, after all.
# # # #
hvp 06.04.09)
Post a Comment