This is a condom ad
MANILA, Philippines—Welcome to 2010, where kids in the call centers screw themselves dead, women waddle to market towing Baby Number 8 with Baby Number 9 on the way, and teenage girls skewer out fetuses from their vaginas with bent plastic hangers. The Church said abstain or bear the consequences. That the consequences eventually starve on the streets of Manila singing Villar songs isn’t the state’s problem. Consequences don’t stand on pulpits to condemn candidates to damnation in a voting year, but the sons of the Church certainly can.
With the Reproductive Health bill in limbo as presidential candidates drop support in the face of rampaging friars, Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral found herself in the role of Hosea’s wife when she gave away condoms on Valentine’s Day. Not satisfied with howling for Cabral’s resignation on the grounds of lewdness and immorality, the Church went back to its favorite stomping ground and demanded a ban on condom advertising.
There is a necessary parallelism to be made here. In 2007, when the Marlboro man rode off into the red sunset for the last time, he took with him five decades of tobacco advertising dominance. The cigarette ad ban was a result of Congresses around the world going head to head with the big guns of the tobacco monopoly on the strength of a single damning medical conclusion: smoking kills. To ban cigarette advertising is to concede the definite, addictive and inevitable harms of tobacco. It is a statement that although the state recognizes your freedom to kill yourself slowly by way of a Winston Lights soft pack, it will not quietly allow the murderers to encourage your children via Edsa billboards. Unlike cigarette advertising, which if successful condemns the citizen to the grim promise of death by lung cancer, condom advertising, if successful, protects the citizen from a painful future with STDs—a future even the Church fears.
It is an interesting argument in the land of free speech and free enterprise, neon signs and presidents with mistresses, KTV bars and HIV. That most advertised products pose greater dangers than a condom does not seem to matter. Let the billboards peddle motorcycles and beer buckets and 24-hour cholesterol delivered to your doorstep. Let the grinning politicians pimp miracles; let Pagcor advertise the glory of gambling. All these are allowed because it is understood that individuals are free to make their own educated choices. Not every man gets drunk and beats up his wife, not every car owner runs pell-mell into school buses. It is abuse that is dangerous, not the cars or alcohol. It is why the government requires seatbelts and bans liquor sales past two in the morning. It is the same logic with sex, only the seatbelt is called a condom, nobody is forcing anyone to snap it on, and while the Church has every right to call it a ride to hell on a lubricated latex slide, the state is not permitted to do so.
According to a UNAIDS report, condoms have a 90 percent success rate against AIDS, and it’s not because one in 10 condoms is faulty. The failure is mostly due to human error and a lack of consistency. In a country where NGOs need to disabuse men of the notion that safe sex means a condom on a finger and not on a penis, we don’t need just condom ads, we need public service announcements from the national government ensuring that choices made are informed choices. If an individual chooses to abstain, chooses to have sex before marriage, chooses to be promiscuous, chooses not to have children when married, chooses natural methods, chooses to have threesomes at high noon with a jumbo pack of condoms and a hot pink leather, he/she has that right. It’s called a democracy. Judge him/her for it, if you will, but the government cannot. A ban on sexual intercourse has yet to be included in the Constitution.
After all, not everyone is Edu Manzano. “I’ve never used a condom.” It is also hoped that he no longer has sex.
This isn’t just about condom ads or that the existence of over-the-counter contraceptives like pills and injectables is kept quiet. It is about a government, with the exception of Cabral, that has buckled before the altar of Catholic righteousness in matters of reproductive health care. This is the same Church whose Fr. Melvin Castro told reporter Ricky Carandang that it is all right to vote for a crook for as long as that crook does not support modern family planning.
For the last eight years, the administration has bent over backwards for the Catholic Church, crowing about the success of natural family planning and failing to address the grim facts: 54 percent of all pregnancies are unintended, 1.9 million unintended pregnancies occurred in 2008 mostly among the country’s poorest 40 percent, 560,000 of these pregnancies resulted in induced abortion, 90,000 were hospitalized, 1,000 died from abortion complications and 1,600 women died in childbirth. AIDS cases have risen over 100 percent. So when every presidential candidate says he/she supports women’s choices to use artificial contraception but not the RH bill, it is necessary to ask just how legitimate women’s choices are. It can’t be a choice when a condom is an impossibility in a household earning only enough for a meal a day, when marital rape is a revolutionary notion, and sex education has come to a point that a student from the University of the Philippines can claim with all sincerity that he’s practicing safe sex because we all know a girl can’t get pregnant if she doesn’t get an orgasm.
The state already admitted the need to curb both a growing population and the rise of STDs; it already put out a budget for natural family planning. To deny the greater good and keep the public ignorant of choices that may well save their lives is not a policy decision, it is a moral argument from a single religion. The gods may damn the uneducated teenage girl in the slums for sleeping with her first boyfriend, but when government does it by consciously denying access and information, it’s discrimination.
It is an odd notion to claim it is necessary to see a condom advertisement for a teenager to want sex. God and puberty take care of that. Keeping an entire generation in the dark because of their “delicate conscience” is insane preparation for a universe where they will walk into multiple beliefs that collide at a street corner where Angelica Panganiban shows off her Bench panties in a four-story billboard. You want people to abstain; you offer a foundation that demands it and convictions that stand up to it. You don’t ask it from a government responsible for the protection of the varying convictions of 80 million people. If all it takes to “weaken the moral fiber” of a teenage girl is an ad that Frenzy condoms are now available in banana flavors, maybe it has less to do with the condoms and more to do with morals whose strength rests on a bishop’s wagging finger.
No comments:
Post a Comment