Love Makes The World Go Round.

Love

The saying 'love makes the world go round' is accurate in a metaphorical sense. Some people may disagree, saying that greed or money makes the world go round, but in order to be greedy you have to love something (or at least feel passionately about it) and the most common thing greedy people crave is money, even if it is to buy other things.Am I saying that desire also makes the world go round? Well, maybe.  Some people might argue that desire and love are different. Films are made about it, books and songs and poems are written, artists draw paint and sculpt, people spend their entire lives waiting for 'The One'. You can love anything, really a person, place or thing, or maybe even the concept of love itself. But there are also different types of love. You would not love a sibling as you would love a spouse and you would not love your friend as you would love your home or faith. Dictionaries define love as basically a 'passionate feeling of affection' but love is so much more than that. Nearly every human feels love at some point in life, even if it is not their own and just directed at them. Love is not something that can really be described well by anyone, unless they are describing how much love they feel or why to someone who knows what love is. The only concept young children have of love, for example, is the love they feel for their parents. They do not really understand why their parents are together, but they accept that they are because they love each other, and that is all they know.

Part of the reason love is so difficult to define is that it is one of the most complicated feelings in the human range of emotions. I think that love is perhaps a bundle of emotions all felt at the same time and instead of trying to recite this long, and maybe even at times conflicting, list, we call this list love. The list consists of a few staple feelings but depending on the exact thing we are feeling love for, the list can differ greatly. I am not going to talk about everything one might feel as it would take far too long and be very boring to read, so I will talk about the obvious ones and move on.

Obviously, you are 'in love' with something/someone or love something because it brings you happiness (although perhaps not all the time, as I will mention later). If it is love you feel for a person, they have probably made you laugh or have had entertaining conversations with you at some point. They raise your spirits when you are with them.
Maybe even just their being with you makes you happy. My friends and family make me happy. I wouldn't spend large amounts of time with someone,  trust them with my secrets and talk laugh with them, take their advice and give them mine if they didn't make me happy.
If it isn't a person, your religion for example, you might feel happy when you sing a song of praise, when you pray, or maybe just reading your holy book. Religion brings millions of people happiness and security in knowing who they are, what is expected of them in life, how they should live, and what will happen to them when they die. They feel like a part of something on a large scale and it brings people together, the belong, which I am going to talk about next. I personally do not have a religion and so do not have all these additional feelings, and this makes me depend on my family and friends even more than I would if I had one, as I don't look to my god for guidance and help, I look to other people.
Love inspires a feeling of belonging, like belonging in your family or with someone in a relationship or in your favourite chair or in your religious community. When you feel love, you feel complete. The other person in a relationship might 'make you feel whole', your love of your god might fill a hole in your life (or 'heal' you if you perhaps suffered abuse or great sadness at some point), or maybe being with a friend who you trust and have a good time with does the same thing. I know that if I didn't have my friends, I would be much unhappier. Some people don't really value their friends much but if I didn't have friends, who would I gossip with for 15 minutes at break or walk to the shop with for lunch or walk home with? Who would I discuss music and films with? Who would help me decide what to wear and who would comfort me when something bad happened? I can't imagine not having someone there for me or even not being there for someone else.

The Rape of Jessica Soho

Vice Ganda is a star. He has television shows, which he claims have rated on top consistently. He has endorsements, the standard of success for most Philippine celebrities. He asks the public to subscribe to Globe telecom and eat Funtastyk Young Pork Tocino. There are call center agents who file leaves on the days his movies light up the marquee, holding up hand-drawn posters, in the hope that their hero will turn his head and wink on the red carpet.

His celebrity is such that his opinions on a wide variety of issues make newspaper headlines and run as sound bites in the evening news. Senatorial candidates express their gratitude over his endorsements. He says elected candidates should have more legislative experience. His support for family planning was lauded as a brave, progressive move among the purple-clad crowd. He does not refuse interviews, he answers all questions, saying he supports sex change operations and believes sexuality should be irrelevant in the military. He is sharp, witty, irreverent, and straddles both politics and entertainment.

“We need to see people according to their capacities,” he said in an interview in 2011 after the premiere of his film Praybeyt Benjamin. “We will understand people more if we look beyond their appearance.”

Jose Marie Borja Viceral, born March 31, 1976, called Vice Ganda, is aware there are responsibilities that come with rising high.

“I’m enjoying what I am now, and at the same time aware of my responsibility.”

***

Jessica Soho is a journalist. She rose in the ranks at a time when it was difficult to be a woman, especially when that woman is not typical of the rest of the camera-ready long-legged darlings of prime time. She covered war, flood, and political intrigue. She fielded hundreds of reporters and made decisions that changed the face of Philippine media. In the last 30 years she proved herself, again and again, providing women across the country with the possibility that a woman can fight and win.

In the span of two minutes and 31 seconds, a comedian named Vice Ganda decided that all this was not enough, that it was funny, oh so funny, to bring down this public figure to a crass cartoon of all that makes it terrible to be a woman — helpless, hapless, judged for her weight instead of her mind.

And so this man reduced this woman to the unforgettable picture of a fat snorting pig on a shiny platter, all skin and blubber and grease, naked legs akimbo, demanding to be fucked and taken for as long as she had an apple in her mouth.

This is what rape is. It is the use of power over a helpless individual, often a woman, who is violated in the closest and most personal of ways.

In the last few years, the definition has changed. It includes shards of wood shoved up vaginas, as a number of gentlemen did with activist Sherlyn Cadapan when she was abducted by the men of the still-at-large Jovito Palparan. It also includes, although the Supreme Court may disagree, the sexual abuse of a young woman named Nicole in the back of a van behind Neptune Club in Subic, although we are told it is her fault because she was drunk and flirtatious. It includes, for example, the rape by 6 men, mostly teenagers, of a 20-year-old girl on the way home from watching fireworks at one in the morning of January 2012. That was gang rape, and her father wants them all buried behind bars.

In the imagined world created by Vice Ganda, Jessica Soho too was gang raped, only this woman is so desperate that she welcomes the assault.

***

It was a joke, he said. Just a joke. He apologized, he said sorry because “he may have offended Ms Jessica Soho.”

He does not understand why so many made this an issue – it was, after all, just for laughs. He forgets that he held the megaphone and stood on the platform, that it was his choice and his pre-produced, pre-rehearsed script that put Jessica Soho on a weighing scale and seared that image into the national imagination. This angry woman is fat, boys and girls, so fat she will break a scale, so fat her panties are the size of comforters, so fat she can be mistaken for a roast pig. Ding goes the bell, there go the laughs.

This is not just about a rape joke, or about a crass joke, or about Jessica Soho. This is about how this man looks at women, and what he finds funny — so funny that he can barely deliver his lines — and it is a judgment on him as well. He chose to do this, as many men and women have chosen and still choose to do, all the more potent because it was an intelligent, progressive, much adored comedian with followers in the millions who chose to do it, in public, before thousands.

This is correct, he means, this is okay. Laugh, because I am laughing with you.

“Let us stop this,” he said in the monologue he gave as apology over noontime show Showtime. “Let us stop giving opinions especially if you don’t know what happened and if you never watched it, because the world will be more chaotic.”

It is an odd apology, filled with perhapses. Perhaps people were offended. Perhaps they were angry. He promises never to speak of Jessica Soho again, as if the issue were Jessica Soho, and not this brutal attack on the female image. Had it not been Jessica Soho, it would have been the same, only less powerful, less public, less the fall from grace.

You don't get the joke, say his supporters. It’s his right, it’s funny and brilliant and exactly what comedy allows.

This is not about censorship. It is about freedom. Vice Ganda can say what he wants to say, offend whomever he chooses to offend, and if he is excoriated for it, if he is attacked and questioned and called a bully and a bitch, that’s freedom too.

The emperor is naked, and it’s not Jessica Soho. 

<posted and edited by Patricia Evangelista>