Sin City
FORGIVE me for my skepticism over the yet-another-police-oplan to rid Angeles City of prostitution. From the late ‘70s when I started column writing for the local papers, that has been a recurring refrain, making me look at these police actions from the perspective of an unknown 18th century writer as “hypocritical impotence, to make spasmodic raids upon their (the prostitutes’) habitation.”
Here’s a piece in my Golpe de Sulat column in the Sun-Star Clark issue of January 27, 1997. Yeah, almost 11 years to the day yet as real today.
THAT ANGELES City is the main course in the international sex menu is no shocking matter anymore. It has always been. It shall always be.
So, one Big Apple Oriental Tours in New York advertised “12-night stay in the Philippines for any American male and select your companion upon arrival in Angeles City for $2,195.”
So the ad even had a built-in warranty: the pimp to check the morning after if the client had a good night, if the girl “performed satisfactorily.” So? So.
I remember sometime in the ‘80s, a tour operator in one village in the Australian Outback advertised in a pamphlet “Come to Angeles City. The girls are cheap. 100 pesos only.”
I remember too reading in one local Outback shit of a sheet an article saying, “Filipino men are willing to sell their daughters, sisters, wives and mothers for a few dollars.”
So we have long become not only menial to the world but its whore as well. So?
When Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim cleaned Malate and cleansed Ermita of the flesh traders and sex enslavers, there was wide applause in Angeles. Not in oneness with the mayor’s righteous outrage. But for the opportunity the banishment shall offer Angeles.
True enough, Angeles welcomed them all – the white devils from Down Under and from everywhere – with open hearts, hugging arms and scissoring legs, to fill the void left by the departed Gringos on Fields Avenue, First Street, and BJ Alley.
So the sex institution that is the Area in Barangay Sta. Teresita continues to operate with impunity. Why not, one papasan there claims immunity, nay, untouchability, courtesy of close kinship with the head honcho of the city.
How and why “rescued girls,” already accompanied by cops, were still pelted with stones when they went back to the Area to retrieve what little is left of their worldly possession bespeak of the grossest moral turpitude there is in this city.
Still wonder why Task Force Magdalena, created by the Honorable Edgardo Pamintuan to check the city’s unbridled, open and blatant display of sexuality and depravity, was dishonorably disbanded only a few months after its birth?
Despite its pretensions to high commerce and rising industry, Angeles City shall always have a service-based economy, founded principally on the overwhelming supply of sexuality.
Look at its present. GROs in karaokes. Stripteasers and go-go dancers in clubs and lounges. Table-girls even in barbeque plazas. Masahistas. The girls of the casas. Pick-up ladies from the settlements. Caddy girls for evening holes-in-one. The Area.
Study its past. The banana and hot dog cutters of Red Baron. The dog-and-girl act of what is now Exotic 2000. The beer-for-BJ of Studio 1 or something. The shower scenes in just about every other club. The girls near Amagi. The Area.
So what do we expect of a city primarily built to satisfy the loins of a conquering imperialist army?
Life is sex. Sex is life. So it was with Sodom. So it was with Gomorrah. So it is with Angeles.
SO, AS IT was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
Here’s a piece in my Golpe de Sulat column in the Sun-Star Clark issue of January 27, 1997. Yeah, almost 11 years to the day yet as real today.
THAT ANGELES City is the main course in the international sex menu is no shocking matter anymore. It has always been. It shall always be.
So, one Big Apple Oriental Tours in New York advertised “12-night stay in the Philippines for any American male and select your companion upon arrival in Angeles City for $2,195.”
So the ad even had a built-in warranty: the pimp to check the morning after if the client had a good night, if the girl “performed satisfactorily.” So? So.
I remember sometime in the ‘80s, a tour operator in one village in the Australian Outback advertised in a pamphlet “Come to Angeles City. The girls are cheap. 100 pesos only.”
I remember too reading in one local Outback shit of a sheet an article saying, “Filipino men are willing to sell their daughters, sisters, wives and mothers for a few dollars.”
So we have long become not only menial to the world but its whore as well. So?
When Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim cleaned Malate and cleansed Ermita of the flesh traders and sex enslavers, there was wide applause in Angeles. Not in oneness with the mayor’s righteous outrage. But for the opportunity the banishment shall offer Angeles.
True enough, Angeles welcomed them all – the white devils from Down Under and from everywhere – with open hearts, hugging arms and scissoring legs, to fill the void left by the departed Gringos on Fields Avenue, First Street, and BJ Alley.
So the sex institution that is the Area in Barangay Sta. Teresita continues to operate with impunity. Why not, one papasan there claims immunity, nay, untouchability, courtesy of close kinship with the head honcho of the city.
How and why “rescued girls,” already accompanied by cops, were still pelted with stones when they went back to the Area to retrieve what little is left of their worldly possession bespeak of the grossest moral turpitude there is in this city.
Still wonder why Task Force Magdalena, created by the Honorable Edgardo Pamintuan to check the city’s unbridled, open and blatant display of sexuality and depravity, was dishonorably disbanded only a few months after its birth?
Despite its pretensions to high commerce and rising industry, Angeles City shall always have a service-based economy, founded principally on the overwhelming supply of sexuality.
Look at its present. GROs in karaokes. Stripteasers and go-go dancers in clubs and lounges. Table-girls even in barbeque plazas. Masahistas. The girls of the casas. Pick-up ladies from the settlements. Caddy girls for evening holes-in-one. The Area.
Study its past. The banana and hot dog cutters of Red Baron. The dog-and-girl act of what is now Exotic 2000. The beer-for-BJ of Studio 1 or something. The shower scenes in just about every other club. The girls near Amagi. The Area.
So what do we expect of a city primarily built to satisfy the loins of a conquering imperialist army?
Life is sex. Sex is life. So it was with Sodom. So it was with Gomorrah. So it is with Angeles.
SO, AS IT was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.
posted by A.Caesar Z. Lacson at 10:25 AM
1 Comments:
I attended the first meeting of Task Force Magdalena July 14, 1995, reporting on local efforts to clean up Angeles from the worst of its sex tourism. Present were vice-chair Jesusa Pineda, DOH official Dr Esguerra, and tourism officer Soledad Medina, amongst others, and they seemed to me to be full of determination to reach out to the exploited women to improve their health and to offer solid alternative livelihoods other than the sex trade.
What happened? I would be very interested to gain your perpsective on this.
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