No laughing matter
SOMETHING happened on my way to writing my original topic for today’s column. I bumped on YouTube into Vice Ganda’s sick joke suggesting that sex with Jessica Soho has to be through gang rape on account of her size. The clip was disgusting and watching it was just sickening. I felt an immediate constraint to switch to writing about my indignation over it because it simply cannot be stressed enough that rape is an evil that should be eliminated from civilized society and not a laughing matter to be callously dished out as entertainment.
On one hand, I cannot even begin to understand what emotional numbness or what distorted sense of propriety made Vice Ganda think he could just make public fun of any person’s physical characteristic and get paid for it. On the other hand, and this is even worse, I cannot stop wondering if it was moral vacuity or being stoned drunk with popularity that drove him to make light of gang rape. In any case it was most detestable.
Jessica Soho, undoubtedly, has every right to feel offended about her weight being made the butt of Vice Ganda’s sick joke. To her credit, however, she has an impeccable reputation as a journalist and as proof that she is a better person than Vice Ganda and does not deserve to be the butt of sick jokes, she rightly declared it’s not about her but about rape being routinely made into a laughing matter.
I must, therefore, join my agreement with other voices that Vice Ganda should be sued and her shows boycotted until decent folks are convinced she has learned her lesson that she should not make rape and other sensitive human issues a laughing matter. ABS-CBN executives should also be made accountable for allowing such a sickening episode to be grist to the entertainment mill. They ought to know better.
Speaking now of the audience, it was bad enough that at least an episode in the concert was of questionable propriety but it was worse that the audience saw nothing wrong with it. Nobody walked out, nobody showed indignation. Instead everybody laughed to their heart’s content. That’s how far down the mercury of Vice Ganda’s and his audience’s moral thermometer had sunk the night of his concert.
Rape is serious, heavy stuff. It is a crime against persons. It is not about sex but about power, specifically the use of superior power to violate a person’s wholeness. And what can be a more blatant use of power to violate a person than gang rape, the very method Vice Ganda jokingly but ever so callously suggested has to be used on a heavy person like Jessica Soho.
Rape is bestial not human. It is a grave evil that only the morally callous or drunk with popularity treats as a laughing matter.