“Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington!” (Noel Coward)“ A couple of years ago I got an email, marked “URGENT”, from a very polite, very shy, but very well regarded American Naval Architect, with whom I correspond, once in a blue moon, on such things as stability curves, downflooding rates, and such matters. This was different. He was concerned – very concerned – about my Facebook page. He felt it his duty to tell me, as soon as he possibly could, that I was running the risk of arrest, were I ever to set foot in the United States. I had no idea what he was talking about until I opened Facebook and found that my sister in law had posted some snaps of her children, playing in a swimming pool, to my page. In one of the snaps her then twelve year old son had managed to mislay his swimming trunks. Big joke. I deleted the picture and I then had to explain to my Filipina sister in law why I had done so. This was not easy. So far as she was concerned, the picture was innocent fun. The idea that it could be misconstrued as pornography had not occurred to her – and she works in the film industry! This is not terribly unusual. Many Filipino parents – well, let us cut out half the population – many Filipina mothers – fathers don’t come into this - are very much inclined to dress up their sub-teenage daughters in bikinis, to let them use make up, and generally to “enjoy dressing up” and they are not unhappy when they are told that their tot is “sexy”. Little children, asked to stand still for a photograph, will very often strike a pose that looks absurdly “provocative” and, to my eyes, inappropriate for the child’s age. Nor is it confined to parents; schools do it, too. My better half recalls the lengths her mother went to, to ensure that her father did not attend her high school graduation, because she was required, for some reason, to perform a dance wearing a bra top and a grass skirt. Now, all this really quite aggressive “sexualisation” of the young is, I am quite sure, done very innocently. The Philippines is not a nation of pederasts; sexual assaults on young people seem almost always to be the work of a handful of perverted tourists. So why do children have to be “sexy”? Why is it done? Because the Philippines has a nation-wide fascination with the stage, with cinema, with beauty pageants, that is seldom found elsewhere. Filipina mothers tend to be “Mrs Worthingtons”. They DO want to “put their daughter on the stage”, not least because, in a nation where politicians sing and dance, even in the Senate, and singers and actors are politicians, the entertainment world is seen as one of the best ways to get ahead. The rest of the planet is moving in a different direction. “Child sex abuse” is right at the top of most nations’ lists of really appalling crimes, and in North American and in European countries, to take a photograph of any child, no matter how conservatively dressed or posed, without the written consent of that child’s parents, is a very serious matter. Police forces, determined to stamp down on the abuse of children, and rightly so, check their citizens’ web surfing activities and downloads. As my American friend pointed out to me, an innocent family snapshot in the Philippines can be child pornography elsewhere. It’s not worth the risk.
Yes, - indeed, we might say that much of Filipino culture is "just copying what was all the rage in america a few years ago ".
Depends I guess on the definition of 'a few years' clearly Filipino culutre has been influenced by the US for many many decades, I'm am not sure that the facination with the stage and cinema is anything recent in Filipino culture, I think it has been around for a long long time.
