Batting for legalized prostitution

By Herbert Vego

ONE of the events I can’t forget as a young bachelor on a forgotten date in the 1970s was my first and only visit to an old house on Elizondo St. in Quiapo, Manila.

I was then a news reporter covering the entertainment beat for the defunct Daily Express.

Jun, the director of a movie in progress, asked me to be on the shooting set, so that I could write about it.

After the shooting, Jun invited me to accompany him to Quiapo for a “good time”.

“There’s always the first time,” Jun said as we entered an old wooden house. “You will remember it for the rest of your life.”

Jun was right. To this day, the memory of that short time remains vivid.

It surprised me that it was a “casa” because I had finished AB-Journalism at nearby MLQ University without finding out.

From among the available belles of the oldest profession, we chose our partners. Mine was Lourdes, a woman much older and bigger than I was.

“Let’s do it quickly,” she said while literally pushing me to a bed in a narrow cubicle. “I have other customers coming.”

Those words, instead of “whetting” me, scared my “flag” down. By then, I had read enough stories about careless men catching venereal diseases from prostitutes.

But since I had already paid her “talent fee,” I might as well spend time conversing with her in bed.

“We don’t have to do it,” I said to her disbelief. “Let’s just talk.”

After an exchange of pleasantries, Lourdes spilled just enough information to convince me that necessity had forced her to sell her body.

“I am already 30 and the eldest of nine children born to a poor couple,” she confessed. “Not having gone to college, I could not land a decent job. So, I opted to be a waitress in a restaurant, hoping to earn enough money with which to send at least one of my siblings to college. But I was earning so little that I abandoned the job and came to this place where we are. I know this is not a decent job, but it has enabled me to support my younger sister who is now a nursing student.”

I have not seen Lourdes again since then. But I hope that her sister has finished her course and raised a happy family.

The same reality repeats itself everywhere. Here in Iloilo City, along the poverty-stricken Molo Boulevard, prostitution houses disguised as nightclubs and massage parlors have mushroomed.

The failure of government authorities to curb or even simply minimize the illegal flesh trade is understandable in view of the refusal of its “victims” to identify the prostitutes.

In legal terms, the prostitute is the “criminal” while the patron is the “victim”. That makes prostitution the only crime where the “victim” is a willing one.

As regards the harm that prostitutes inflict – usually a form of venereal disease – the best way to fight it is to legalize prostitution, as in Thailand where they are under medical supervision. The girls would be less harmful to men’s health than cigarettes.

Not so in the Philippines where prostitution remains illegal under the Revised Penal Code (Article 202) even if their only motive for “sinning” is to “retire from poverty.”

No doubt, Filipino sex workers here and abroad are driven by extreme poverty.  We know of some – notably those with beauty and brain — who earn more than they could in traditional jobs.

Remember the Bible story where Jesus Christ defended a prostitute from a lynch mob by challenging them, “Let the one who is without sin throw the first stone” [John 8:1-11].

The sex worker fills a biological need of men, notably the bachelors, the widowers, and the separated.

Strange as it seems, no Filipino legislator has filed a bill legalizing prostitution