Sexscapes: The Spaces of Philippine Pornography
REUBEN RAMAS CANETE
Reuben Ramas Canete is currently Associate Professor at the
Department of Art Studies, College of Arts and Letters, Univer-
sity of the Philippines (UP), Diliman, Quezon City. He finished
BFA, Major in Painting, at the University of Santo Tomas; MA in
Art History at UP Diliman; and Ph.D. in Philippine Studies, also
at UP Diliman. An artist, writer, and independent curator, Dr.
Cañete has contributed numerous articles on Philippine art and
culture for various national publications and peer-reviewed jour-
nals, such as The Philippine Star, The Philippine Daily Inquirer,
The Manila Bulletin, The Manila Times, Lifestyle Asia, BluPrint
Architecture and Design Magazine, Pananaw: Journal on Philip-
pine Art, Bulawan: Journal on Philippine Culture, Plaridel: Jour-
nal on Mass Communication, The Diliman Review, and Business
Day, among others. He has also written several monographs and
books on Philippine Modern and Contemporary artists and art
collections. He served as President of the Art Association of the
Philippines (AAP) from 2000 to 2002. He was awarded the Leo
Benesa Prize for Art Criticism in 1996.
Pornography, as a suitable subject for the exploration of
architectural spaces, necessitates the discussion of at
least three levels of consideration: the conceptual space
of porn itself as a (notably serious enough) subject for
study; the physical spaces that this subject and its audi-
ence are framed within, and; the often conflicting spaces
of power that circumscribe the relationship between ac-
tors, producers, and audiences.1 The study assumes that
spaces are “not ‘empty’ or ‘neutral’ that facilitate the free
interaction of bodies with space.” Rather, the study looks
at space as “mechanisms of representation, and as such
they are political and ideological” (Lico 2001: 31). At
the onset, I shall not attempt to frame porn within the
debates of community-based morality and suitability by
which it has often been linked to, and its existence chal-
lenged and negated. Neither is it my intention to privi-
lege the practice and, more crucially, the consumption of
porn as a social indicator for individual rights. Rather, it is
my interest to see the practice of depicting, seeing, expe-
riencing and/or doing porn as a “presencing”, a productive
existence of otherwise suppressed social and sexed (thus
erotogenic) spaces.
We understand porn to be the means by which a consum-
er (often ascribed as a viewer¬) obtains sexual stimulus
and eventual gratification by means of works that contain
erotic images, the passage marked either by the view-
er’s masturbation and/or coitus with a sexual partner. It
is when we attach specific ideological qualities to this
sexual practice2 that (if not its very implication) porn
(and by extension, the entire concept of erotica) becomes
demonized as “obscene,” “filthy,” “immoral” and “viola-
tive.”3 The paper will not tackle the moral implications
of porn, which is better left to a debate on theological
grounds. Rather, the political economy of “porn space” is
here flagged for the purpose of analyzing and throwing
light on a suppressed and “underground’ praxis that has
so far resisted every means of eradication available to the
state since its modern inception in the late 19th century:
the relationship between sexual practices and architec-
tural spaces, and the role of urbanism and capitalism in
foregrounding their interactions in the present.
51
 Advertisement of sex-themed movies from the bomba era of the 1970s to the 1980s
Crucial to the conceptual space of porn is its desirability
to the viewer: its ability, you might say, to “turn you on.”
Subsequently, if the depicted sexual activity, or the nature
of its performers, does not conform to the viewer’s erotic
desire, then it does not achieve its goal. In the words of
film critic Richard Dyer: “There’s nothing more boring than
porn that doesn’t turn you on.” Dyer, in fact, makes the cor-
relative term “exciting” as a necessary appendix to the de-
sirability of porn to its viewer, a significant pointure that
posits the necessity of the interaction between art form
and consumer in order for the whole thing to work (Dyer
1998, 504-514). It is this specificity that brings out the
complex topography of porn as being audience-specific,
there being many categories and genres, each tailored to
a particular segment of the porn-consuming public: soft
core or hard core, straight or gay, anal or oral, body wor-
ship, masturbation, S & M, bestiality…the list goes on.
Crucial to our understanding of porn space as an aspect
of everyday human concern is Michel de Certau’s no-
tion of sens practis, or “practical sense,” in foreground-
ing the practices of porn as part of the “normal” (if not
suppressed) modes of modern everyday life in capitalist
societies. Although Theodore Adorno famously dismisses
the notion of film (and its more viral contemporary incar-
nation, video) as part of the capitalist-driven “culture in-
dustry,” where base desires and formulaic solutions typify
the “entertainment” of publics as its use value to allow
the rationalization of mass consumption to interlink with
capitalist overproduction, de Certau’s notion of a “tactical”
approach to the utilization of everyday products as part
of a strategic resistance to domination should be con-
sidered as a reinvigorating heuristic practice that denies
the monolithic oppression of state/religious authority, as
well as the exhausting grind of capital-dominated labor,
and replaces it with a contingent—and thus pleasurably
“useful”—practice of “releasing one’s carnal urges” through
52
porn. Since porn, especially in the Philippines, functions
as part of a prohibited sphere where state authority im-
poses its invisibility in the public realm, the necessity to
investigate the nature and articulation of such suppressed
practices within architectural space allows us to realize
the spaces of porn as the interstice where state author-
ity fails, the (underground) market flourishes, and the
private nature of individuality re-functions its agency in
determining what constitutes the “personal good.”
Within the Philippine context, porn (particularly in its
filmic or video aspect) is a fairly recent development, aris-
ing only since the early 1970s. Perceived as a device of
mass pacification (entertaining a public previously devoid
of such stimuli at a time of intense political and economic
crisis), as well as a means of denying the institutional
power of its moralizing other, the Marcos government’s
willingness to look the other direction while the infant
“bomba” industry seized the public consciousness was, to
many, a sign of the increasing multi-polarity of the insti-
tutional apparatus, specifically the separation of political
priorities between a consolidating authoritarian state and
a dominant but vulnerable church. This secular consolida-
tion, arising in an ironic disposition of priorities (the state
as placidly pro-porn, but virulently anti-subversive), does
little to clarify the conceptual space of porn in the Philip-
pine situation, but nonetheless essentializes the artificial
dichotomy between morality and power. This institutional
uncertainty would grow to absurd extremes by the early
1980s, when the value of porn as political placebo would
be championed by the state-controlled Film Center, and
the productions of the Experimental Cinema of the Philip-
pines, to the virulent opposition of the Catholic Church
and its supporters within the (ironically state-supervised)
Board of Censors. In the post-EDSA era, bereft of state
“interest,” the porn industry embedded itself deeper into
the substratum of the underground market following its
official ostracism under increasingly ultra-conserva-
tive censor boards, appearing as highly lucrative “XXX”
videotapes that could only be bought at selected (but
not secret) locations.
In this paper, we shall take as samples developments
of porn scenes from Philippine films in the 1980s and
early 1990s, some of which date to the height of the
Marcos-induced International Filmfest sex films and
straddle into the post-EDSA period of more slickly-pro-
duced (if better-marketed) sex videos from 2004. The
technological formats of these videos also follow the
historical progression of home video technology, start-
ing from the VHS/Betamax tape formats of the 1980s,
or the digital-burned video compact disc (VCD) during
the 1990s, and digital video disc (DVD) and the most
recent high-capacity Blue Ray discs since 2000. Pecu-
liarly, the phenomenal development in the market of
mass-consumption DVDs in the past 10 years have al-
lowed this back-tracking to be condensed into a series of
montage tracks on the newly popular and inexpensive
de rigueur mass entertainment machine, the DVD/MP3
player.4 Not only shall we take into account the literal
space of porn as viewed, but also its site of consump-
tion, retail and display. The paper therefore traverses
the urban spaces of circulation and consumption that
such videos are situated in, so as to expand the scope
and project of this paper from a mere reading of spaces
within Philippine video pornography to a siting of the
videos’ socio-economic setting that encompasses the
spaces around and outside these videos.
What strikes me about the spaces in which porn videos
are sold in Manila is its enforced invisibility and quasi-
criminality: the sources of porn VCDs/DVDs are to be
found in the various bazaars that retail often pirated
software, of which the Virra Mall complex in Green-
hills used to be the most public during the 1990s. This
has been superseded since the millennium by the emer-
gence of porn DVDs in many sidewalk stalls throughout
the metropolis, in particular, the various transport route
junctions that disgorge large numbers of people from the
elevated trains, buses, and jeepneys, and who congregate
at these bottlenecks to shop and transfer to feeder routes
between the home and office, such as Alabang, Quiapo,
Avenida-Recto, Cubao, Crossing and Monumento. Wad-
ing through narrow alleys filled with techno-merchan-
dise, kitchen and hardware equipment, ukay-ukay clothes
and siomai-fishball takeout, one comes upon the video
hawkers, who whisper their wares to you conspiratorially
(“Boss… X, boss?”) and lead you to their cramped stalls
overflowing with pirated films and software, proffering
cardboard boxes full of the stuff. That this video genre
should be concealed in an area that publicly retails equal-
ly illegal pirated merchandise is itself symptomatic of the
conceptual power structure that has confined Philippine
porn to the deepest pits of the epistemological under-
ground—patronizing porn video is more “sinful,” appar-
ently, than pirated versions of PC software and Hollywood
films. This is especially so when one’s object for purchase
is “m2m” or man-to-man video (shorthand for gay porn).
That category is often to be found “at the bottom of the
pile,” shunted out as the darkest of the dark—if not deep-
est of the hidden—desires of this cramped, sweaty bazaar
swarming with customers, hawkers, and hustlers.
The sense of occlusion and seeming claustrophobia ex-
tends into its space of consumption as well. The most
common practice is to lock oneself in a room (bedroom
preferably), turn down the lights, and load the VCD/DVD
or the older VCR player. Often, this is done alone, or with
close companions at home. Sometimes, the audiences of
these videos are couples, who purchase these items as
sexual stimulants in aid of lovemaking. More often, indi-
53
 vidual male consumers who purchase porn based on their
sexual orientation (heterosexual or homosexual) consti-
tute an unstated majority of this market. Again, the spaces
in which Philippine porn is viewed is set within a defined
closed/closeted space, relatively cramped and isolated
from the rest of the social space of either the household or
its neighborhood. The closure of physical spaces in both
purchase and viewing is telling: as an object of virulent
protest from morality groups, and subject to erratic sur-
veillance and seizure by law enforcement, porn video in
this contemporary time is still treated as a social taboo,
an item best left under the covers in the singular privacy
of one’s bedroom, along with its attendant “aberrant acts”
like jacking off (jakol, in local parlance). This suppres-
sion and semi-invisibility of an erotically desirous—but
trans-socially iffy—product, which plays out even in the
Philippine marketplace,5 becomes a complex intersection
of multiple traces of signification: sex sells, but “publicly”
showing it is undesirable; porn videos are not as “display-
able” as pirated software; that purchasing “straight”/het-
erosexual porn wouldn’t bat an eyelash, but purchasing
m2m porn would cause smiles and furtive glances to light
up in vendor’s faces; and that porn is bought for private
(read: individual) consumption, and viewed within the
private-d spaces of the bedroom, but could be acquired
surreptitiously in crowded, public places.
This seeming dichotomy between public and private, porn
space and social space, is at the heart of the irony of Phil-
ippine porn dissemination and consumption, one which
can be explained through the notion of public anonym-
ity: crowded places are among the best sites to conduct
surreptitious purchases due to the noise, volume of hu-
man traffic and compactness of the site of dissemination.
Informal urban Philippine markets, such as the talipapa,
maximize this phenomenon by intentionally occupy-
ing public spaces, such as sidewalks, roads right-of-way,
Video grab from the recently released films of the pink genre or M2M
54
and (supposedly) open plazas. The vendor’s strategy here
is not so much as to assist the consumer in disguising
their purchasing patterns/preferences, but rather, to maxi-
mize possible retailing exposure by literally throwing up
their wares at people’s way, blocking their movements,
catching their visual/auditory/olfactory attention, and
making enough of a blurred impression to persuade the
pedestrian-cum-potential shopper to stop, look and ask.
These result in snaking, overlapping patterns of looking/
asking/choosing humanity gridlocked within the overall
public space. This strategy has been the case in most un-
regulated market spaces in Metro Manila, whether it is a
back alley in Pasay or Caloocan, shopping mall corridors
in the more upscale Green Hills Shopping Complex, or in
the vast bazaars of Divisoria, Quiapo and Baclaran. It is
easier to lose oneself in a crowd (just in case the police
are watching). Within a crowd, it is also easier to conceal
identities: purchases are made with prompt, verbal cues;
there is minimum eye contact, and; the customer’s name
is often not revealed (unless you are a suki, by which time
an alias would usually do). Hence, public space becomes
privatized, deconstructed into a virtual simulation of do-
mesticity and individual privacy, a “reality” which is broken
only by (intruding?) glances of your fellow shopper.
This notion of multiple “tactical” uses of public space to
function as a “strategic” liberative space through occupa-
tion, occlusion and multiple-coding is what Edson Cabal-
fin determines as “multifunctionality.” Cabalfin’s notion of
public space as an extension of gender identification and
tactical projection is intuited by him from Aaron Betsky’s
notion of “queer space,” but re-functioned by expanding
the notion of queer-ness (or in Cabalfin’s Filipino translit-
eration, “mala-bakla”), to typify a classification of the use
and nature of space, rather than its simplistic determina-
tion of gendered (and sexed) space as belonging to one or
another (Cabalfin 2003, 195-198).
Once the public-but-surreptitious purchase of porn is
made, the wares are then brought back to its natural-
ized space of viewing-the bedroom. The physical enclo-
sure of the bedroom walls, completed when one draws
the drapes shut and locks the door, becomes a defined
barrier beyond which “outer” society is perceived not to
enter. The bedroom then becomes a symbolically de-
limited, primally uterine (thus feminine) refuge, and
a site of political defiance on the part of the porn con-
sumer, who may be aware of the legal and/or moral gray
area that porn inhabits in Philippine culture, but none-
theless has decided to partake of his/her right to self-
inflicted “sodomy.” There is, therefore, a crucial point
that should be made: contemporary porn, as a com-
modity phenomenon driven by the industrial mecha-
nisms of capitalist production, is often assumed to be
viewed within the confines of private spaces, where
state authority cannot intrude without a court order
or arrest warrant. The bedroom thus also becomes, in
effect, capitalism’s (as autonomous individuality’s) ulti-
mate site of consumption. Although porn also exhibits
a public cinematic persona, notably in its early stages
during the 1970s, such has been rendered mute in the
Philippines by the draconian censorship laws, which
virtually prohibits any public cinema from screening
X-rated films. What happens, of course, is the whole-
sale illegalization of the porn industry at the surface,
and its thriving underground nature in the form of
black market software and risqué public cinemas often
patronized by homosexuals—a scenario graphically il-
lustrated in the 2006 film Serbis.
The films themselves are the most intriguing aspect
of this practice, for they seem to mirror the sense of
spatial closure and privatized locus that hegemonizes
local porn discourse. The majority of sex scenes filmed
is in household spaces. This is the case in straight
“compilation videos”, such as Manila by Night and
Mahal, Idiin Mo, which take scenes of sex films from
1982 to 1998 and pastes them in succeeding series
of montage shots, as well as the straight film Camp
69 (1983). Much is also the case of two gay videos,
Spadahan (Boy in the Mirror) and ColeBoyz, produced
Posters and movie stills of the award-winning film, Serbis (2008)
in 1990 and 1991, respectively. However, in Manila Scan-
dal (2004), we see a variation in the form of both private
as well as public space. The depicted spaces for the films
made before 2000 are most often well-furnished but me-
dium-sized bedrooms, study dens, or bathrooms—with a
design sensibility akin to, if not reflective of, the retailed
urban spaces of illicit sex, such as motel rooms. Often,
these rooms have no view of the outside, their windows
shuttered and curtained off from prying eyes. Only in one
scene in Manila by Night is a view to the outside open, a
glass curtain wall of a seaside villa that opens out into a
deserted beach—which thus plays on the second aspect
of porn’s appeal, its fantasy of sexual release in exclusive
and elite spaces.
There are some public spaces that are depicted, but these
are done in areas that are isolated from other people,
such as a country farm or rocky beach (Mahal, Idiin Mo),
where, for example, a heterosexual couple can theoreti-
cally copulate without fearing exposure to anyone except
the camera crew—and its intended audience. The two gay
copulation scenes reviewed, one for each of Spadahan and
ColeBoyz, occur within internal spaces that can be char-
acterized as that for medium or upper-end income users:
one is a well-furnished bedroom, with wooden bookcases,
shaded table lamps, framed paintings, and Philippine or
Southeast Asian table top antiques; the other is a luxuri-
ously appointed private exercise gym, with mat carpeting,
wall-to-wall mirrors, and leather benches. In almost all
cases, there are no other “actors” in the scenery except for
those engaged in the sex scenes. This elite privatization
of either domestic or outdoor space is telling: the pub-
lic vacuum of the scenery becomes the private bordello
upon which the erotic desire of the viewer is transposed
across the medium of the screen. Hence, the viewer be-
comes the voyeur looking at, and being aroused by, the
sex scene. There is also a matter of identity migration to
consider: that those actors (assuming that the viewer is
male, which is the tendency for most individual viewers
of porn) engaged in the sex scenes are often identified by
the viewer as themselves, hence, completing the virtual
reality of video sex: viewer becomes (sex) actor.
55
 It is not only a question of “copulatory space” that is ex-
plored by these videos, however. There are also the spaces
reserved for male masturbation—an index of the primary
socio-sexual hegemony of the phallus6 in defining the
identity of its (mostly male) consuming public, and re-
flecting the sexually-specified nature of filmic and real
spaces. This is especially the case of the two gay videos
mentioned earlier, in which young models take turns jack-
ing off in front of the camera. In Spadahan, the space of
choice is the bedroom, often simple affairs that include a
single-person capacity bed, an electric fan, and a mirror.
In ColeBoyz, the spaces vary from the study den (which
segues into oral sex between partners) to an outdoor
mini-pool, where three models masturbate separately.
This unique characteristic of gay video to be self-reflexive,
often engaging oneself in a visual and spacio-temporal
play that invite a viewer to maximize the scenic stimulus,
makes it more dynamic in form and content than straight
video, which is often encumbered by a canon of hetero-
sexual processual stages (kissing and tit play, followed by
fellatio, then by intercourse, and finally orgasm), scenes
often stretched out via multiple camera placements.
The series of the heterosexually-oriented Scandal porn
videos done between 2004-2005 also play in this priva-
tized environment of bedrooms—in one scene of Manila
Scandal, for example, two couples have sex on a queen-
sized double-bed, situated most likely inside a motel
room. However, a third aspect of porn’s appeal, the thrill
of risqué sexual acts done in public spaces, with the added
drama of being seen and “caught in public,” also becomes
a dominant strain. Two such spaces are seen in Manila
Scandal: a rice granary warehouse, where the two straight
couples undergo sex among the rice sacks; and a horse
stable, where the walls open up to the surrounding coun-
tryside, inviting everyone to ogle at the sexual antics be-
tween the “stable boy” and the “water girl.”
Finally, the spaces between the video and its audience
should be traced, for an understanding of the relationship
between being there, seeing it, and (probably) doing it is
what makes “porn” porn, that is, having the ability to stim-
ulate the viewer sexually. The affinity of private—specifi-
cally domestic—spaces conducive to sex, such as the bed-
room, private study or bathroom, is most often reflected
in the actual physical environment by which its audience
is implicated - the privatized spaces of the domicile. The
utilization of the outdoors as venue for filmic, if not actu-
The x-rated Manila Exposed DVDs are released internationally but bootleg copies are openly sold in the sidewalks of Quiapo
56
al, sex increases the level of audience interest by imputing
the (indeed, exciting) possibility of being discovered and
watched, as well as the prudent realization that such a
space has also been over-determined by notions of spatial
semi-privacy (a honeymooner’s beach or pool resort, per-
haps, or an isolated farm in the countryside).
This affinity for congruent space materializes the visual
linkage made between watching porn and doing porn, one
often being a precursor to the other. What is more, the
visual bond between the display of sex, as observed in the
various camera angles that maximize the (often multiple)
view of the act, and its consumers, is strengthened by this
affinity of space and practice, especially when the dis-
tance is closed by the self-reflexivity of the actor/actress
to the viewer on a one-to-one basis. Jacking off alone in
a room while seeing someone jack off in a filmed room,
or performing sex at home while viewing a couple hav-
ing coitus at a set, binds viewers and actors together in a
mesh of erotogenic practices that provide both pleasure
and entertainment to its public. The utilization of such
privatized spaces in porn, therefore, acts to propel, sustain
and climax this excitation.
It is this synchronicity between filmed and actual spaces
of sex that delineates porn as a special area of problema-
tizing Filipino notions of space as either public or private,
virtual or real. In a sense, it also mirrors the general issue
of pornography as an individualized space within which
personal desire—and power—is produced versus attempts
of institutions to hegemonize individuals into obedient
servants. In a sense, porn space is a space of resistance,
characterized by fantasy and verisimilitude, desire and ful-
fillment. The usage by porn videos of interiors that signify
upper-income gentility serves as device simulators in aid
of excitation, both on the level of the sexual, as well as that
of the economic. The architectonic fantasies of VIP motel
rooms, for example, which carry design themes like a vid-
eoke bar, a Swiss chalet, a Japanese tea house, or even
an African safari house are calculated to maximize the
imaginary of its “classiness” as well as its being sexually
“kinky,” categories of desired intimacy that cater to its cli-
ents’ notions of psychosexual, as well as socio-economic,
satisfaction.
This over-determination of social fantasy around sexual
fantasy is what continues to make porn space a serious
topic for cultural critique, as well as an admittedly vigor-
ous economic practice. What these fantasy interiors also
elicit, however, is the simulation of wealth and power that
goes with the activation of erotica in the tactical disposi-
tion of sexual and gendered relations between partners,
individuals, and in some cases, even “groupies.” This simu-
lacra of privilege, accessed through the rental of rooms
on an hourly basis (“short time”, measured as three hours
long, being the universally understood minimum block
rate for such rooms, as well as the flagrant intention of
quick sex for blocking such short room rents), is what also
reconnects desire and power in subtle, even subversive
ways.7
The spaces of porn, therefore, are also the spaces of po-
litical resistance, the demarcation made between the
public and the private as resolved into life practice and
consumption. This “sexscape,” resolved by the XXX cipher,
is what constitutes the ultimate domicile of person ver-
sus group, individual versus communal. This transaction
of spaces linked together by desire is also the last barrier
in which the “free will” of one to indulge in such “aberrant
behavior” would have to shield itself from the surveillance
of the suppressing other.
case is the City of Manila, which passed an ordinance banning “short
time” in motels to discourage the practice of “illicit sex” in just such es-
tablishments.
References
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Betsky, Aaron. Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire. New
York: William Morrow, 1997.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and
Literature, ed. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press,
1993.
Cabalfin, Edson G. “Mala-Baklang Espasyo sa Arkitekturang Filipino:
Estetika, Morpolohiya, Konteksto”, in Tabi-Tabi sa Pagsasangtabi: Criti-
cal Notes by Lesbians and Gays on the Arts, Culture and Language, ed.
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University of the Philippines Press, 2003.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven
Rendall. University of California Press. 1984.
Dyer, Richard. “Idol Thoughts: Orgasm and self-reflexivity in pornog-
raphy”. In The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. London:
Routledge, 1998, 504-515.
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Routledge, 1992.

Notes:
1. This insight is derived from structural notions of production and agen-
cy in the studies of Pierre Bourdieu, especially his notions of “field” and
“habitus.” See Bourdieu1993, 29-73.
2. This is the case, traditionally, when orthodox religious patriarchal im-
positions that refuse the bodily nature of human existence as abhorrent
and “paganistic”—that is, nature-oriented and thus feminine—condemn
publicly-viewed sexual interaction as “aberrant” and “obscene”, because
its ideological function of openness, equality, and pleasurable interac-
tion threaten to displace the individualist, dominant oppression of celi-
bate male power.
3. Lynda Nead specifically critiques these categories of defining pornog-
raphy. In The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (1992), she
deconstructs how cultural notions of making distinctions between what
is acceptable behavior and what is illicit are translated into forms of
controlling social behavior, and are conformed by the moral requisites
of the state, thus producing censorship. The difficulty in defining such
terms as “obscene” and “immoral” in pornography, such as the celebrated
1961 court case versus Penguin Books for its republishing of Lady Chat-
terley’s Lover, showed how artistic merits are often confused for moral
demonization when “it falls into the wrong hands.”
4. Considering the economics of purchasing both (pirated) hardware
and software in the VCD format in the currently uncontrolled black mar-
ket, with VCDs to be had for as little as 30 pesos a piece and players for
as little as 1,000 pesos, this issue takes on a massive dimension in the
cultural and spatial visualities of millions of everyday Filipinos.
5. Porn videos in Manila are often never reviewed on a monitor before
purchase for fear of being “caught”—by whom, considering the very il-
legality of the vendor’s existence, is a very good question.
6. Extended scenes devoted to masturbation indicate the source of porn’s
“empowered public” as well as its inclusion within the general outlines of
acknowledging the dominant sexed being in the socio-sexual (and thus
socio-political) context. Thus, by extending the pleasure and fetishism
inherent in stroking and exciting the penis to a hardened and ready-to-
ejaculate state, such scenery provides copious proof of both patriarchal
as well as fraternal hegemony.
7. The subversive usage of “short time” has been identified by some state
organs, which now regulate such practices in certain places. One recent

57