Well, excuse us as we objectify men

It’s another round of beer and catching up with some of my high school friends — some of the most intelligent, over-achieving, hilarious and strong-willed girls I have ever met in my life, when the topic of our conversation shifts to the recent public stir caused the Bench billboard ads that were removed along Guadalupe-Edsa featuring some half-naked sexy rugby super-mongrels… I mean, models.

In relation to the issue, my friend Lourisse informs me that she’s delighted to say that HBO has finally started exercising their right to feature male frontal nudity, a move she considers long overdue since the network is known for an extensive liberal serving of exposed women’s breasts and other lewd sexual content. We toast to the progressive move of HBO’s genitalia-on-air, followed by a collective promise to one day achieve our goal of being able to objectify men, just as they do to women.

Great balls: Vanity Fair’s World Cup coverage had a few soccer players in their boxers. Fortunately, the MMDA wasn’t there to impose a ban or anything. Photo from Vanity Fair

This is a group of girls who I personally think are some of the most promising people I know. Among us is the valedictorian of this year’s batch in the UP College of Public Health, another is a UP oblation scholar, and one was former president of UP’s Junior Marketing Association. We may discuss some relevant matters from time to time, but for the most part we also just like to waste time talking about shallow insignificant things like half-naked men on billboards. This is our declaration.

At this point in time, and especially in this society, we all agree that it’s about time women have equal rights to objectify men. Not to say that the objectification of the human body and sexuality is by any means correct — it’s just that we’ve seen women over and over again being misrepresented and exploited on public advertisements, and for the first time Bench is actually giving us women that equal right to ogle at men and make them feel like fine pieces of meat.

Ho: With a title as shamelessly frank as Hung, the HBO comedy series is about a man who succumbs to prostitution to earn money for his children while his female-friend acts as his pimp, after learning his well-endowed man parts might be his only skill to survive.

People can argue that the advertisements were distasteful, disturbing, and inappropriate. While this argument holds some truth, is there not something “inappropriate” about the portraits of politicians plastered in equally massive billboards on the streets? Aren’t the dozens of other advertisements of skimpily dressed women just as “distasteful”? Is it not “disturbing” that our local media industry continues to subscribe to a representation of women under a patriarchal household, giving the man ultimate dominant power while women are portrayed as the crying mother, the housewife, the cook, the emotionally unstable other?

What the Bench billboards do allow us is nothing short of a public appreciation of “good form,” as my good friend Bea would say. And excuse us as we appreciate the wondrous beauty of these hard-worked and hard-earned bods. Though there is hilarity in the fact that the enlarged and gargantuan size of these billboards is pun intended, obviously in this society, it’s a man’s world. We women never get what we want.

Good joey: The kangaroo in Aussie model Travis Fimmel’s pants caused a stir when a Calvin Klein billboard in London was said to have caused traffic.

Women have been subject to be slaves of a market of skin whitening, size-zero, plastic surgeon devotees, and these are the superficial advocacies we see on billboards everyday. Inappropriate messages are being sent through advertisements anyway, fully clothed or not. For Bench’s underwear advertisements to blatantly promote men in, well, tight briefs, really seems to be an obvious intention.

Women have been objectified before, so allow us to objectify men for a minute in this machismo society of men-on-top. If men can be superstars of a radio talk show that discusses their sexual relations on-air, diminishing the value of women to mere vaginas, then excuse us as we appreciate the form and beauty of a man’s body in an overly enlarged billboard for all to see, and watch us smile as we watch all of men’s egos slither back and sit rather uncomfortably on their possibly part-chauvinistic, possibly part-homophobic shell.

Sausage fest: Men may have flocked to 300 for the action but for women, the movie broke some taboos—at least as far as the outspoken appraisal and appreciation for the male body are concerned.

We’ve accepted this society is superficial; at least give us equal opportunistic rights. Anyway, we should really question why billboards of such size even exist on main highways in the first place. The Coca-Cola billboard with “real trees” and intentions of sucking up pollution was equally distracting, I thought.

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The facets of the Filipina: For most Philippine soap operas, women usually have only two roles: the bida and the kontrabida, both characters usually determined by the status of their social class. The former cries, the latter slaps.

This article is the collective effort of ideas pitched in by a group of intelligent and passionate women at their early 20’s. For violent reactions email kasmira_simone @yahoo.com.