This week, some artists from UP (my alma mater, by the way) trying to drum up support for a local tv personality in yet another one of those bothersome reality shows took off their clothes as a sign of solidarity with that tv personality. They did this, I am told, in an artist's hang out, with much publicity, and of course, loads of fun.
A couple of days after baring their beauteous bods, they get an adverse reaction from officialdom. The President of the city's Anti-Indecency Board has apparently reacted quite negatively to the strip-off, and loudly denounced the event as something that "sends the wrong message."
I wasn't quite sure what the wrong message was that he was referring to, and so today, I wanted to dissect what he could have meant in this piece. After thinking about it for a few seconds, I came up with my top five theories as to why a group of people taking off their clothes was perceived by the city's Anti Indecency Board as sending the wrong message:
1.The artists were ugly and had bodies better left clothed. By stripping, they sent the wrong message that it was perfectly ok for dumpy people with loads of fat to expose their skin, thereby contradicting the Surgeon General, who has already proclaimed that thin will always be in.
2.The artists were from UP, and as members of the most progressive campus in the nation, they are sending the wrong message to outsiders that UP graduates are not above using their bodies, aside from the normal brains and beauty combination we're known to have, to deliver intellectual messages to the rest of the nation.
3.The artists should not have supported Budoy, the local tv personality, because he was short, dark and ugly. As the chief officer of the Anti-Indecency Board, he had come to the reasonable conclusion that it is indecent for short, dark and ugly people to succeed in reality shows, as this would be detrimental to the widely accepted but rarely publicly acknowledged truth that tall, fair and beautiful people should always win (shades of Jude Law in Gattaca).
4.The artists should not have called attention to this reality show, Pinoy Big Brother, because by doing so, they are sending the wrong message that it is acceptable to watch a local version of an internationally franchised reality show which has no substance and is purely lame, content-wise. Besides, as head of the indecency board, they have already made the determination that the contents of this show, including the coming out of a gay movie star, have absolutely no decent value whatsoever.
5.>The artists should not have taken their clothes off in a dark dingy bar in the middle of nowhere in the name of an intellectual slash political exercise, because it sends a message that it is ok for people to take off their clothes in dark dingy bars, even for those who are not doing it as an intellectual slash political exercise, but more of a economic slash social necessity. Plus, people should take off their clothes in the sunlight, where it is better for people who are near sighted like me to ogle at them and revel in all their physical glory.
After mulling the above reasons for a few more seconds, I still wasn't too sure if I had the Anti-Indecency Board right. My problem, it seemed, lay in the fact that my bounds of decency seemed to be occupying a different geographical terrain as the Board's.
So, after a few minutes wrestling with my keyboard, I arrived at a satisfactory conclusion that allowed me not to worry anymore about trying to divine the meaning of the Board. This conclusion was it:
An Anti-Indecency Board is a waste of resources, anachronistic and has no useful function except to make a lot of noise. This Board is useless, since whatever it wants to police can be policed by the very people on whom the law already places this obligation - the police. Therefore, it is also a waste of time trying to figure out what the Board means, except as a source of amusement.
If anything needs to be stripped, it's the 'authority' of the Board to determine what is or is not indecent.