Sex And Technology

The news on the radio was blasting this morning about a rape incident that had occurred in Los Baños, Laguna, involving 7 youths. The young victim herself was being interviewed on the air and had bravely recounted how the crime was effected and had named some of the assailants. For a rape victim, she sounded so young and also so courageous.

Her forward demeanor while narrating the harrowing incident was a bit unusual as she spoke in straight and unwavering tone in that radio interview. Possibly, the terror of her ordeal had hardened her that there was nothing else left for her to do except to tell—-to live and tell—-and to get the ends of justice despite the huge embarrassment that the experience will bring her and her family.

The rape had happened on June 18 and the delay of her testimony might weaken her cause. However, this is very understandable since the alleged assailants, one of them the son of a policemen, were threatening her and family to no end. To top it all, the rape incident was even video-cammed by one of the rapist using a cellphone. That would make any victim all the more hesitant since broadcast of it would be another callous intimidation. If you speak, you’d be shamed to the whole world.

This is the problem with technology, despite it’s boon, there’s always a bane to it, and minimal as it may seem, but when utilized, may be very vile and destructive.

This rape incident left my mind wandering about how some of our youth had become so sexually callous. I am not generalizing here,but I am just pondering. I am thinking how perhaps advanced instruments like cellphones and the Internet could be at times hazardous to the society, where these gadgets could in some other time become devices to generate highly sexual materials and then to propagate it, thru mails and image messages.

In the Internet, explicit content can be viewed so easily and by any youth even not of age, just as long as the youth knows how to click the proper buttons.

I am not saying that such misuse of the net by youths is so rampant. In fact, I can say that Internet cafés administrators—-at least to the ones I frequent—-have done good in controlling such inclinations except that once in a while, I notice how some would veil the explicit sites by pretending to browse on regular websites while clicking back to the sexually-explicit site every now and then, when the café administrator or keeper is out of sight. In fact there was this one memorable occasion when I saw a very young child, like 8 or 9 years old, playing some colorful java games. But on the corner of my eye, the screen in front of the young boy kept on changing hue that when I observed closer, the boy was actually browsing a very explicit site when no one is looking, and just pretending to play a game. I felt a little shock realizing how a very young boy like that could be exposed to such materials.

And then there was this another incident when while this Internet café was so busy with lots of customers—-some playing while others surfing—-there was this burly fat guy, who just sat in front of a computer and immediately opened numerous porn sites without hesitancy or reservation whatsoever, and went on downloading like there was no tomorrow and like there were no other people present there. Of course, many had thrown knowing looks at each other in that café, including the café administrator and me. Everyone seems to notice how unusual the situation was and in fact a bit funny that I smirked lengthily while surfing the net, trying to hold of a laugh.

What the hell was this fat guy thinking just coming in and downloading porn while the net was particularly full of people at that moment. I bet even the café administrator couldn’t do anything about it—-it was liked an unprecedented situation for him that he wasn’t prepared to handle or did not anticipate to happen.

Despite that there is no concrete indication relating the increasing amount of sexual misconduct among our youths today to the proliferation of sexually-explicit materials on the net and thru cellphones, and while there is yet to be a very formal scientific study on the subject, I feel somehow that unmitigated and unrestricted access of our youth, and even of the general population, to such highly explicit sexual materials would be deleterious to the society, propagating a general psyche in the population of sexual looseness and injecting disturbing ideas to a youth population that should in the first place be concentrating on their studies and other worthwhile social duties. As of now, it might not be as prevalent—-although I feel it is—-but the government should not wait for the situation to get worse before it acts on it.

The Internet is so seamless and so vast that I know controlling or regulating it against explicit content would be a hugely monumental task, quixotic even. But somehow, we got to do something.

This is the right and proper opportunity for newly-elected political leaders to be of significance to our society. Lawmakers should formulate a scheme that would curtail misuse of technology such as cellphone messaging and the Internet, even to the extent of creating an agency that would specially handle and monitor such improper conduct(s). There are lots of government agencies out there that do not really matter much to our population and yet they are there just for the sake of it. But if there is an agency that would be well-worth people’s money, it is this agency that should be watching out for these kind of misuse.