By Menchu Aquino Sarmiento
Under a canvas tent on a narrow crowded Tondo street, a gaggle of women, all of child-bearing age, laugh at a tall young man with a flip chart showing a life-size model of the female reproductive system. It’s not because he wears a beaded headband and is tastefully made up, though without the water balloon bra or the hormonally enhanced breasts, but because of the truthful audacity of what he says. “Face it—we are all sexual beings: lahat ng tao ay may libog sa katawan. But it’s not all kilig at langit. There’s also lagkit at sakit. The bottom line is proper planning. Don’t rush into things without thinking. That’s a disaster. Tumayo ka na lang kung saan nadapa.” Then he proceeds to systematically show them just how, in what may be otherwise unmanageable lives, they can take better control of their fertility.
Benigno Vere Jr. or just Vere—no cute nicknames—knows firsthand what it’s like to suffer from the disastrous lack of access to reproductive health or RH services. His mother Raymunda was a teenage bride and had nine children by her early 30s in the slums of Malabon. Her eldest son died in infancy. Vere’s older siblings (he is second to the youngest) started their own families while still young adults. The padre de familia, Benigno Vere Sr.’s earnings as an OFW—a ship’s cook— were not enough to support his dependent children and to help out with the grandchildren too. Thus Vere’s nursing studies were untimely cut short. But for the last five years, he has found a niche as a community mobilizer and RH educator with the Likhaan Center for Women’s Health in Vitas, Tondo and Del Pan, Manila. NGOs like Likhaan focus on the poorest communities with unconscionably high rates of adolescent pregnancy and maternal mortality.
Vere’s spiel considers his audience’s particular socio-economic realities. He assures them that even if they feel bloated from birth control pills, the hormones are not accumulating dangerously in their bodies: Hindi alkansiya ang inyong puson; that the rust-proof brass IUD (Intrauterine Device) is worthless in the neighborhood junk shop. He tells the few men present that there’s no danger of thrusting the IUD right through the uterus. “Not happening, not even if your ari is as thick and as long as a walis tambo. Hanggang cervix ka lang. Period.” And yes, that was just another urban legend about the strands of a beautiful actress’s IUD strangulating the head of her Fil-Am actor boyfriend’s member.
Such misconceptions and untruths thrive in social media, where hook-ups abound. The high incidence of MSM (Men having Sex with Men) whom they met on FB or online dating sites is a huge factor in the Philippines’s unprecedentedly soaring HIV rates. Thus Vere urges the use of condoms “Kung hindi matiis, mag-condom please.” They have no side effects and come in various flavors besides.
“Para mas masarap¸” he naughtily reminds the giggling women. “Don’t believe your partner when he claims he can’t get an erection with a condom on. How did he wear it in the first place? Believe me, girl, you can even hang a Good Morning towel on it. And it’s not true that he didn’t feel a thing. Why did he come then?”
Beyond the sassy, snarky, stand-up comedy patter, Vere harkens back to the venerable babaylan: a Philippine tradition involving cross dressing and gender bending as well as healing and mediating with the spirit world. Civilized society is still uncomfortable about reproductive health or sex education. Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s success as a sex educator on 1980s American TV was said to be due in part to the audience’s inability to imagine having sex with her: she was in her 60s, tiny as a child at 4’7”, and with a comically thick Germanic accent. Similarly, Vere’s exotic mystique as a cross-dressing gay man sets him apart in the realm of a sexual unreachable for his mostly female heterosexual audience. Besides in our popular culture, the flamboyantly gay character is a stock confidant and BFF. Thus Vere always replies to SMS questions which women are too embarrassed to ask publicly during the Likhaan seminars, or patiently reiterates the complex timing and physical conditions for natural family planning.
Given the magnitude of the Filipino needs for RH services and education, Vere deserves a wider audience. He could be our own Pinoy Laci Green, whose YouTube channel “Sex Ed for the Internet” (www.youtube.com/user/lacigreen) has over a million subscribers. Learning about RH privately through YouTube videos and getting answers through email or chat about one’s personal concerns would suit the millions of Filipino millennials. Like the wise, accepting romcom sidekick, Vere understands that being human, kahit sino man, may karapatan mangalabit. As an RH educator, he teaches that: Mararating mo pa rin ang langit, na may ngiti sa labi.