Indecent Display!!!

Hotels, motels, they are all venues for an increasingly-going-public thing: sex!

There is a public holler about an alleged motel being built near a public elementary school. As motels are easily equated to sex -- illicit sex, hotels have a more decent image.

So that, years ago when a standard class hotel sprouted just beside the school where my daughter attends, nobody complained (Sure the bar right next to it is a one of the hottest spots at night where teenagers and yuppies go to, have fun and vomit at the opposite fence bordering the school premises).

But then, what's this?! My daughter tells me that her classmates have seen a man and a woman engaged in sexual acts seen from the window of their second floor hotel room. It was daytime, of course, school hours in fact. One of the girls even described the couple doing the "bouncy bouncy"!

Perverse thoughts flooded my mind -- are these couple encouraging voyeurism to these schoolchildren?

The hotel windows are lightly tinted, but still the children saw what they saw, probably pumping silhouettes bathed in warm light. With what mass media is teaching our kids these days, they can just easily fill in the blanks! They saw a couple having sex through the second floor window of the hotel.

What were they thinking? My daughter tells me her friends were imagining a highly paid prostitute. A dirty old man who can afford a standard class hotel. Even if they were legitimate couples, what the school children saw already stamped an unforgettable scenario in their young minds.

Perhaps, it is not the fault of the hotel that things such as this would happen. But now I realized that there are couples that would take their perversions to the streets if given the chance. What a different kind of high those two might have had when they knowingly displayed their acts, knowingly or unkowingly to the shocked children. After all, the Philippines is still a largely modest society.

One of the teachers at my child's school explained that since they could not do anything against the hotel which most probably also had no idea what was happening within the window frame (and the world is full of such things), they are focusing on teaching their students how to deal with situations such as this. Just like a television, switch off, change channel.

As a parent of the child who only had secondhand information of what transpired, her imagination just as fueled by the "bouncy bouncy" description, what I can do is present things to her matter-of-factly, discuss another aspect of sex education, i.e., sexual perversion.

With this, I always remind my daughter to renew her mind. With all the sex, violence and other explicit content she has and will encounter on TV, radio, music, magazines, the internet, and other mass media, I constantly tell her to increase her power of discernment, to know the good from the bad, to learn from them both, to choose good and to overcome evil. For the real battle is not of this world.

It's all in the mind.

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2)