The unravelling of Rhian and Mo

As far as I was concerned, Rhian Ramos was always but one in a bevy of young female artistas, and in the age of beauty clinics and hair treatment salons, these girls tend to look alike. I knew though that she was gutsier and more articulate than most and seemed to have a good head on her shoulders. Suffice it to say that when news broke that she and Mo Twister were together, I thought well, she must be smarter than I gave her credit for.   Because for all our complaints about Mo, I always thought he was an intelligent voice in popular culture, over and above the reputation for being risqué and smart-ass. At some point of course it became old: controversies about him banked on his offending people, which, to begin with, is something that’s easy to do in pseudo-conservative third world Philippines. Mo was an unapologetic Inglesero, devoid of the Pinoy sense of propriety, and had notions of truthfulness that he imposed on guests on his radio show. We might call him many things, but he wasn’t pretentious or stupid.     His own unraveling though was in that break-up with Rhian early in the year, when he gave new meaning to TMI (too much information), and seriously just went overboard in Twitter revelations about how together he and Rhian were. Of course his premise was love, and he was self-aware enough to know it was a breakdown of sorts, but seriously? Break-ups are bad enough without social media.   Or the Internet. Or just a computer with a video cam.   In fact, that recent video is Mo’s unraveling, not so much for what it says but for its mere existence. What is it that pushes an adult man, at the height of an emotional crisis, to sit in front of a computer cam and talk to himself? The excuse is that this was just a journal on video, and what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong is that it was careless and unthinking. If the concern was the career and reputation of his girlfriend, why record something like this at all? Of course we’ve got our own ways of dealing with crisis, but I’d think we’d also always want to be careful instead of careless, unplug instead of plug in our computers, especially if we’re part of a high-profile relationship.   Doing a tell-all on television is one thing, but putting a camera to our faces in a moment of crisis?   So Mo thought it would never come out? But that’s so naïve of him, really. In these digital times, everything of ourselves that we put out there, which is to say in the hard drives of our computers and on social media, can only catch up with us at some point. Wouldn’t it have been kinder, more sensitive, to have made sure that none of those files saved on his computers, none of them, would be retrievable? I would’ve just thrown that computer out, truth to tell, if I feared that those videos would come out at all.   But there was no fear here, obviously. And it’s not to question the sincerity in Mo’s recently published apology, nor in those tears he shed in that video. It’s to say that our imagination of him was never about his being a kind sensitive guy, and now he’s proven to some extent that judgment of him valid. Add to that his predisposition to talk instead of to sit back and quietly deal, and it’s difficult to feel pity for him.   As with those Hayden Kho sex videos, in this set-up it is the woman who is sacrificed, the woman who is aggrieved, the woman who is to some extent prostituted by the act of recording something personal and private, and carelessly letting that come out. But unlike those sex videos, what’s deafening here is our silence. Certainly this is not about disbelieving Mo, nor is it about believing Rhian who hasn’t denied the abortion either.  Yet, certainly regardless of a denial, as with questions of homosexuality, this is something that will just be taken to be true about the unraveling of this relationship.   And so it seems that we can’t quite deal with this unraveling. It should’ve been kept private yes, but now that it’s out in the open and is not just being left undenied but also just impossible to deny at this point, what do we do? Silence might be kinder to Rhian, but it isn’t the most productive option.     Keeping silent is something that we will pay for later on, if we think about those young teenage girls who have no one to talk to about this revelation; heck, if we think of the countless Pinays who will now have to deal with the question of sex and pregnancy and abortion in whispers and in their heads instead of discussing things intelligently and compassionately.   The worst case scenario is that some conservative anti-Reproductive Health (RH) Bill advocate will use this to say that the RH Bill is in fact not needed anymore, because girls – rich or poor – can have abortions anyway. Which would be beside the point. Not to mention unkind and downright wrong. We are after all living in a time when there seems to be no excuse for accidental pregnancies, a time when information might easily be had about birth control. But that is not true. We still live in a time when women don’t know how to take control of their bodies and, faced with a man who refuses to wear a condom, will be at a loss as to what else to do. Getting over-the-counter birth control pills is difficult for any woman – real or imagined, you can feel the judgment of the pharmacists on the other side of that counter. Imagine how impossible it must be for a woman who’s well known. And once you get those pills, you’re on your own about how to even begin taking it; you’re also always risking being found out.   Going to a gynecologist might be the better option, but you have to realize that on these shores even those in the medical profession will invoke Catholicism and morality the moment you ask about birth control. No sorry, they will not even be open to talking to you about sex – if you’re unmarried, they will presume that you’re just not having any. Such is the lack of women’s rights to their bodies. Here is why an RH Bill is important: we will have the right to information that’s otherwise muddled in the mess of present-day moralities. We will know of the options that we have, and it will be clear that abortion is not one of them. Because that is not in the RH Bill, no matter how it is imagined by senators like Tito Sotto.   If there’s anything that this unraveling reveals to us, it’s the fact that the RH Bill eludes precisely the pro-life versus pro-choice dichotomy because it isn’t even about abortion at all. That Mo’s video and apology speaks precisely of this dichotomy, and puts him on the side of pro-life and Rhian on the side of pro-choice, is its power. To some extent, it is beyond our years, this video, and it is so because we cannot even imagine this dichotomy to be true for us. That this video might be fiction, improbable as that is, makes it even worse.   Because maybe that’s why we’re all silent about it, too. We cannot even wrap our heads around it, we cannot even imagine having the right to choose for ourselves.   Except that we should. If only so we can deal better with our limitations as society, if only so we can reassess questions of conservatism and morality, rights and bodies. There is no doubt that this is damaging to Rhian’s reputation, but there is a way of seeing that might keep us from thinking any of this damaging at all. In fact, the challenge might be for us to level up our capacity to respect the choices a woman like her has made. And if we can’t do that, maybe it is our capacity at understanding, our ability at compassion, that need upgrading: there is nothing beautiful or graceful about what she’s been through, and there is no judgment of her that will not be a moral one.   And morality on these shores, in this age of social media and the Internet, in this age of fake bodies and skin whitening, in this age of corruption and the dark matuwid na daan, can only be highly questionable. And seriously: if Hayden Kho can be forgiven, enough for him to have a billboard selling clothes and his own perfume line, if someone like him who has without a doubt oppressed and abused women can be forgiven, then we are hard put to make things difficult for Rhian.   In fact at this point our hearts should only go out to this girl who is suffering for choices she’s made, including falling in love with the wrong guy. Her unraveling is her own suffering. Our silence is a revelation all its own. – GMA News Apologia: The mention of Dr. Margarita Holmes in the 13th paragraph of the original version of this article has been removed, as the author mistakenly attributed to her a question that was raised in her Facebook thread, but not by her. The author did not in any way mean malice or damage to Dr. Holmes' reputation, and has since publicly apologized for this mistake at http://www.radikalchick.com. The author absolves GMA News Online of any liability, and takes full responsibility. The rest of this piece stands on its own. -- Katrina Stuart Santiago.