[OPINION] Sex and the DDS

Walden Bello

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[OPINION] Sex and the DDS
'But there's something more,' he volunteered. 'The height of sexual pleasure is when he says "I will kill you" to his enemies.'

As a sociologist, I have always been fascinated by social movements, especially right-wing ones where people regress to the state of collective behavior before humans evolved into a community.  Now, people have always told me that my fascination with right-wing movements could get me into trouble, since my informants, sensing my left-wing leanings, could end up beating me up, which almost happened twice when I was doing a PhD dissertation on the fascist group Patria y Libertad in Chile in the seventies.

The latest movement to catch my interest is the DDS, or “Die-hard Duterte Supporters,” whose informal chieftain is Mocha and whose best known cheerleader is Dick Gordon. DDS is, of course, a defiant word-play on the acronym DDS, or Davao Death Squad that Duterte commanded while mayor of Davao. 

I finally found someone from the DDS who was willing to talk, though I had to promise not to disclose his identity.  But I made no promise not to describe him.  He was around 45, overweight, balding, squat, and definitely middle class.  A subdued person at first glance, he came across as a wallflower type.

So I asked him what qualified a person to consider herself or himself a DDS. He said, “We have a common experience.” Could he be more specific? He looked around, then told me a bit sheepishly, “We get an orgasm just seeing the President on TV.” Talaga? I asked. “Yes, and we compared notes, and we all came to the same conclusion.” And what is that? I persisted. He looked around again, and said, “That just seeing the President on TV is better than actual sex.”

You don’t say! “Yes,” he continued. “And it’s therapeutic, too. Some of us had erectile dysfunction disorder, some had long lost our sex drive, but when the man came into view, a miracle took place.” And this was true of both men and women? “Yes, men and women, old and young, lovely and ugly, and this is what has made us so loyal to him. It’s like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.  Tumindig ka, Lazaro.  At tumindig nga.  He made us sexually whole again.” 

He continued: “And there’s nothing like a DDS rally, with the President present. We have collective ecstasy, an orgy, the ultimate high but without actual sex.” He reflected. “Well, it’s not quite that. It’s like we are all collectively making love to him, and through him to one another. You know, like the priest says at Mass, “through Him and in Him and with Him.” I tried to recall the Latin from my prehistoric days as an altar boy, but he beat me to it: “Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso.” Wow!  Did this fellow graduate from that place on Katipunan? I asked myself.  

By now my mind is racing, trying to understand; I heard the same thing about the Nazi rallies, like the one in Nuremburg in 1936, where, some participants testified, the mass ecstasy ended in mass masturbation by thousands of participants, much of it involuntary, so that women were warned not to walk on the rally grounds for days afterwards to avoid accidental impregnation.  

“But there’s something more,” he volunteered. “The height of sexual pleasure is when he says ‘I will kill you’ to his enemies.” You mean, his call to murder turns you on? He smiled, his face transfigured, no longer that of a wallflower, and said with a hint of menace, “Now you know why we call ourselves the DDS.”  Thank you, I said, and hurriedly left.

After the interview, I pulled up a dog-eared book that I had not read in years, Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism.  Was Reich right?  That fascism is a political movement rooted in sexual repression and deep feelings of sexual inadequacy, and that the fascist head honcho is the one who successfully taps into that and converts that pent-up energy into murderous rage?

If he’s right, then we’re in real trouble in this Catholic convent that passes for a country. – Rappler.com

Aside from occasionally writing satirical fiction, Walden Bello teaches sociology.  As a member of the House of Representatives from 2009-2015, he made the only recorded resignation-on-principle in the history of Congress owing to principled differences with former President Benigno Aquino III.  His latest non-fictional study is “Counterrevolution, the Countryside, and the Middle Classes,” which appears in the January 2018 issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

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