17 - Sex in Manila in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Summary

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw seismic political and social change in the Philippines. It was a period marked by a series of watershed events: Spain’s ignominious defeat and the loss of the colony in 1899 to the United States; a subsequent bloody war and brutal pacification campaign waged by the US resulting in Philippine defeat and American colonization, the effects of which would reshape local societies and endure well beyond the next half a century. Tracking across a wealth of disparate sources, including colonial missionary confessional manuals and etiquette handbooks, photographs, and popular culture, this chapter explores Manila’s dance halls, brothels, and opium dens, popular folksongs and ballads that celebrated female sexual allure or lamented the mundanity of married life. Who were considered the arbiters and experts of sexual behaviour and what forms were deemed the most dangerous to morality, health, and public order? In the process of examining prevailing anxieties over sexuality, the chapter foregrounds a plethora of erotic intimacies, sexual habits and appetites, pleasures, and practices, and how these were expressed and experienced in a city that bore the brunt of revolutionary upheavals.