Let's start with a latest high court decision that sexual advertisement should be banned from newspapers, and that Reggaeton songs should be censored on radio. I am certainly not a prude but there is certainly a case to be made that some norms should exist as to how sexual advertisements (read: prostitution) should be handled in the newspapers available to general public. But banning ads outright is not going to work, it never worked to control prostitution, anywhere. The more so in Venezuela, a country of easy sexual mores, skimpy attired women where virgin teenager girls dress like experimented whores of other countries; where after 15 years of chavismo, more than ever, a woman's value resides in that a man wants to fuck her. Period.
The offensive ads were apparently published 5 years ago, that is how long it took the TSJ to reach a verdict. That is in itself highly suspicious, the more so that it is directed a newspapers that have a not insignificant portion of their revenues from classified. For example El Universal even started putting inside their small ads pictures of the alleged escort offering her, or his, services. Interestingly, if the pictures of the women seemed rather unrealistic for the Venezuelan market the ad pictures for the men offering services for men looked more plausible, though nearly all claimed 20cm. And if you doubt that this is yet a way to push the general censorship agenda, the TSJ also ordered to investigate the existence of prostitution rings behind these ads. There is no doubt that at least one of these ads will be found to be connected to such a ring and that at some point a newspaper will be punished for not having investigated each and every ad folks placed. I suppose that the TSJ will also want newspapers investigate all the scams from used cars, inadequate housing and what not.
For reggaeton I will not come to its defense: it should be banned purely on aesthetics grounds. But that is another story.
The other puritanical moment came from Rodriguez Torres, the security minister, during the tearing down of student camps a la "Occupy Wall Street". Apparently the man is shocked because in addition of all the alleged war booty he found, there was "promiscuity and social shame". The term he used is "bochorno social" which in fact does not mean anything in Spanish but can be suggestive of socially embarrassing conducts as I tried to translate. I will start by noting that the term would be much better applied to the intense corruption we are subjected by the regime.
The thing is that Rodriguez Torres is appalled that at night in these camp sites with plenty of vigorous youngsters there was more going on than political protest. And that must be reason enough to suppress them. I suppose that Rodriguez Torres having spent his life in military barracks with all sorts of sexual repressions, usually vented out through homophobia or machismo, never had much time to wonder about is it to be young. And since he was fired from the army as a coup monger he was too busy organizing thug gangs to support Chavez to visit a psy and work out his sexual frustrations which are more obvious everyday.
The fact of the matter is that the bolivarian fraud is turning more repressive, more conservative, more uptight by the day, just as it happens with most revolutions which after having destroyed institutions suffer from the lack thereof and thus turn to easy placebos like sexual repression. Ask Reinaldo Arenas how the Castro revolution went fast from his liberator to his oppressor. Do I need to remind the readers how often I had to write against the homophobia alive and well inside chavismo? Or how in the purest machista style women are used to do all the dirty errands of the regime?
To finish I retake an old cartoon of Weil, ever so actual. Remember he drew Chavez with a military boot for head. Chavismo is reactionary in every sense.
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