A DIFFERENT KIND OF MERCY

Of late, the phenomenon that is the mercy fuck has been brought out in the open. But the act isn’t anything new. Mercy fucking has most likely been performed for as long as men and women have been fornicating. However, the term’s popularity is only starting to peak in the Philippines.

Sex-Lexis.com, an online dictionary of sexual terms, defines a mercy fuck (also called the pity fuck or courtesy copulation) as a sex act “performed when one person feels sorry for another.”

The website also documents what its researchers believed to be one of the earliest instances when the term was used in a movie. In a little-known offbeat 1993 flick, The Pickle, Ellen Stone (Dyan Cannon) consents to have sex with her ex Harry (Danny Aiello) to keep him from jumping out the window. But, she tells him, “Just remember, this is a mercy fuck.”

More recently, the HBO series Sex and the City did much to further popularize the term. In a fourth season episode aired in 2002, titled “Belles of the Balls,” lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) has sex with an ex-boyfriend who is left with only one testicle after being treated for prostrate cancer. When she tells her friends that she has gotten pregnant from her act of charity, one of them turns to her and asks, “Mercy fuck?”

As such, the mercy fuck giver may be a woman who takes it upon herself to screw a man who has serious self-esteem issues—caused by various reasons such as dick deformity, a bad childhood, or a bad break-up. The mercy fuck giver could also be a man who is determined to rise to the occasion despite the fact that the woman has psychotic tendencies, a funky aroma, and a more-than-passing resemblance to Mighty Mouse.

Yes, you might say some people just can’t say, “No.” You could also say they’re just perverted do-gooders. And they remain in this exalted status as long as the mercy fuck recipients never find out that they were serviced out of pity.

Look at it this way: porn stars get paid to fake it. Mercy fuck givers just do it out of kindness. (For the purposes of this entry, we’re only discussing non-professional mercy fuck givers.) Most of the time, the mercy fuck recipients don’t even thank them. One mercy fuck giver laments, “Afterwards, the guy even had the nerve to ask me if I missed his tiny dick! He bought my lie! I created a monster!” Another relates: “After I went out of my way to make her happy in bed, she dumped. I made her too confident!”

For the most part, the mercy fuck is merely a naughty good deed. Why should doing a good turn be confined to bailing out a friend from the city jail or helping Quiapo’s bootleg DVD vendors make a living?

Of course, mercy fucking is just a tad bit pathetic for both parties involved.

In my opinion, the only thing worse than a mercy fuck is mercy phone sex. Call it the “poor relation” of true mercy fucking.

From the time the idea of phone sex was conceived, mercy phone sex was inevitable. Phone sex is all about fucking through the use of one’s mind. With the right minds in on the act, it can indeed be a very pleasant experience. Unfortunately, not everyone is blessed with a mind that is capable of fucking well. As a friend of mine likes to say, "One cannot 'mind fuck' with an idiot."

Aside from people in long distance relationships or people who for some reason can’t have real sex just yet, phone sex propositions abound in adult chatrooms. There, one virtual stranger can hook up with another for the safest sex imaginable. This is where the fun or the agony begins. For starters, attempting to hook up with a suitable phone sex partner in an adult chatroom is somewhat like being blind and trying to buy provocative underwear on your own. Although, I’m told, one does get lucky sometimes.

In the mercy fuck scenario, the problem usually starts when the mercy fuck recipient’s physical attributes and/or bedroom skills leave much to be desired. This prompts the mercy fucker to act out in order to just get it all over with. At some point, the mercy fucker’s brain shuts down. This blissful “spacing out” is a luxury alien to mercy phone sex givers. On the telephone, there is no escape.

Mercy phone sex happens when one unfortunately “connects” with an idiot. Although this misconnection often ensues from instant partnerships forged in adult chatrooms, it can also happen with people who already know each other. (How it happens is another story.)

I imagine it must be sheer hell to have phone sex with a person whose mind isn’t worth fucking with. (Read: People who think that phone sex only involves moaning and grunting.)

Sure, one can just put the phone down or pretend that government spies are tapping the line at the first sign of idiocy. But mercy phone sex givers just can’t do that. The Good Samaritan in them is just too strong.

With the welfare of the valiant mercy phone sex givers in mind, here are three easy steps to help them get through the ordeal:

1. Close your eyes and recite: “Oh, yes, yes, yes. You are getting me so wet.” or “You are getting me so hard!”
2. Repeat the cheesy dialogue as often as necessary. Flatter the mercy phone sex recipient as much as possible.
3. Towards the end, scream your head off like you’re being serviced by Totoy Mola or grunt like you’re giving it to Angelina Jolie. (They’re sounds of desperation, but the other party doesn’t have to know.)

CELIBACY IS THE NEW SEX

In the age of stylized orgies for bored yuppies, nasty amateur videos in which hapless college students make like porn stars, the tireless production of flesh flicks from all over the world, and the never-ending stream of kinky gadgets from who-knows-where, sex has lost a great deal of its shock value. You name it, we have seen it. Hotel heiresses getting down and dirty with their boyfriends. Underage girls humping each other like manic bunnies. Bottle blondes doing the nasty with pythons.

We’re in the midst of the no-holds-barred X-rated carnival where people nonchalantly disclose that they practice the carnal techniques they learned from movies, magazines, books, or the Net. Nowadays, it takes a whole lot to make sex still seem fresh. This makes it easier for me to believe what the late American pop artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol said: “Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.”

But who says we should take Andy Warhol’s word for it? I certainly don’t want to eschew sophisticated bitterness too early in life. I choose to think that sex can be reinvented. The world of feel-good women’s magazines and a few other starry-eyed experts will back me up on this. People need sex like they need bottled water.

In her book Anatomy of Love (pardon the “L” word), Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist, confirms, “Sex is addictive. The more you have, the more you want. When a lover leaves you or dies, you can experience narcotic withdrawal. The narcotics in question are produced by our brains. In the first stage of love— attraction, which may last two or three years—the brain pours out phenylethylamine and other chemicals that create a high. During sex, oxytocin is secreted in the brain, producing that blissful glow—which encourages feelings of attachment.”

“So,” Dr. Fisher goes on to say, “celibacy is not simply an issue of choice, philosophy, or ideology. It can create sharp body-mind pain. The trauma of doing without can be physiologically disturbing. People start to crave the smell, touch, and sound of an all-body, all-mind, all-engrossing experience.”

Dr. Fisher’s romanticized musings had me saying, “Bingo!” I think I may have stumbled upon a way to make sex hot again. Yes, sexual deprivation or, to use a more friendly term, voluntary celibacy may be the answer. Just as Paris Hilton’s favorite pink shade is the new black, celibacy is the new sex!

The practice of glorified sexual abstinence has had a long history. It’s been done by gurus, yogis, shamans, mystics, and seers who simply cannot afford to expend their energy on sex. In Freudian terms, this is the healthy sublimation of the libido. Christians, on the other hand, have been taught that voluntary celibacy should be done “for the sake of purity and spiritual perfection.”

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not turning into Miss Spirituality. I’m not espousing celibacy as a way toward The Light. I’m only saying that it should be done so that we can all once again look at sex as something wonderfully forbidden.

In voluntary celibacy, people look for the best way to channel their urges into other endeavors. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that this would lead to men and women writing sonnets or baking mind-blowing brownies, it’s my hope that abstinence would make people cook up more naughty scenarios in their head.

I call this The Diet Mechanism. As anyone who’s ever been in a diet knows, there’s a point when all the sad dieter thinks about is food. It’s that point where bags of potato chips at the supermarket begin to call out your name. The same principle would apply to a person who is voluntarily celibate. There will be a point where everything will seem sexual to him or her. Even shampoo labels with instructions to work up “a lather,” would cause him or her to shiver. The sight of carrots, eggs, and oysters would make him or her have a pseudo heart attack. Imagine the exquisite agony!

Hey, I’m all for marketing celibacy as an extreme sexual sport. Let’s say a group of friends would get together and try to outlast each other in a game of total celibacy (which means no self-stimulation). The one who lasts the longest without any form of sex gets the prize money. In this game, even the losers are happy. The only difficulty in conducting this game would be in checking the veracity of the participants’ claims. They’d have to be under 24-hour surveillance just so everyone is assured that nobody “cheats.” It’d be like a sexually-oriented Big Brother. (If the players are all male, the show could be titled Big Birdy.)

Still, how long could a human being who has experienced great sex last without any sex at all? A hundred days or a thousand? At what point does a voluntarily celibate person go crazy? The risk of insanity aside, an all-out celibacy challenge is guaranteed to be loads of fun.

It is worth noting, though, that voluntary celibacy should not be confused with involuntary celibacy. There are people who are celibate by force of circumstance or the lack of opportunity. But that’s another story that I don’t care to go into. It’s simply too sad. Celibacy is only a happy state for those who willingly choose it—be it for the strange thrill, respite from sexual engagements, or, hey, even good-old religious beliefs.

We should all be so lucky.