The sociological significance of ‘bolitas’. No seamen jokes, please.
Sorry we don’t have a proper picture, but here’s a jar of marbles.
Somewhere, someone is already writing a pitch for an indie movie.
The Strange Sexual Quirk of Filipino Seafarers
by Ryan Jacobs
When Norwegian anthropologist Gunnar Lamvik first began living in Iloilo city, a seafaring haven in the southern Philippines, he sensed he wasn’t getting the richest and most detailed information about the shipping experience from interviews with his neighbors, who were home on two-month vacations from 10 months at sea. To crack the cultural mystery of any total institution, you have to go inside, he reasoned. “If you [want] a feeling of a seafarer’s life, you have to be at sea with them when they are open,” said Lamvik, who now studies how cultural differences affect occupational safety at a Norway-based think-tank called SINTEF. “It’s important to be on board for some time, and build trust. That’s the crucial thing to do.”
For the next three years, he was on and off ships, floating with his subjects from port to port and trying to make that connection.
At a raucous karaoke crew member party somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean, it began to happen. He belted out the lyrics to “House of the Rising Sun.” Then, he insisted on singing it again. “That was a real ice breaker,” he said.
It was in this type of loose, booze-flowing setting that he learned the most about the lives of his shipmates. And soon, conversations turned to perhaps the most fascinating part of the Filipino seafaring identity, the little-known and barely studied sexual practice of “bolitas,” or little balls.
Many Filipino sailors make small incisions in their penises and slide tiny plastic or stone balls — the size of M&M’s — underneath the skin in order to enhance sexual pleasure for prostitutes and other women they encounter in port cities, especially in Rio de Janeiro. “This ‘secret weapon of the Filipinos,’ as a second mate phrased it, has therefore obviously something to do,” Lamvik wrote in his thesis, “‘with the fact that ‘the Filipinos are so small, and the Brazilian women are so big’ as another second mate put it.”
Read the article at The Atlantic.
Thanks to Chus for the link.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
August 10th, 2013 at 12:19
Excellent piece of article. I will have others read this one!
August 11th, 2013 at 17:19
All I seem to be getting from this is a deep pathological need to be liked.
August 11th, 2013 at 17:39
Ejia: You are right. Any theories on the root of this pathological need?
August 12th, 2013 at 01:50
I heard it causes painful erections.