NEWS
Q2 release for DW’s “Sex and the Body” series; series encourages “healthy relationship with our body and ultimately ourselves”
26 February 2024
Germany’s DW has started production on a new Tagalog/English series, "Sex and the Body", about women and their bodies.
The eight seven-minute episodes, targetting a Q2 2024 release, promise to discuss taboo topics in a series of conversations between host Ana Santos and medical expert, Dr Issa Matibag.
The series tackles a key issue: “In the conservative society that we grew up in, talking about sex and understanding our bodies was taboo, vulgar, and impolite,” Santos says.
"Sex and the Body" is opening up conversations “so that we can begin to have a healthy relationship with our body and ultimately, ourselves,” she adds.
The series is part of a global movement discovering and embracing the different aspects of female sexuality.
“For me as a Filipino woman, that bold step needs to include a local context to reflect our own cultural beliefs and how we experience sex and the body in everyday life,” Santos says.
Questions the magazine programme asks include “Why don’t women lose their hy-mens?”, kicking off a discussion about the obsession with virginity, hymen reconstruction surgeries and tightening creams.
Other episodes look at the clitoris; menstruation and PMS; the vulva; fertility and infertility; Sex during pregnancy; the female orgasm; and the pelvic floor.
Was it difficult to find women to talk about this?
“There is a growing community online talking about pleasure and female sexuality,” she says.
“However, this is more a younger generation. There’s less shame talking about sexuality – the biology part of it, like menstruation. But women still giggle and cover their faces with their fans when talking about the emotional and psychological part, like initiating sex to satisfy your sex drive”.
Santos says the team has this very act on tape; “a woman covering her face with her fan when I asked her who was going to start the honeymoon”.
The production team unearthed more than a few surprises in developing the series.
For instance, Santos says, the discovery that there are standard Filipino wor...
Germany’s DW has started production on a new Tagalog/English series, "Sex and the Body", about women and their bodies.
The eight seven-minute episodes, targetting a Q2 2024 release, promise to discuss taboo topics in a series of conversations between host Ana Santos and medical expert, Dr Issa Matibag.
The series tackles a key issue: “In the conservative society that we grew up in, talking about sex and understanding our bodies was taboo, vulgar, and impolite,” Santos says.
"Sex and the Body" is opening up conversations “so that we can begin to have a healthy relationship with our body and ultimately, ourselves,” she adds.
The series is part of a global movement discovering and embracing the different aspects of female sexuality.
“For me as a Filipino woman, that bold step needs to include a local context to reflect our own cultural beliefs and how we experience sex and the body in everyday life,” Santos says.
Questions the magazine programme asks include “Why don’t women lose their hy-mens?”, kicking off a discussion about the obsession with virginity, hymen reconstruction surgeries and tightening creams.
Other episodes look at the clitoris; menstruation and PMS; the vulva; fertility and infertility; Sex during pregnancy; the female orgasm; and the pelvic floor.
Was it difficult to find women to talk about this?
“There is a growing community online talking about pleasure and female sexuality,” she says.
“However, this is more a younger generation. There’s less shame talking about sexuality – the biology part of it, like menstruation. But women still giggle and cover their faces with their fans when talking about the emotional and psychological part, like initiating sex to satisfy your sex drive”.
Santos says the team has this very act on tape; “a woman covering her face with her fan when I asked her who was going to start the honeymoon”.
The production team unearthed more than a few surprises in developing the series.
For instance, Santos says, the discovery that there are standard Filipino words for parts of the anatomy like clitoris, i.e. tinggil.
“We normally say the English words for body parts because it is considered more polite. But it made me think of how that is also based on how colonialisation has made us think of our own language as inferior and vulgar.”
In addition, she adds, “I could not find a model of a clitoris – not even a plushie toy like the ones available in Europe and the U.S.”
She eventually found one from a professor friend whose engineering students made one using a 3-D printer.
The third surprise from the development process was how the discovery of the obsession in Asia with skin whitening has extended to whitening the vulva and genitalia in the Philippines.
“That was our first episode where we featured soaps and lotions that whiten and tighten the vulva/hymen,” she says, adding: “My god, it’s my vulva, not my face!”
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