THE POKEMONS....

When my kids were young, I remember they were big fans of a cult cartoon series of The Pokemons and collected the cards. Remembe them? But if you live in Chile, Pokemons means something entirely different.

The teens call their public orgies ponceo. On a typical Friday afternoon in the Chilean capital of Santiago, hundreds gather in a leafy urban park for a few hours of sexual experimentation. Surrounded by passing strollers, they trade partners multiple times—mostly engaging in anonymous rounds of oral sex. When the party is over, no contact information is exchanged. Same-gender interactions are commonplace, as the lines between hetero- and homosexuality are blurred, partly by the alcohol and drugs consumed, but also by shifting social mores held by Chilean youth, in contrast to their conservative parents. "Ponceo is about having fun," says Natalia Fernandez, a 15-year-old with pink hair and a pierced chin. "This time I had seven partners." Fernandez, like many others in the park, is wearing an anime T-shirt. Drawing inspiration from Japanese anime culture, the teens refer to themselves as "Pokemones."

Now Chile is a conservative and Catholic country so the decadent behaviour of the Pokemons shows what happens when morality is  casually abandoned. The Pokemones do not have a political creed, preferring apathy to engagement. 

"I guess we don't really think about politics or anything," says Valentina Espinosa "We're not for anything, but we're not against anything, either—well, except our parents getting mad at us for being Pokemones."

I know that there has always been teen rebellion, and that is a good thing in the main. But this is something else and on a different scale. It's a display of immorality, a show of no morals and animalistic instant gratification.

Comments

[Tom Tyler]

I was just as shocked as you, David, upon first reading of this....then, when I read a lot of the comments on the linked article (many of which were posted by Chilean teens), well, many of their comments suggested that the newspaper article had been grossly exaggerated, and that, rather than full-scale sex orgies going on in public parks (I had trouble believing that), it was more a case of teenagers doing a bit of kissing and "making out" (as the Americans call it).
Teenagers the world over, being full of fresh hormones, have always been keen to explore a bit of physical contact with the opposite sex (or the same sex, for the minority that way inclined). But teenagers, being also gawky, shy, and full of anxiety about their bodies, are as a rule very unlikely to, erm, expose themselves en-masse in public parks.

If what was reported was really happening as told, then yes, that would be a problem. But somehow I think that it's a case of the editor wanting to shift maximum copies of the paper, as usual.