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I have nothing but love for Charice. No, I am no fan really, but I find it infinitely interesting when popular culture icons give their mass audience the unexpected or taboo, or something difficult to talk about, something against what we know to be proper or consider as important.
there is no doubt in my mind that joking about the rape of a woman is a no-no, which is like joking that you will kill a faggot. these are black and white, they are premised on gender discrimination, these are violent thoughts we do not think, and do not think to articulate when we actually do think about them out of anger or spite. and yet i get it, too, that really fantastic comedy, the kind that’s intelligent enough to… Continue reading »
which is to say what exactly? that she is honest about her earnings? well you see, she has no choice but to be honest, seeing as she likes to display her wealth, talking about it on TV, mentioning it in her interviews, if not using it for the pages of her very own magazine. if you were Kris Aquino, you would have no choice but to pay your taxes. you display your wealth like that, you earn from your life in this way,… Continue reading »
We’ve always known Kris Aquino to be shameless. And no, to me this didn’t start with her wanting to join show business, neither was it about the fact that her mother’s presidency was riddled with her love affairs with “wrong” men, with a couple even fighting it out in Malacañang, no less. To me, the shamelessness began in 2003, September to be exact, when Yes Magazine featured this ex-presidential daughter as nothing but her clothes, her make-up, as nothing but… Continue reading »
It was difficult to celebrate Women’s Month at a time when the Pinay remains under attack, even when she’d like to think otherwise. To me it happens on the level of a beauty industry that has standardized what it is we mean by beautiful, as it does happen on the level of a Catholic Church that continues to take a stand against the Reproductive Health Law, after we have fought for it for 14 years. Scientific and common sense would… Continue reading »
In January, the Department of Tourism (DOT) celebrated the 6.09% rise in the number of tourists to the Philippines. That’s 25,000 more people who have come to visit this country where everything’s more fun. That’s 436,079 tourists who landed in good ol’ Pinas in January alone. It gives me goosebumps. Far from the good kind. Because it would take an amount of delusion to think this all good, and only the naïve would think those numbers equal to development or… Continue reading »
Making Lemonade There is a romance that we like to imagine about writing, and especially the writing of a book. And while my rebellious self would like to tell you that this was not the case for Of Love and Other Lemons, that would be a lie. Certainly it came from a personal history of love and loss and sadness, complete with the high – if not OA – drama of buckets of tears. But the writing of this book… Continue reading »
it was literature that taught me about the objectification of women. no, it was philippine literature that taught me about the oppression of the Filipina, the kind that objectifies her, makes her into nothing but image, nothing but stereotype. half-naked if not totally so. skin and leg and boobs and butt. image not voice. body not thought. and just in case everyone thought this witty and funny, and thought nothing of the layers of this image we’ve used to sell… Continue reading »
Project Stitch puts the Filipino woman worker at the forefront of changing her own impoverished life and gives an entrepreneurial bent to the task of struggle. it will allow for women in poor communities in Manila to engage in sewing cooperatives, that will work toward a sustainable and just livelihood for women. most important? i trust the women who are behind this project. i would trust them with my life, in fact. Project Stitch is the only Filipina project in the… Continue reading »
Lest Bayo think that a short three-sentence apology from its vice president is enough. Lest Bayo imagines that a flurry of memes is good publicity still. Lest they are ready to milk the noise that has surrounded this “What’s your mix?” campaign for all its worth and spin it by having these five girls Jasmine, Ana, Nikita, Margo and Kharu talk about how Filipino they are, or how much they love that percentage of them that’s Pinay. Lest Bayo thinks… Continue reading »
Oh yes, it’s as macho as it sounds. And that’s also what informs the anti-Claudine rhetoric that’s on the interwebs, i.e., Twitter and Facebook. So in a fistfight that began between two men, the backlash has been on the one woman in the story; and while it’s been fascinating watching Raymart and Mon Tulfo going at it on television, the backlash has been more strongly against the woman.
March is International Women’s Month and March 8 is Women’s Day. It’s the perfect time to kick-off The Be Cause. This is a tiny project that I’ve been wanting to launch as a way of dealing with contemporary women’s issues, central to which can only be the images of womanhood that we’re bombarded with everyday. It isn’t just that these images are false – if not impossible – for a majority of us; it’s also that this has normalized superficiality in… Continue reading »
this piece went up yesterday on that horrid cover for March that FHM Philippines was set on putting out. which it has pulled out, announced via that official statement posted on their website. that might be a success, but seriously? why is that official statement not a public apology? it needed to be an admission of having made a mistake, full stop.
brought Angela to Love Loss and What I Wore, the local staging of a Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron original. mixed reviews in the US, but an interesting enough text owing to this third world Pinay’s class consciousness. and Bituin Escalante and Menchu Lauchengco-Yulo are equally brilliant in it. go see it, bring your mothers and girlfriends. will only run until Jan 22! :) saw it last year, and did this review. Five women in all black outfits, mostly in the same… Continue reading »
or let’s begin 2012 by talking about oppression, shall we? My issue with self-help books is that they are mostly American. And anyone who lives off of the Philippines’ contradictions and silences, crises and sadnesses would know that not much of American self-help applies to the every Pinay. The 11 stupid things women do by Veronica Pulumbarit, based on the book by Dr. Laura Schlessinger Ten Stupid Things Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives among other sources, reeks of a… Continue reading »
The Church and reproductive health by Juan Miguel Luz When RH is portrayed as a great evil and when women and men who choose to pursue RH measures, notably contraception, are deemed to be sinners by Church leaders, this is neither fair nor informed. The greater sin would be to bring any number of children into a world of poverty.When parents do so with no means to provide adequately for them nor provide them a chance at a decent quality… Continue reading »
in April 2000, Prof. Luisa Mallari-Hall died in a plane crash, along with her husband and two children. she was a wonderful woman/teacher/friend/human being whose teaching continues to resonate with me, 15 years since she was first my teacher in 1996. these two essays were written soon after she died, the first one for a SEA newsletter, the second one i read at the tribute put together by the DECL in U.P. in 2010, i give birth and lose a… Continue reading »
Let it be said that Superstar Nora Aunor’s comeback is by all counts a success, if we are to measure it not by media mileage or product endorsements, not by tell-all interviews in every darn showbiz talk show or by grand statements about home being where the heart is. Ate Guy’s return has been about none of this and that is precisely a measure of this comeback’s success. Because would she be the unbeatable popular culture icon that she is,… Continue reading »
had an infinitely emotional conversation with this non-fiction narrative of a review of Ang Sayaw ng Dalawang Kaliwang Paa. The teacher of literature, Karen (Jean Garcia), is enigmatic for a reason, but effective like every literature teacher should be. She reads poetry and it comes alive, she asks questions about it with certainty. She is unsurprised by any of her students’ assertions, even as these are necessarily about sexuality and desire, love and intimacy, the act of gazing. Even as… Continue reading »
on Temptation Island 2.0 It might have been the more apt title, actually, for the benefit of those who are so strict about originals and remakes, and imagine faithfulness to be about keeping to the level of copy. But there’s no crossing the same river twice, and it’s a foregone conclusion that every remake is a retelling, every retelling a different story altogether. And so the question for Chris Martinez’s remake of Joey Gosiengfiao’s 1981 Temptation Island (Regal Films and GMA… Continue reading »