TO BE born female in this country is to develop a long-term relationship with your holes.
The first holes are sometimes given when a girl has just been born.
The so-called female version of circumcision entails putting a kind of gun against an unsuspecting babe’s head and shooting a stud through each of the pearly pink lobes of the stunned infant.
Doting relatives coo endlessly over christening photos of infants. I’m told that birthstone-studded ears beat a frothy head band in clarifying to one’s large family the exact gender of the youngest addition, specially if she was born with a hairless golf ball of a head.
When a girl is old enough to have a fatal attraction for mini-skirts and the whiplash reactions these extract from male heads, she gets the whole package dumped on her—lectures, sermons and prayers of last resort—about the Hole Down Under.
If she’s smart and observant, a girl will know the chief distinction between her, so far, three holes: the first pair is punctured as soon as possible; the second, only, legally and ideally, after matrimony.
If she finds herself in rebellion with The Rule on the Third, she might discover independence spewing from the fourth hole: her mouth.
In the long, winding interregnum between maidenhood and the final hole in the ground, a woman may be forgiven if she loses sight of her other holes.
After all, in the usual course of life, a woman often has too many things to do to spend a minute just ruminating on the Hole Thing.
If a woman chooses to have a baby, the hole down under becomes from a dark mysterious taboo into a mysterious passage of light, out of which another life will enter into this one.
The complete dependence of another life on her life makes a woman not just see things differently but move entirely apart. If she once covered her breasts chastely or left them half-bared strategically, the nursing mother now regards her twin cones as automatically activated by one hole: the sucking, rooting mouth of her young, imperiously demanding to be fed.
“Teats” is not a politically “in” word. It’s not even a word pornographers use in association with a human.
Yet “teats”—and the imagery of gushing abundance— will cross a woman’s mind when, despite all the oceans of clam soup she has swallowed, her breasts fail to yield even a drop of reddish-stained thin milk for a furious, yelling infant.
During the rooming-in, while the mother is trying to nurse her baby, watched and commented upon and compared by a room full of midwives, nurses and relatives—all female, all wise, all experienced in summoning the flow and squirting milk into generations of gurgling, ecstatic babies—a woman might first experience her first bottomless regret: that instead of puny breasts defined by fashion trends and cup sizes, she had cow udders, dripping with the mysterious miraculous stream that shields her young from nearly everything, from infections to mental retardation.
But as with the others, these holes are programmed for obsolescence. When the children move out and the nest grows cold, these holes are as good as plugged.
Except that she, after spending almost an entire lifetime with holes, finds that the female state of grace is to remain eternally unplugged.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* First published in the July 5, 2009 issue of Sun.Star Cebu’s “Matamata” column
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Goodbye, Joker
WHEN I heard that Michael Jackson died, I thought of that white mask and couldn’t summon any feeling.
When I heard that the King of Pop was 50 when he died, I had to look for the papers to verify what I heard on TV
I’m not a fan, finding him more grotesque in his life—or the bits of it splashed across tabloid pages—than in his “Thriller” made-for-TV video (MTV).
Yet few things can get me lost in the past as the high, clear and dulcet tones of the young Michael of the Jackson 5 singing “Give Love on Christmas Day,” “Ben” and “One Day in Your Life.”
Few things make me cringe as the kitsch of “We are the World” and the sanctimoniousness of “Heal the World.”
His early songs impressed on me the vulnerability and power of innocence.
Yet his strutting and crotch-grabbing, that ludicrous metallic make-believe costume, and notoriety from allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior with boys make me associate that kabuki-white mask with the deviousness of pedophilia.
Knowing how he was terrorized at a very young age by a sadistic and controlling father, remembering how he dangled his infant son over a balcony, reading about his Neverland ranch that drew first the children to its toys, rides and animals and later, dubious sleepovers—he deserved the media moniker of “King of Pop” because, more than other newsmakers, he morphed stories into a kind of hyperreality composed of versions that alluded to but never represented the truth.
Being more shocked that he was 50 when he died than by his dying brings to me the reason why I don’t share in the world’s mourning: enamored with the Joker of the tabloids, I thought the music ended long before it could be despoiled by age and decay.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published first in Sun.Star Cebu's "Matamata" column in its June 29, 2009 issue
When I heard that the King of Pop was 50 when he died, I had to look for the papers to verify what I heard on TV
I’m not a fan, finding him more grotesque in his life—or the bits of it splashed across tabloid pages—than in his “Thriller” made-for-TV video (MTV).
Yet few things can get me lost in the past as the high, clear and dulcet tones of the young Michael of the Jackson 5 singing “Give Love on Christmas Day,” “Ben” and “One Day in Your Life.”
Few things make me cringe as the kitsch of “We are the World” and the sanctimoniousness of “Heal the World.”
His early songs impressed on me the vulnerability and power of innocence.
Yet his strutting and crotch-grabbing, that ludicrous metallic make-believe costume, and notoriety from allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior with boys make me associate that kabuki-white mask with the deviousness of pedophilia.
Knowing how he was terrorized at a very young age by a sadistic and controlling father, remembering how he dangled his infant son over a balcony, reading about his Neverland ranch that drew first the children to its toys, rides and animals and later, dubious sleepovers—he deserved the media moniker of “King of Pop” because, more than other newsmakers, he morphed stories into a kind of hyperreality composed of versions that alluded to but never represented the truth.
Being more shocked that he was 50 when he died than by his dying brings to me the reason why I don’t share in the world’s mourning: enamored with the Joker of the tabloids, I thought the music ended long before it could be despoiled by age and decay.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published first in Sun.Star Cebu's "Matamata" column in its June 29, 2009 issue
The invisible ones
FATHERHOOD must be the only occupation rated at its best in absentia.
Years ago, I entered a warren of inner-city hovels for an assignment. I found enough strange things to think I was in another world: a city made of cardboard scraps and tarpaulin floating above a sea of ooze, a smell that dogged my steps like a mangy canine out for a bone, any bone, even the one my ankle was still attached to.
It was noon. Women with children were preparing lunch. And the men were just stirring.
Of all the oddities, this was by far the most curious: that all these men—young or middle-aged, fit and able—were not at work.
The bourgeois portrait of fatherhood is all about an empty space beside smiling spouse and children. Fathers provide; mothers nurture.
Women have to be everywhere, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, at work, in the PTA. Fathers go off to work; when they come home, they have a license to disappear into a newspaper, TV set or laptop. When children are told not to disturb Dad, it really means that they are not supposed to question the disappearing acts: to retreat to work, to escape from work.
In that city growing above ooze, I rediscovered fathers.
Wondering what kept them sleeping till noon, I let my bourgeois biases color my assumption. What else but the illegal and the covert must drive these men to follow lifestyles in total reversal to the normal and respectable: while others slept, they worked; while others worked, they slept.
But the sleep-deprived can also include a taxi driver on a 24-hour shift or one plying a jeepney route thrice a week. The night watchmen and the dope peddlers: aren’t both providers, with one difference? If one provides for the family, isn’t that already meeting the all-qualifying criterion for fatherhood?
In incest cases, there is a pattern of women becoming blind to a partner abusing a daughter or blaming the daughter for “seducing” the abuser. Such women would rather sacrifice a daughter or two than jeopardize the survival of the whole family, which will happen if the male partner and breadwinner is put in jail.
Absent fathers or growling guts?
Wandering among the hovels, I noticed how few of the children drew near the men. No male arm or knees dandled an infant.
The kids clustered instead around the women, who, because they were busy with chores, either ignored them or swatted them away and harangued them. When the women’s curses faded away, the children drew closer again to the women, who renewed swatting and cursing.
The only ones unbothered by the press of small bodies in that cramped place were the men. They leisurely stretched and scratched several parts of their body. They chewed on toothpicks. They openly stared back at me, a stranger.
Even when some men are at home, they remain invisible. They cannot find their socks. Their children cannot see them.
Yet when a child runs away, or is caught slitting a stranger’s throat, or winds up slitting his own throat, the family case study specialist will often theorize this reason for wildness: an “absent father.”
But isn’t fatherhood an occupation in absentia?
So the case study writer used one adjective too much: fatherhood is an exercise to eradicate the proliferation of “absent” in modern English usage.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s “Matamata” column in its June 21, 2009 issue
Years ago, I entered a warren of inner-city hovels for an assignment. I found enough strange things to think I was in another world: a city made of cardboard scraps and tarpaulin floating above a sea of ooze, a smell that dogged my steps like a mangy canine out for a bone, any bone, even the one my ankle was still attached to.
It was noon. Women with children were preparing lunch. And the men were just stirring.
Of all the oddities, this was by far the most curious: that all these men—young or middle-aged, fit and able—were not at work.
The bourgeois portrait of fatherhood is all about an empty space beside smiling spouse and children. Fathers provide; mothers nurture.
Women have to be everywhere, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, at work, in the PTA. Fathers go off to work; when they come home, they have a license to disappear into a newspaper, TV set or laptop. When children are told not to disturb Dad, it really means that they are not supposed to question the disappearing acts: to retreat to work, to escape from work.
In that city growing above ooze, I rediscovered fathers.
Wondering what kept them sleeping till noon, I let my bourgeois biases color my assumption. What else but the illegal and the covert must drive these men to follow lifestyles in total reversal to the normal and respectable: while others slept, they worked; while others worked, they slept.
But the sleep-deprived can also include a taxi driver on a 24-hour shift or one plying a jeepney route thrice a week. The night watchmen and the dope peddlers: aren’t both providers, with one difference? If one provides for the family, isn’t that already meeting the all-qualifying criterion for fatherhood?
In incest cases, there is a pattern of women becoming blind to a partner abusing a daughter or blaming the daughter for “seducing” the abuser. Such women would rather sacrifice a daughter or two than jeopardize the survival of the whole family, which will happen if the male partner and breadwinner is put in jail.
Absent fathers or growling guts?
Wandering among the hovels, I noticed how few of the children drew near the men. No male arm or knees dandled an infant.
The kids clustered instead around the women, who, because they were busy with chores, either ignored them or swatted them away and harangued them. When the women’s curses faded away, the children drew closer again to the women, who renewed swatting and cursing.
The only ones unbothered by the press of small bodies in that cramped place were the men. They leisurely stretched and scratched several parts of their body. They chewed on toothpicks. They openly stared back at me, a stranger.
Even when some men are at home, they remain invisible. They cannot find their socks. Their children cannot see them.
Yet when a child runs away, or is caught slitting a stranger’s throat, or winds up slitting his own throat, the family case study specialist will often theorize this reason for wildness: an “absent father.”
But isn’t fatherhood an occupation in absentia?
So the case study writer used one adjective too much: fatherhood is an exercise to eradicate the proliferation of “absent” in modern English usage.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s “Matamata” column in its June 21, 2009 issue
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