I am Leila

THE YOUNG woman was distraught. She had been looking forward to celebrating with her friends. Then her father fired several bristling questions: Why? When? Where? With whom?

To seal that disastrous day, she ran into a particular young man just when her eyes were puffy from crying.

She had not seen him in campus for days. Then they walked into each other just as the covered walk was deserted. There was not even a scrap of poster she could pretend to read as he passed her, oblivious.

Why do men bookend our disasters?

My student’s rollercoaster Friday channeled my thoughts to misogyny. A parent’s concern and young love’s throes hardly manifest the deep-seated, even unconscious, contempt against women.

Yet, men socialize women: fathers, brothers, playmates, classmates, lovers, spouse.

Not to mention the usual suspects: the construction worker, the president, the troll and their rape jokes.

The catcalling variety of misogyny may have lost much of its novelty. It has swaggered from the streets and dunghills to straddle Malacañang and the once hallowed hall of Senate.

The first 100 days of this administration has ushered the most maddening honeymoon between President Duterte and Filipinas, 28 million of whom comprised 52 percent of the 54.4 million voters who turned out in May 2016.

We bristled and seethed as the president and his men made a new twist of the old carrot-and-stick approach with Vice President (VP) Leni Robredo.

First, he shut her out of his Cabinet, saying he was “non-committal” about Robredo, elected by 14,418,817 voters, because he did not want to hurt the feelings of his good friend, defeated rival Sen. Bongbong Marcos.

Then, after he “courted” her into heading the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council (HUDCC), we had to read his nauseating “compliments” to the “beauteous” vice-president.

“You won't listen to a female president, you will just stare at her because she's beautiful,” said the president, who has told journalists he often gazes at Robredo during Cabinet meetings.

President Duterte has defended that he was not patronizing Robredo, a vocal critic of extrajudicial killings and the president’s move to give the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos a hero’s burial.

Misconceived as hatred of women, misogyny can be disguised as the idolatry of “women as divine creatures.”

“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person,” wrote Dorothy L. Sayers in her essay, “Are Women Human?”

For other women, though, who don’t fit into the president’s mold of "lady-like and kind" paragons of femininity, the prince will readily turn himself into a frog.

In his brutal, relentless public destruction of Sen. Leila de Lima, the president has pulled out all the stops. He has even used standard English, for once eschewing his colonial curses.

An “immoral woman”. The greatest English monarch, Elizabeth I had been called “diseased,” “deformed,” a “man in disguise,” wrote Sayers.

From Elizabeth I to Leni and Leila, slut-shaming is not so much about women going out of control as the desire to control women by men, who are, if they would admit it, afraid of them.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 9, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Mar

THERE were three of us, having a chat after lunch. The three of us discovered we were voting for Mar Roxas, the Liberal Party presidential contender.

Two of us are not yet ready to let others know that Mar is their man.

Even while I argued that going public about our choice may help swing the undecided in his favor, I realized that this is the burr roughing up a campaign that otherwise marshals impressive munitions: the resources of the administration, the political machinery of the ruling Liberal Party, and the old wealth and extensive influence of the Roxas and Araneta clans.

Everything perfect except for the man.

When I was in a hospital lobby on my way to visiting my mother a couple of weeks ago, I saw a “Sale” sign on an Esquire Philippines copy displayed in the newspaper and magazine stand.
The November 2014 issue featured the Interior and Local Government Secretary, sitting on a pile of lumber, smiling and waving a hand at the person snapping his photo. “Hello from Tacloban… one year later,” read the magazine liner beside Mar, a loopy grin plastered on his bared teeth but not quite reaching the eyes behind the spectacles.

Commemorating the first year after Super Typhoon Yolanda, this Esquire PH magazine cover stirred a furor on social media. Many netizens were insulted and furious that the magazine chose Mar for its cover. What did the man do after all? Just bungled the relief and rehabilitation efforts, bringing on more suffering for Yolanda survivors.

I read the magazine from cover to cover. I read thrice the cover story by Boo Chanco, each time more slowly. It wasn’t just because I’m a fan of the writing found inside this magazine’s pages. I kept looking for an article about the man on the cover.

The man didn’t exist in the inside text, the soul and heart and sinew of storytelling. It was as if by using only Mar’s image—the incongruity of that smile in a place where at least 6,000 died and 4 million were displaced—the editors chose photojournalism to express all that had to be said.

Like my two colleagues, I’m made uneasy by my choice for president on May 9. Aside from Yolanda, there is the Mamasapano debacle, which exposed that Mar didn’t enjoy the confidence of his commander-in-chief and was bypassed for other men.

Yet, after he refused to abandon a beleaguered President Aquino, facing calls for impeachment and public shaming, Mar showed that his inability to make waves applied even when he could have otherwise acted for self-preservation and political survival.

Unlike supporters of Rodrigo Duterte, who hold on to his promises of action and radical change, I vote for Mar because I think what the country needs most is the status quo.
Voting for Mar means risking a leadership that is vulnerable to reprising another Yolanda or Mamasapano scale of mishandling.

Balancing this risk is the near certainty that the gains earned during the Aquino administration are consolidated and sustained: accountability, the fight against corruption.

The political future of running mate Leni Robredo is hinged on Mar’s victory on May 9. Leni, with her track record of working with the poor, women and other marginalized sectors, will infuse inclusiveness in an economic agenda that benefits the middle class and the elite.
For his better half, I vote for Mar.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 322 6131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s March 20, 2016 issue of “Matamata,” the Sunday editorial-page column

Leni

IS there a women’s vote?

Proclamation No. 227, series 1998, recognizes “Women’s Role in History” in March. This year, the theme for Women’s Month is “Kapakanan ni Juana, Isama sa Agenda”.

The challenge to include the welfare of women in the agenda for governance has set my choices for the May 9 poll. The welfare of women and children is not among the 10 issues listed by the Philippine Daily Inquirer as national priorities that should guide voters in selecting the next Philippine president.

However, a re-examination of the Inquirer’s agenda for the 2016 election reveals that women’s welfare is embedded in all issues. Poverty, which tops the list, is rooted in inequality, according to studies cited by the paper.

While others argue that women are also part of national concerns and dismiss singling out this sector, I contend that this perception also contributes to the problem of marginalizing women.

If victims have a gender, it would be female. In poor families, they are beasts of burden, sexual slaves without rights to their bodies, and victims of domestic abuse.

Saddled with children and less education and opportunities, many women are sidelined by men in the competition for jobs, livelihood, and security.

Society expects women not only to survive but also to provide for their children’s upbringing, education, nutrition, health, and safety. Society makes excuses for men, and dumps all the blame on women.

When peace and order break down, traffic congests, and predators prowl the Net, who are the most vulnerable? Women and children.

So why should the welfare of women be assumed and taken for granted in national development when social ills put women and their children at the top of the list of victims?

As early as October 5, 2015, when she accepted to run with the Liberal Party standard-bearer Mar Roxas, I already voted in my mind for Leni Robredo.

Of all the contenders for the top posts—of the vice-presidency, as well as the presidency—she alone has the integrity. For more than a decade, she worked with the Public Attorneys’ Office, the Naga chapter of Sentro ng Alternatibong Lingap Pang Legal (Saligan), the Lakas ng Kababaihan ng Naga, the Naga City Council for Women, and the Federacion International de Abogado.
Through alternative lawyering, she served the powerless: farmers, women and children.

After graduating from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, she returned home to Naga. She was shortlisted as a presiding judge for any of the three regional trial courts in the Bicol region when she was thrust into the limelight by the accidental death in 2012 of her husband, former Naga City mayor and interior secretary Jesse Robredo.

Her public and personal life meshes in her campaign agenda of zero hunger, shared prosperity and gender equality. If Leni served then in anonymity, with few resources, and no political backers, imagine her potentials and opportunities as vice-president. Leni’s “tsinelas” advocacy deserves to be spread throughout the country.

Two of the five presidential contenders are women. Neither Grace Poe nor Miriam Defensor-Santiago will get my vote.

More than anything, I question these women’s choice of vice-presidential running mate. For choosing Bongbong Marcos—who compounds the sins of his parents with his historical lies and lack of atonement for the past—shame, shame, shame, Miriam.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)



*First published in the March 6, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column of Sun.Star Cebu, “Matamata”