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”

Mad men and mermaids

ROUTINES play a big role in barbershops. When schools open, nearly everyone who walks in sits for a clean cut: ears in the open, hairline clear off the top of the collar.

In summer, the walk-ins invariably ask for the bald-as-a-billiard-ball look. In our “suki barberohan” near the old Mandaue City public market, nearly everyone who walks in often walks out looking alike. You could rob a bank or own it: for P35, you got the same look.

There are exceptions.

After spending months in a city I’ve not grown fond of, I see my sons’ barber to lose unwanted hair as soon as I’m back in the city of my birth.

Why pay more for the same cut in a “beauty salon”? Instead of fashion magazines and showbiz gossip, I get back issues of tabloids, commentary about local politics or boxing (two topics our barber is a specialist on), and a spine-tingling neck-and-back massage capping a trim. Only P35, tipping optional.

The best part about going to a barbershop are the opportunities for watching men. Perhaps less majestic than the whaleshark but even more mysterious is the gender that I spend much of my adult life with (I have three men in my life: two sons and a husband).

Stereotypes hardly do them justice. Just the other day, I was submitting to our barber’s scissors and political predictions when two men in sawed-off sleeveless shirts, denim shorts that have yet to be tamed by soap and water, and serious silver jewelry walked in with a delicate-looking tyke.

The barber on my left whipped out a small box and placed it on top of the seat. In malls are grooming dens specializing on stress-free kiddie haircuts. Instead of the red upholstered seats that look like the ones that shoot killing voltage into convicts are miniature planes, racing cars and submarines with enough gadgets to lure a tot into having his or her first haircut.

In these cheerful cubicles, the barbers or hairdressers must have advanced degrees in psychology or, at the very least, crowd control. Ensuring that the tot doesn’t burst a fuse when a snippet of hair is trimmed is an entourage of relatives, usually female, cooing, cajoling and bribing the minor to at least walk away from a session without a haircut that would not look bizarre on an alien.

Not a word was wasted as the two aging he-men nodded to the barber, barber nodded back, and the tyke was hoisted on the kiddie seat. One of the burly escorts, who had a thick dogcollar lacking a leash, barked just as the barber was about to apply an electric shaver on the boy’s tresses: “Dili na sad semi-opao. Tapered kuno (not the usual shave, tapered this time).”

Dogcollar turned out to be the grandfather. A much worried one, harassed that his grandson tried to cut his own hair, leaving a near bald spot on one side. The remedy, proposed by his “apo (grandson)”: longer hair at the top and sides, tapering to the nape. Should cover the “mistake” and leave enough bangs to “style”.

All eyes in the barbershop swiveled to Dogcollar, who sheepishly said he was just repeating his grandson’s choice. Then, half-reluctantly, half-proudly, Dogcollar blurted: he wants to open his own salon.

This made the barbers instantly joke and clamor to be hired by the young entrepreneur, who was silent, staring at the reflection of the scissors moving over his head. The other escort paused in his reading of a tabloid to comment: Is that what you want to be: a businessman or a mermaid?

I wondered about the choice of word: why “salon,” not a “barbershop”? In the latter is space for barbers with minds and mouths as sharp as scissors; no space perhaps for that in the former, which can fit hairdressers, cosmetologists and all genders, including queer.

An hour later, the barber laid down the scissors. Dogcollar and fellow macho made the manly version of fussing, still joking about the grandson’s definite dreams and undefined gender.

The tot, whom I had never heard speak the entire time, watched as the barber styled his bangs by combing up and flipping back. When he finally got down and faced Dogcollar and fellow macho, there was no sight of the telltale bald spot.

“Guapa (beautiful)” was all Dogcollar could splutter.


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 30, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Studs and Stripes

YOU don’t have to own cattle to be interested in stud watching.

Last Monday, while waiting in line at banks, I had my first sighting of one in the Nov. 6, 2006 copy of Time I was browsing.

Predicting who will prevail in the fantasy and adventure “Survivor” sweepstakes, the newsmagazine singled out Yul Kwon, described as “smart and studly (italics mine).”

When did word merchants let the stud out of the pen to propagate an adjectival offspring?

After checking out Kwon’s photo though, I agree that, except for the dimples, there’s nothing in the man’s construction that would not be coveted by a bull about to service a pen full of mooning cows.

A stud, according to The American Heritage^® Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth Edition, 2000), is an animal for breeding. A well-developed physique and a clear sense of one’s predominance in the circle of life are prerequisites to join the Stud Club.

But, like some misbehaving scions, studly exhibits non-endearing qualities that can’t be traced to the root word but on context.

In the same Time issue, studly appears again in Richard Corliss’ review of Patricia Foulkroud’s “The Ground Truth.”

The documentary shows how young Americans are seduced into joining the military because of its “seemingly studly glamour.”

One soldier’s brainwashing began in high school when he saw the Marines: “I was like, that’s it! They’re mean, they’re tough, they got cool uniforms, and chicks dig ‘em.”

Corliss’s use of studly hints of artifice and deception. Strength is not just the prowess to spawn but also to destroy and conquer, or “keep the peace” through invasion and occupation.

What makes one studly spectacle more viewable than the other?

Footages of war, carnage and atrocities make good TV news. Unless you’re a student of animal husbandry, a habit of watching rutting pigs or humping dogs is borderline, if not pornographic.

That one version of studly is packaged as heroic while the other is bestial surely requires a drafting of word use, such as the Rules on Stud.

Last Nov. 8, when websites first reported the overwhelming victory of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, my idea for studly protocols was reinforced.

The Democrat takeover, ending 12 years of Republican rule, has been seen as a rejection of President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

Unhappiness over the bloodshed, ambivalence over the invasion and interference, impatience for a conclusion to a war that has dragged on for four years—media point these as the reason why American voters booted out the Republicans in all regions (conservative, liberal and moderate) and districts (urban, rural and suburban).

The victorious, aside from the Democrats, also included independents, moderates and suburban women.

For someone who was so “steadfast” in “staying on the course (of war)” or “constantly changing tactics to meet the situation on the ground,” Bush has not had the distinction of being described by Time as studly.

But if, years after 9/11, the man decides the legacy of that day of infamy is dialogue, human rights and trade, not hatred and war, I will be first to draft him for perpetual membership in the Hall of Stud.

(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/mayette.tabada@gmail.com/0917-3226131)

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Nov. 12, 2006 issue