All is fair in love and war.

Or it it?







In the blistering heat of a conflict, SOMEONE brought up my sex life. Uh, I mean my EX sex life, because boy have I been celibate for years.













Anyone, oh, anyone who has known me for the past decade will know that I have always lacked child care support, I have lugged my daughter around with me to interviews, to coverage, while putting newspapers to bed…So anything in my life frivolous, juicy, delicious or hot enough to be worthy of gossip, has to have happened a really long, long time ago.







But according to someone, I’m a “moral threat” to family and society.  Wow. This is not the first time I’ve been punished for having a sexuality. Makes me wonder why God created that little piece of  nerves down there ... was it meant to become like my appendix?




ALL this hullabaloo over humping and similar matters brought to fore the hypocrisy of Philippine society when it comes to sexuality. All these uptight sexual mores – especially among the middle class -- but in reality, heck, we’re 80+ million Pinoys and growing at a rate of 2+percent. Somebody’s gotta be getting it every minute. You do the math.







Pinoy’s concept of being a woman seems so outdated – almost like it stopped at 1898. It’s either you’re Ilaw ng Tahanan (The Light of the Home) – the ever-martyric mother who keeps the hearth, cries and suffers in silence, or Dragon Lady for women who get into power , or Tandang Sora, or Maria Clara (http://www.ladygadfly.com/blog/?p=192), or… a slut.







The ideal Pinay is powerless and sexless. And always puts herself last.







Makes me think that the Spanish friars who first came were actually shocked and threatened by our tropical sexuality so they proceeded to vigorously wipe it out and make Pinoys ashamed of it. After all, those bulitas (penile implants) were so common in prehispanic Philippines, read the historian William Henry Scott. His source couldn’t be any more objective – dictionaries of Tagalog terms collected by the first Spanish priests as they tried to communicate with those they sought to evangelize.







You can be a Viva Hot Babe, or a Margarita Lebumfacil Romualdez, or a Mareng Winnie Monsod, or a Cory Aquino. But no no no, not all of the above. If you have brains, you’re sexless. If you have any sort of sexual passion in you, you’re Viva Hot Babe.







And where men are concerned, the Pinoy husband goes home to his “clean” wife who does the dishes, keeps the home, takes care of the kids, and goes to the beerhouse if he wants something any racier than what he gets at home.  As my friends, college-educated, A-student, young Filipinas in their 20s, say – Why can’t the hubby just do that same things to the wife?!







And even where writers are concerned, Fiipina writers (in English) are so damned sanitized. Where’s the Filipina Erica Jong? Or playful Pinay Rimbaud? Or the female Dante full of gusto for life and all its offerings? Or the Filipino version of Shanghai Baby? Even Forbidden Fruit, the erotic book by women in the 1990s was a collection of careful offerings.







TWAS this kind of society that has forced me into frigidity for the past years. At 28, I realized that I had something important to say; I had my own voice as a writer and an advocate, but at some point I realized I wouldn’t be listened to or taken seriously if I kept on as the free spirit that I was.







So I just stopped being a sexual being. Cold turkey. Just like I quit smoking.







Now, 10 years later, I realize that this was tantamount to female circumcision.







I had this conversation of this sort once with my prettier and braver cousin, Marionne, who has always been brave about being on the edge, doing in-your-face things that have made our clan frown or squirm. Marionne, by the way, is also a mother and a Scrabble champion many times over.

"There is no Ibaloi word for vixen,” she mused. Neither is there a word for salacious, wanton, bawdy, sensual.













Or, as my friend Christian notes, sex in the country was seen  more as something that people HAD to do (propagate), rather than something that people would want to do.







I also found out once from my uncle that the punishment for the erring Ibaloi woman – banishment from the tribe – which, in early days was almost the same as death.







Enough of this now.  Just click on the links and make your own conclusions. And for my dear friend who dragged out the sexual skeletons from the closet, these images are dedicated to you.  Here's wishing you the best humping for the rest of your life!

 

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/01/20/magazine/20080120_CIRCUMCISION_SLIDESHOW_index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_Greer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_de_Beauvoir

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/08/18/IN237263.DTL

It's still Women's Month, as far as I'm concerned...

...............................

Here's an interview of Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard by Ruby Washington/The New York Times; published: July 4, 2006.

If a list were made of the great biologists of the past 100 years, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard would certainly be on it.

In the 1980s, she and Eric F. Wieschaus solved one of the central mysteries of life: how the genes in a fertilized egg direct the formation of an embryo. For their discovery, Dr. Nüsslein-Volhard, Dr. Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Dr. Nüsslein-Volhard was just the 10th woman to win a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences.

Now 63, she directs the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany. In her off-hours, she works to improve the status of women in science.

With her own money and a $100,000 award from Unesco-L'Oréal's Women in Science Program, she has organized the Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Foundation, which offers grants to young female scientists for baby sitters and household help.

Dr. Nüsslein-Volhard was in New York last month to talk about her Kales Press book "Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development ."

Q. Grants for baby sitters and housecleaners? Is this the kind of foundation a male Nobel Prize winner could have thought of?

A. No one thought of it! (Laughs) Not even non-Nobel prize winners!
I am often asked why there is discrimination against women in science. And I have given it some thought. With prejudicial attitudes, you can't really do much. You can point out when people discriminate and ask them not to. At the Max Planck Institute, we made a little pamphlet telling the men when they do it, because they often don't know.

In German science, we have a special problem. We lose talented women at the time they get pregnant. Some of it occurs because they are encouraged — by their husbands, bosses and the government — to take long maternity leaves.

Germanic thinking has it that children can only be properly brought up if the actual mother is cleaning and picking up. Many stop their research for two or three years. Later, these young women find it difficult to get back. They drop out.

Q. And how does a $400-a-month grant plug a brain drain?

A. We try to find the gifted ones, where it would be a real pity if they dropped out. We say: use these funds to buy yourself time away from household matters. We still expect they'll work full-time and get day care for the kids. This is meant to ease the extra workload they have because of children.

Q. Did you experience gender bias when you were a student?

A. I didn't have children. But when I finished my doctoral thesis, it was published and I was only listed as the second author. The boss at the laboratory where I worked said: "Let this man be first author. He started the project and has family, and he needs his career."
I had done almost all the work. And yet, I agreed! I could still foam: I get so angry about it.

Q. Did you foam last year when Lawrence Summers, then the president of Harvard, suggested that women were less likely to have "an intrinsic aptitude" for scientific careers?

A. He missed the point. In mathematics and science, there is no difference in the intelligence of men and women. The difference in genes between men and women is simply the Y chromosome, which has nothing to do with intelligence.

What troubles me is that some might think: "Well, if the president of Harvard says this, it must be true. He's just being attacked because he said something politically incorrect." What Summers said was scientifically incorrect.

Q. When you made your Nobel discovery, was there a moment when you felt: "Aha, I have changed what humans know about nature?"

A. At the time we did the experiments, Eric Wieschaus and I knew the work was important. Nonetheless, one always struggles with whether the experiment is right.

Q. Can you describe your Nobel experiments in lay terms?

A. We first bred a large number of fruit fly families where just one gene was absent. If an embryo did not develop a head or a gut, we could then say, "This gene is important for the shape of a head or a gut." In our first published paper, we described 20 or so "control genes" affecting the subdivision of the embryo's body into regions. Using what were then newly developed technologies, we and others then isolated the genes.
We figured out what they did biochemically and how they interacted.

The sum was: We developed a detailed understanding of how an embryo's shape is determined by genes. We found many of these genes were similar to those implicated in human genetic diseases. This was not anticipated by us but was important for the Nobel Prize, I think.

Q. Your country is being led by a Ph.D. physicist. Do you think Chancellor Angela Merkel's election has improved the status of German women in science?

A. It might be of influence. I am happy that she is there because she understands science outside of ideology. In the Green Party and among some in the Socialist Party, there are people who are anti-science. They are against genetically modified foods and atomic energy. She sees through it, and maybe this will help.
Another thing, we have since 1990 this Embryo Protection Law, which says that eggs are human beings from the time of fertilization. Cells in a Petri dish are considered the same as a full human!

Q. Is Germany's embryo-protection law a reaction to the pseudo-science of the Nazi period when physicians performed experiments on concentration camp prisoners?

A. It's probably the reason why German research laws are so restrictive — just to be on the "safe" side. If the people don't understand stem cells or gene diagnosis, they say, "Let's make laws that make it impossible that something bad can happen."

Q. You were born in 1942. Did you ever speak with your parents about their activities in the Nazi years?

A. Nearly everyone in my age group had those conversations with their teachers — though often the parents would not speak about it. In my family, we talked. They were not heroes, but it was O.K. They were not in the Nazi Party. My grandfather was dismissed from his job because he was not in the party. Also, he hid Jews. And one aunt was put in a concentration camp.

One of my colleagues is a nephew of Dietrich Bonhoeffer [the anti- Hitler resistance leader]. What we observed, with consternation, is the way people tried to live normal lives.

When you read letters between my mother and father while he was at the front, it's about where to get food and knitting a pullover for "Little Janni." After the war, my mother was in a group of women with Emmi Bonhoeffer [Bonhoeffer's sister-in-law].
They helped refugees from Auschwitz give testimony against those who ran the concentration camps. My mother told us there were things from that time she felt awful about and she had to do some good.

Q. It's often said that artistic work and scientific inquiry are similar. Do you find it so?

A. Yes and no. It is certainly a creative act to understand phenomena in nature. But after some time, scientific discoveries no longer depend on the personality of the scientist. Whoever discovered the double helix, it is true. It doesn't matter whether Watson and Crick discovered it, or Rosalind Franklin. Yet, no matter how much time passes, Mozart is still Mozart.

Q. Every article I've read about you mentions that you bake an incredible chocolate cake. Why is that?

A. It's true! They want to make sure "she's still a woman." There is terrible prejudice against women who are successful. If she's beautiful, she must be stupid. And if a woman is smart, she must be ugly — or nasty. I think it makes some people feel better to learn I bake good chocolate cake.

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caption: Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard in the Hall of Biodiversity at the Museum of Natural History.  Photo copyright of the New York Times.

 

The best thing about this, is that, while it's not original, l received it on the mail from my aunt...ibig sabihin, I'm a phenomenal woman in her eyes. Hehehe.

So here -- something light naman:

..............................................................................

WHY I LOVE MOM

Mom and Dad were watching TV when Mom said, "I'm tired, and it's getting late. I think I'll go to bed"
 
She went to the kitchen to make sandwiches for the next day's lunches.
Rinsed out the popcorn bowls, took meat out of the freezer for supper the following evening, checked the cereal box levels, filled the sugar container, put spoons and bowls on the table and started the coffee pot for brewing the next morning.

She then put some wet clothes in the dryer, put a load of clothes into the washer, ironed a shirt and secured a loose button

She picked up the game pieces left on the table, put the phone back on the charger and put the telephone book into the drawer.

She watered the plants, emptied a wastebasket and hung up a towel to dry.
 
She yawned and stretched and headed for the bedroom. She stopped by the desk and wrote a note to the teacher, counted out some cash for the field trip, and pulled a text book out from hiding under the chair.
 
She signed a birthday card for a friend, addressed and stamped the envelope and wrote a quick note for the grocery store. She put both near her purse.
 
Mom then washed her face with 3 in 1 cleanser, put on her Night solution & age fighting moisturizer, brushed and flossed her teeth and filed her nails.
 
Dad called out, "I thought you were going to bed."
 
"I'm on my way," she said.
 
She put some water into the dog's dish and put the cat outside, then made sure the doors were locked and the patio light was on.
 
She looked in on each of the kids and turned out their bedside lamps and TV's, hung up a shirt, threw some dirty socks into the hamper, and had a brief conversation with the one up still doing homework.

In her own room, she set the alarm; laid out clothing for the next day, straightened up the shoe rack. She added three things to her 6 most important things to do list She said her prayers, and visualized the accomplishment of her goals.
 
About that time, Dad turned off the TV and announced to no one in particular. "I'm going to bed."
 
And he did...without another thought.
 
Anything extraordinary here? Wonder why women live longer...?
 
CAUSE WE ARE MADE FOR THE LONG HAUL..... (and we can't die sooner, we still have things to do!!!!)
 
Send this to five phenomenal women today...they'll love you for it! I just did.
 
THEN, GO TO BED!

By Vinia Datinguinoo
Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism
July 1998

Photo by Luis Liwanag

http://luisliwanag.multiply.com/photos/album/53/Happy_land_Ulingan#4

Bonglo, Bordon, Cebu—JOSEFINA Flores is only 40 years old, but she looks at least a decade older. Thin and gaunt, the mother of six seems in no condition to do even the least of her daily chores at her farm here in this mountain barangay, about 80 kilometers from Cebu City.

But she does them all, and beginning at the crack of dawn until late evening, Josefina is in constant motion. She starts the day with a two-kilometer trek to fetch water, and continues on to cooking meals, gathering and selling firewood, making charcoal, cleaning the house, looking after the children and her husband, and seeing to it that everyone in the family has something to eat.

Of all her chores, it is the last that Josefina is finding hardest to do these days. Hunger is a familiar feeling in Bongdo-a community of nearly 400 families-as it is in many other poor farming communities elsewhere. But in this prolonged season of El Niño, the situation has gone from bad to worse, and there has been even less food here to go around. And the mothers, as usual, are having it toughest.

"Life has been hard," says Josefina in Cebuano. "But there must be something that my husband and children could eat. If there's any left, then that's what I eat."
Every year, the National Nutrition Council declares July as 'Nutrition Month' in the hope that some attention, however short-term, would be given to the kind of diet Filipinos should have. But the annual event seems to have become a mockery in places like Bongdo, where there is almost no food to be had, and where the women are especially unlikely to ever be in good health because of malnutrition, if not sheer hunger.

To be sure, health workers would be hard pressed in finding any Bongdo resident-male or female-in sound health today. After all, Bongdo is among the areas that have been declared to be in a state of calamity by the Cebu Sangguniang Panglungsod because of the drought, and people here now count themselves lucky if they had at least corn lugaw to eat.

But it is the mothers who have it worst, because, say nutrition experts, "culture" dictates that they eat last-and often risk eating nothing at all.

This is a practice not unique to Bongdo. "Kung isda ang ulam, yung pinaghimayan niyan na halos tinik na lang, yun ang sa nanay (If the viand is fish, then the mother usually gets to eat whatever is left clinging on the bones)," says nutrition anthropologist Catherine Castañeda, who did a 1994 study on how food is distributed in Filipino dining tables.
The explanation goes something like this: The father should have something, because he's the "breadwinner." And the children should have something, too, because they are children. As for the mother, Castañeda notes: "She's the one that is expected to make the sacrifice."

But such a sacrifice exacts a heavy toll on the women's health, making them weaker in the long term.

Women menstruate, get pregnant, lactate, and give birth-activities that take so much out of them that there is need for the women to slow down, space births and eat well in order to regain their lost energy. But before they can even recover from giving birth, women in poor communities often get pregnant all too soon. There is also no slowing down because there is simply too much they have to do. And eating well is out of the question for most of these women.

The result is that anemia, for example, remains a very pronounced health problem among women. The 1993 National Nutrition Survey found that 43 percent of pregnant Filipino women were anemic. This is higher than the 40 percent cut-off set by the World Health Organization for mild and moderate anemia in that population group.
Other nutrient shortfalls among women are being found survey after survey, among them deficiencies in iodine, protein-energy, vitamin A, thiamin, and riboflavin. Goiter, which manifests iodine deficiency, is most prevalent among women than in men, in all age groups.

Experts have said malnutrition makes women susceptible to disease, exacerbates fatigue, and reduces their capacity in the workplace and at home. It is also particularly dangerous for pregnant women.

The irony is that these same women are made almost solely responsible for the health and nutrition of the rest of the family. Says Castañeda, who is with the Food and Nutrition Research Institute (FNRI), which monitors malnutrition in the country: "When you talk of a nutrition program the priority is always the mother and the child. And when you talk of the mother, you talk of the needs of the mother and how they relate to the nutrition of the family." Always, she says, the state of nutrition of children is dependent on the mothers.

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has also said that women are key to guarding children's nutrition, and that ill health in women often translates to not being able to take care of the children properly.

There is even a term nutrition experts use: "maternal time allocation," which measures the time a mother spends on her duties that include work, child care and child feeding. As for the fathers, Castañeda says, "walang pakialam iyan (they couldn't care less)."
She does say, though, that fathers are now attending government-sponsored "mother's classes," where they are lectured on their role in caring for their children. That's why, she says, there are now fathers sharing the burden of monitoring the children's nutrition and general well being, though still "the exception more than the rule."

Such lectures may also be lacking in listeners today in places like this farmingcommunity, where people would much rather spend their time looking for food than discussing balanced diets. What had been a three-month dry season has stretched drastically to the current nine-and still counting-and people can now see clear across fields where rows and rows of corn stalks had once obstructed their view.

"Dakong kausaban (There's a very big difference)," says Pelagia Olivares, 45, when asked if life has been the same after El Niño. And she does not just speak of the springs drying up, making them hike longer trails to find other sources of water.

Before El Niño struck, her family could afford a ganta of corn for every meal, says Minda Arnado of Bili, also here in Borbon. But these days, they are down to five gantas per week. "Wala na mamunga," she says, "walay lubi, kamote, saging."

The lowly corn lugaw has become the staple for families here. On very bad days, they make do with malunggay, boiled in water with salt. On worse days, there is only salt. Mothers have also taken to making coffee out of corn grits to replace milk for the infants.

"It's pitiful if it goes on," comments Castañeda. "Making infants take coffee made of corn grits could be tantamount to neglect." She also says a prolonged lugaw diet can have disastrous results, quipping, "Kung puro lugaw ang kinakain, magiging utak-lugaw yan (If all they have is porridge, they'll have porridge for brains)."

White corn, which Bongdo residents use for their lugaw, is an energy-giving food. It does not contain vitamin A, which the yellow corn variety has, but it does have carbohydrates. A balanced, proper diet, however, requires much more than carbohydrates almost every meal. Other nutrients are needed to keep the body functioning normally. (The FNRI has drawn up the recommended dietary allowances for these nutrients; the RDA is different for different age groups.)

Especially for growing children under seven and pregnant and lactating women, the effects of inadequate diet could be long-term and irreversible. Malnourished pregnant women give birth to underweight infants. Iodine-deficient mothers, in particular, suffer frequent miscarriages, still births and early infant deaths. For their babies who do survive, the chances are high that they will be born deformed, mentally retarded or even complete cretins.

Read the second part at:
http://www.pcij.org/stories/1998/women2.html

 

Women's month series no. 1: Am too busy to write a blog, but posting this as the first of a series of stories -- reprints, blogs, photos, videos -- about women. It's women's month, after all.

By Jackie Wullschlager  

The Financial Times 21st July 2007

 Among world-class female writers, woman as victim has always been a big theme: Jane Austen's Persuasion, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath. There is nothing comparable in painting, because for all sorts of social and economic reasons - chiefly the ease of writing in a room of one's own versus the hazards of male-run art schools and the expenses of setting up a studio - history has produced no great female artists and, indeed, few female artists at all. But now that is changing, and the rise of women painters, film-makers and sculptors is a significant feature of 21st-century culture. Sure enough, just as pioneering women writers had to exorcise the victim-demon as they appropriated traditional male literary genres, so a prime, inevitable topicin the visual arts today is woman as victim.

This is marked among the swathe of female artists at the current Venice Biennale, from Tracey Emin to Sophie Calle. It is also there in the violent images of the female body by hard hitters (and big sellers) Marlene Dumas and Jenny Savile, and it lurks behind the girly curlicues of fashionable painters such as Karen Kilimnik or Elizabeth Peyton. But queen of victim-artists is surely Stella Vine, whose first solo exhibition opened at Modern Art Oxford on Tuesday.

The 38-year-old Vine, who has hung this abundant, chaotic, uneven show of some 100 paintings herself, did not turn up as promised for the press view, but she did not need to. Drip by drip, her life story has seeped into a titillated press over the past few weeks: abused child, runaway teenager, single mum, stripper, actress; then, in 2004, a whiff of notoriety when Charles Saatchi bought her painting of a blotchy, scared, dead-eyed Princess Diana dressed up in a little-girl tiara beseeching her bodyguard, "Hi Paul can you come over I'm really frightened."

http://www.stellavine.com/reviews.htm