Whenever I meet any of those women who treat the woman issue with such seriousness, I usually just smile. I have never felt a personal need to adopt the gender issue as a serious crusade. Many women columnists have taken on gender equality with great passion, devoting column after column to the various issues under the subgroup, taking on the campaign for fairness and equality with men as their life advocacy.
I am afraid I cannot join them in their crusade. I am comfortable in my own skin. I do not think I am unequal with themen. I have always done my best and been allowed to be the best I can be--as me. I don't intend to demand equal opportunities with men in pursuits that do not appeal to the essential me.
I certainly don't want to be the family breadwinner, unless the most drastic of circumstances demand that I be. In which case, as an editor, the inequity will not be between me and a man but between me and a foreigner. I certainly don't want to have to change a flat tire simply because I believe I should be the equal of all male drivers. I don't want the opportunity to be an F1 driver: They can have the experience; let me be the excited, happy spectator. And I certainly want to be able to assume the flaky-woman role in front of a man whenever I want to, totally uncaring whether or not he thinks I am intellectually inferior--better, in fact, if he thinks at first that I am intellectually inferior.
I have never felt a man was unfair to me because I am a woman. If I have ever felt unfairness--and yes, I have felt it many times--it was because I was Filipino (not Filipina), because I was middle-class, because I didn't have enough money, because I preferred not to accept a particular challenge. Also, because I didn't want to stoop down to a certain level or to rise above it.
The gender issue has never been primary to me because there's another issue that will always be more important to me. I grew up with a front-seat view of poverty in the Philippines. From as far back as I can remember, we had gasoline boys and housemaids. From as far back as I can remember, we had millionaire relatives and wealthy, wealthy friends. Even now, I don't look at them all and segregate them into unequal men and unequal women. I look at them all and see unequal people.
____________________
Editorial, The Evening Paper
Issue of 25 August 1995
A star witness taking French leave for a breath of fresh air. A troubled housewife flying over the EDSA-Ortigas interchange. An American wife being warned she may not be woman enough for Beijing because she happens to be US First Lady. And Muslim holy men making noises over the Beijing conference document.
For womanhood, what a life!
But the coming weekend should provide welcome pause to Filipino women as the days bring them closer to the United Nations International Conference on Women and as their own actions afford them the glory of empowerment.
Jessica Alfaro should be the first to savor the sweet taste of woman power. She has had us all--men and women alike--in the grip of a secret more complicated than a Chinese puzzle. She alone (except, she says, for a tabloid columnist, and he only to support) knew why she left her safe quarters at the NBI building; she alone knew why she returned. She will not divulge more, and who are we that she should tell us? She is woman enough to keep her peace and break it only when she desires. How like a woman, indeed, and let no man sneer: Her personality adds its own intriguing chemistry to an event that has held a nation in thrall for four years.
The woman who leapt to her gruesome end gets only a cameo role, a short stint in the sunlight. Still, for the small circle of people touched by her brief and dazzling appearance--those who knew her and those who personally witnessed the finality of her choice against life--the impact can be no less. Again, who has the right to blame anybody, to explain the unexplainable, to damn the dead? The whole mystery has never been one where she has now gone.
What they all force on First Ladies, you wouldn't believe. To demand that Hillary Clinton should not go to an international conference on women (for which she possesses every credential, honors and foibles alike) in sensitivity to the state of Sino-American relations is really the height. A lesson resides there for us who think all that power, prestige, and influence spell freedom. Nobody is more captive, indeed, than she who has all that power, prestige, and influence.
As for a 1,000-year-old bastion of Islam in Egypt, it has certainly closed its doors to the Beijing women's conference. According to the Islamic institution Al-Azhar, the conference aims to create a new kind of life contrary to religious values, and to destroy moral barriers and deeply rooted traditions. Al-Azhar has reiterated that Islam does not discriminate against women. What the effect of such a pronouncement will be on many fundamentalist Muslim women can only be suspected. Will they submit in complete assent, or go to Beijing in dissent?
Who can tell? Each case above partakes of its own dimensions, both human and woman. We want to subscribe to a gender-free world where not even the word gender exists. Yet, women's minds, hearts, and spirits are obviously very different from those of the others.
No wonder Senator Francisco Tatad, hoping to make it in a committee on women, must, in their company, look askance at a world he cannot even start to understand.
-- NBT
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