What Every Filipino Boy Should Know About Filipino Women

What have you been told about Filipino women? And how do you see Filipino women today? Is there congruence?

Well, I'm 40, and I do have my own share of these derived impressions about Filipino women.

But there was one thing my father said when I was around ten that I could never forget. He said, and these were the exact words, "Women are strong. In fact, women are sometimes stronger than men."

That didn't make any sense to me then. But having heard it from my own father, I could not just dismiss it. Thirty years later, that conversation came to my mind again.

Illustration of Malakas and Maganda. The first man and woman in
Philippine folklore, came out from a giant bamboo.

Now I guess I have a fair idea of what my father was referring to, and I'll spill two of them for you today:

1. In the Filipino's psyche, the woman is a man's equal, a twin in creation

This psyche is demonstrated most graphically by the Filipino myth "Si Maganda at Si Malakas." In this myth, the first man and the woman on earth have come out from two opposite sections of the same bamboo. Doesn't this say that man and woman are equal, two creations of the same kind that complement each other? Beautiful, isn't it?

The Christian story of creation tells a vastly different picture. It portrays the woman as a derivative of man, a creation made by God from a man's rib. But haven't our western mentors somehow interpreted the Bible story to  mean that women are inferior to men and should therefore be subservient to men?

What do Filipinos of today believe deep within? Do we really subscribe to the Christian teaching in the way we treat our women? I guess all we have to do is look around and listen stories from our friends and neighbors. What do we hear?

2. Pre-colonial women enjoy a status in society that modern women are enjoying

Isn't this cool?

Think about this. Wasn't it that women activists didn't have to fight tooth and nail to gain rights in Filipino society? They got equality without a lot of fuss, right? Wasn't this because they were not really fighting for new-found rights? Rather, they were simply claiming what the Filipino society already knew were already theirs?

Beautiful.

According to WikiPilipinas, "Philippine precolonial society was egalitarian in many aspects, with women enjoying the same privileges, rights, and opportunities as did men."

Does anyone wish to contest this? So far to date, there seems to be no objection :)

An interesting observation from a foreigner really is worth noting. He said that in the Philippines, women can be leaders and remain women! Does anyone disagree with this?

Because of these two realizations, a lot of things suddenly began to make sense, at least to me.

How about you? Has anything now make sense to you?

It now appears that we have something to be proud of in the way we treat women in our country's history and hopefully in modern society. Let us tell our children about these beautiful stories. We are a beautiful people. Let us propagate that.

P.S. I believe it is a challenge for us Filipino men to raise boys with the proper understanding about what's written in the Filipino DNA about women in Filipino society. It is humbling to realize that much of the so-called "modern" thinking about gender equality has already been in practice in pre-colonial Filipino society. Moreover, I believe centuries of colonialism have not erased what were written in our DNA.