Gender Who?

BJ was always angry with me these days.

We were discussing the direction of the feminist movement last night, and I said to him, more in annoyance with his newfound commitment than anything else, that it seems to me it has deteriorated into a scramble for funds from conservative funding agencies abroad, even from big liberal imperialist organizations, and he balked at me. “What are you talking about???” Then he slammed the door right to my face.

He was very generous otherwise: always making sure there was a job for me in every little grant they got: process documentor, writer-editor, researcher, what-have-you. He and his wife had this nice little NGO that built local capacities and lent money to farmers. I once went to their training-workshop and afterwards, I gave BJ a blow-by-blow account of what transpired, and he hung up on me.

I happened to ask why was the ex-senator there? What did she think she was doing, dropping by to say hello to the farmworkers? And this lady in long loose sequined blouse and tight silk black pants lecturing rural-poor women about the virtues of piggy-banking, didn’t she think it a little shameful to be landing there like that, straight from traipsing around the globe, laptop-totting, an ear to her mobile phone, where did she get the notion to coax the peasant class, in Taglish at that, to help each other raise chickens hogs and goats, to help each other carry baskets babies laundry and proclaim to all and one that the way to a better life is slow and hard, but a penny kept a day is how savings and capital build-up happen?

He cut me short. “Our women beneficiaries are happy, okay? Despite what you feminists think.”

I said of course I am a feminist. “Is anyone not?”

He sighed. “Rina” – that’s his wife’s first name – and he sounded like somebody he is closely associated with just met Karl Marx’s sister and he has shaken hands with her, too, “calls herself a genderist.” My jaw really fell at that and for a few seconds I could not speak. Then recovering, I spat into the mouthpiece, “Oh, how ignorant.”

He sounded genuinely surprised, and then he said oh shit, and the line went dead.