Everyday is a Slutwalk

in photo: slutwalk supermodel talisa cruz




Feminists are not quite dead yet. Okay?

And no, they aren’t home nursing their wounded egos and the scars on their bellies. Neither are they at Sears shopping to death and fitting into mastectomy bras like I last suspected. I saw them lately: they’re on the streets across the globe, and they’re running a great show: Slutwalking!

When viral friend and Cyber geek-in-residence Moira Lanzona informed me about it, my first reaction was, Couldn’t wait to get into one! Maybe this is the answer to the rape culture? And this is June, when Pride parades are just kicking off, imagine whole contingents of LGBT marchers sweeping the highways doing broad-daylight slutwalks? Traffic jam. The policemen will break their necks from looking. What could be more fun.

The basic idea about slutwalks is this: that sluts don’t cause rape, rapists do. It is not what one wears that brings on sexual assault. It’s what the men think.

Ironically, a stupid remark set it off. A Toronto policeman, perhaps thinking himself the wiser, made a mistake of telling college women on campus “not to dress like sluts” if they didn’t want to get raped. Their nails and clits, it would seem, went up in rebellion. They organized a slutwalk. If the law and society, they declared, treat women who are raped as sluts who deserved it, then everyone is a slut. Because we can all be raped at any time, no matter what we are wearing.

Sarah Seltzer, writing for the online magazine Guernica avers: If it had really been just one guy’s mistake, hundreds of women wouldn’t be participating in “Slutwalks”. Men call women sluts for nearly any reason at all, she says. “If we’re dancing. If we’re drinking. If we have ever in our lives enjoyed sex. If our clothes aren't made of burlap.”

In Sulu, where a series of gang rapes were reported just a few years back, and in other Muslim enclaves where Islamic education is “optional” for young girls, madrasah teachers like to blame the spate of sexual assaults on the young having lost their way, as evidenced by the Muslim women’s now dressing themselves up like Bisaya girls: cropped hair, jeans, short sleeves, skirts that show skin. In Saudi Arabia where wearing the burqa is de rigueur and women not even allowed to drive, according to a doctor friend who had worked in a hospital there, slut is when you are on the street unaccompanied by your husband and you got into conversation with a male pedestrian about the weather and the time of the day.

In the Islamic City of Marawi where I spent some college two or three decades back, slut was synonymous to Christian. Maranao boys on the roadside would say "slut" just by my walking by with a Maranao boy classmate I made the mistake of smiling back to. It was horrifying. I would find out later that I was not the only slut they sniped at. A handful of us Catholic girls had been actually molested by college boys and even by little Maranao boys vending boiled corn and peanuts. Coming from the opposite direction of the road, their hands would suddenly shoot up as they met up with us on the road, reaching for what we then kept sacred between our thighs. Sexual harassment wasn’t around yet to bail us out from our misery, so imagine the terror we felt in our hearts. How did they know that we were sluts even then?

My question is, can a slutwalk be staged in Davao? Will our feminist frontliner Gabriela and gayest of friends tuck up their pants and spearhead a little rebellion cum fashion show? Dream on, Honey, dear, lolas would say. Not now when we are so busy fending off accusations over the RH bill which will purportedly encourage free sex. The Church would think: Now look. This is what they want free contraceptives for. So that they can be the sluts they don't want to be caught at. Dirty-minded Catholic Church.

The idea excites me. If women and transpeople (lesbians, gays, transsexuals, queers) can whiff up a drag show that puts together the serious-political and the sexual-theatrical, maybe the staleness and rigidity of street protests will for once die and give way to a livelier time?

Scary shows

photo: marc clifford calumpang




Scary news that was. On the eve of the Gay Pride parade in Baguio City, ABS-CBN ran that “news”, if news has come down to that, headlined, KONTROBERSIYAL!

Isang bakla at isang tomboy magpapakasal daw! At ang pinagdedebatehan ay, Sino ang magsusuot ng gown??? Ang bakla o ang tomboy?

Ang tomboy naka T-shirt at pantalon, lobong-lobo na ang tiyan, advanced stage of decomposition na kumbaga, at ang bakla naman ay naka-T shirt rin at nakapantalon, nakalipstick, naka-pencilled eyebrow, nagbunot pa yata ng bigote.

That was the kind of horrid stories Korinna usually showcases in her Balitang Katakataka. Horrid because Korinna does not educate; you survive her shows not any more informed than when you first stuck your head in. But damnation, because except for Danton Remoto and Bemz Benedicto, almost all the spokespersons of the LGBT Rights Parade were there: Germaine Leonin, Ceegay Agbayani, and… was that Malu Marin thrown in there and cut in mid sentence?

“May mali eh...” she managed to put in, but was shuffled off into space and disappeared as soon as she opened her mouth to speak. The cam that shot her was positioned right above her head, so she looked slumped, and you are grateful she looked up and rolled an eye, oh my Lord, why did she agree to be set like that, like she was talking from ground zero?. What she gets for making so much sense when sense wasn’t called for, I told myself.

Eh, sinong magga-gown senyo? ABS-CBN, in characteristic Balitang Katakataka deadpan politese, asked.

The tomboy replied: Payag lang ako na mag-gown kung magpapakalbo siya. Ha,ha,ha.

I was in the house of a friend, borrowing wifi connection. I usually do not look up to watch TV, but she’s a recent gay advocate convert and was really trying to reappreciate things, including her ex-husband’s leaving her for a saucier and younger man.

Bishop Oscar Cruz was enlisted, too, saying hindi dapat ganyan, parang pinapababa mo naman lalo ang sarili mo. And he had his eyes cast down, head bowed, like he didn’t want to be audience and witness to some striptease that degrades the whole Church and humanity as well. I felt like bleating. Baaaaaaaah!

Germaine was quoted well, you would think all was fair in love and war. It’s about human rights, she said, to which each one of us is entitled. Kung may karapatan ka, meron rin ako. Though that, of course, would not sit well with Gabriela and Bayan Muna. And how well-scrubbed she looked. So lawyerly, so well-to-do. Pro-Gay is at large.

I was facebooking and Ceegay was online, and I wanted to ask: When were you drafted for this freak show? But Ceegay, I reckoned, will probably say, It’s not a freak show, Sheilfa. What can be more subversive and more feminist than a transwoman choosing to marry a tomboy over all the execrable boys?

Right. And what braver act than crossgaying in weddingtown?

But maybe, just maybe, Ceegay won’t say that either. Gay men are misogynists, didn’t he say so to their asses. Who knows, the cad on TV was probably just renting a low-cost petridish. He seemed old to be artificially inseminated himself, she young to change sex again, if she likes, say from calf to bulldagger dyke. And like most of the shows that deal with the poor, the whole thing looked Darwinian to me. You know, And they unawares bore apes, like the species never evolved. The triumph of Biology over Biology across the centuries, when LGBT is supposedly postmodern, progeny to metrosexualism.

And the two don’t even look like they went to St. Scho or Mabini High School. Baklang kanal na parlorista, a Pro-Gay lesbian in classic pre-class consciousness mode said, to my horror. You can’t trust ABS-CBN to pay for their tuition, do you?

But again, as the boys in LGBT town say, it's very hard to make a point with Establishment media. They splice the wrong cuts so that you come out the clown they want you to be. They edit you out.

Except, of course, when you’re Boy Abunda doing The Buzz.

I fall back

photo: kim loraine




I fall back on the men who love me. Their love, of course,
is shallow, not deep, and can't carry me. So I wade back to the shore
to hang my self dry and watch them drown in the shoal.

Flannery O'Connor and Me

"I work from such a basis of poverty that everything I do is miracle to me. However, don't think I write for purgation. I write because I write well.

"It may be that a writer can sentimentalize certain segments of the population and get away with it, but they cannot sentimentalize the poor and get away with it...I have never read J.T. Farell or Steinbeck or any of the people who deal with the afflicted (economically afflicted, that is)... It may be that no American can write about the poor the way Europe can.

"It may also be that poverty in this country is not a matter of physical want anyway, except in certain particular areas. In any case, when you write about the poor, you have to be writing about yourself first, everybody else second, and the actual poor third. The particular appeal of the poor for the fiction writer is existential not economic, but a great deal of the writing about them since and during the 30s seems to consist in numbering their lice."


Flannery O'Connor
THE HABIT OF BEING

FB note, December 27, 2010 at 8:14pm

So I slapped the tyke

I slapped the tyke.

A day before that I had said to him to try not to show his feelings so much because most people don't care and like to see him cry so that they may call him faggot.

"Ano nang faggot?" he had asked.
"Bakla," I said.
"I’m not bakla I’m a boy," he gashed.
"That’s what people here would like you to be."

He was monkeying and kept on pulling my hair and hitting me in the ear. I slapped him. For a few seconds he didn’t move, eyes blinking and little hand suspended over the hurt part. Then he put the hand down, turned his face towards me and stuck his tongue out. "Beeeh! Indi sakit."

He danced around me and kept on chanting, "It doesn’t hurt it doesn’t hurt!"

Now, when I’d pay him a visit, he’d hold back from running to hug and grab my bag to inspect if there’s a little love tucked in there. He’d kept on jumping in his place, clapping his hands and yelling to the house, Sheilfa is here! Look look! Sheilfa is here!

As much as I can I try not to ask who was it this time and where it hurt.

One for love

This article, titled All I Know About Gertrude Stein, is lifted from Granta 115, with thanks to Daniel Ong who sent it in.


Living with you would be the ultimate romance. I am a romantic and that is my defence against the love-commodity. I can’t buy love but I don’t want to rent it either. I would like to find a way to make the days with you be ours. I would like to bring my bag and unpack it.

You say we will fail, get frustrated, fall out, fight. All the F-words.

But there is another one: forgive.


In 1946 Gertrude Stein was suddenly admitted to the American Hospital at Neuilly. She had stomach cancer.

Only a few months earlier they had come back to Paris, in 1945 – the war over at last – to find the seal of the Gestapo on their apartment. Their silver and linen had been taken and the pictures were packed up ready to be removed to German art collections – that’s what happened if you were a Jew.

Alice had been so upset, but Gertrude wanted to get her portrait by Picasso hung over the fireplace again, sit down in their two armchairs either side of the fire, and have some tea.

‘The apartment is here. You are here. I am here,’ she said.

At the hospital the doctor came into the room. They administered the anaesthetic. Gertrude had been advised against an operation but she did not believe in death – at least not for her. She did not believe in the afterlife either. There was no there there. Everything was here. Gertrude Stein was present tense.

She held Alice’s hand. She said to Alice, What is the answer? But Alice was crying and only shook her head. Gertrude laughed her big rich laugh. ‘Then what is the question?’

The trolley bearing Gertrude was wheeled away. Alice walked beside her lover as though she were walking beside her whole life. Gertrude never came back.

The question is: How do we love?

It is a personal question each to each, intense, private, frightening, necessary. It is a world question too, angry, refusing, demanding, difficult.

Love is not sentimental. Love is not second best.

Women will have to take up arms for love.

Take me in your arms. This is the Here that we have.