Week 5: yet another rant on misogyny

This week we learned about pop culture of the Philippines! There’s so much rich history and culture in all the ethnic groups we covered this quarter and it’s a kind of bittersweet shame that we don’t get any kind of coverage of it unless we choose to learn about it in college. But like… they got us singing about Columbus in kindergarten because that was so important. *rolls eyes* But anyway, I wasn’t expecting a total immersion into Pilipinx culture because Tuesdays are the only days we get our culture on. I was so blown away by learning of the Great Pinoy Boxing Era, an era I had no idea existed (for obvious reasons). It’s “amazing” how an era that spanned twenty years has been almost completely erased because of *ahem* white supremacy, racism and war.

It’s also pretty cool how Peter Bacho incorporated boxing into Dark Blue Suit. I was able to relate to certain cultural connections in the book like: having family members with nicknames and not calling them by their actual name, listening in on conversations in another language acting like I don’t know what they’re talking about (even though I don’t speak or understand Tagalog, by listening for certain tone and familiar words in Spanish/English I was able to guess what my parents were saying to each other). But I had a big problem with the book, like I did with Better Luck Tomorrow, which is the blatant misogyny and sexual objectification of women. I guess it’s a sad truth in literature that’s written by men (and also content that’s created by men) that women have to be background characters and have to suffer in order to be in the story. But then again if women were written into stories written by men, they wouldn’t even be accurate depictions because men are often so far off in their perceptions of us – because they “often” don’t recognize our humanity – they can’t write us without reducing us to stereotypes. You see the difference in how Catherine Chung and Julie Otsuka wrote their characters. There’s a BIG difference. Just like in Better Luck Tomorrow, I didn’t feel any sympathy for the characters because of their collective misogyny, I felt the same about Buddy and Rico in Dark Blue Suit. Even fully knowing that Rico’s life was turned upside down when he came back from the war. It’s just that I didn’t feel as much compassion for him as I had the potential to. Trying to write a story about the horrors of coming back from war to a country that does not value your life and mental well-being can be done without treating women as objects, as a “good time” and using “tall, long legged blondes” as an overall descriptor (which is all the more terrible because that is literally reducing us to body parts and even while I have my reservations about white women which is a conversation for another time, they’re still women and also suffer under this woman hating world). It just turns into a big masculine show where how masculine a guy is directly relates to how many women he had laid whether he’s doing it as sport or if it’s just part of the life they’ve been socialized to be a part of.

In seminar I made a comment about how the men in the book, as a way to get closer to whiteness, treated women the way they did. In the United States you don’t get an example of women being treated as people and with respect and decency. And these men are fighting for their lives trying to make a living in a society that only values them for their labor and not much else. I guess what I’m saying is before I write myself into a hole, there are a lot of factors to consider while discussing a conflict like this. While I hate the way men have oppressed all other genders since the beginning of time, I can’t ignore other aspects of identity like ethnicity, class, ability, etc. while I express my thoughts and beliefs. But there is one thing that won’t change about me and the way I see power and oppression is how there is one group that benefits from the oppression of another and all people are contributing to that whether we’re complicit or actively working against it, trying to destroy it or ignoring it or using it for our benefit while pushing down others. It’s complicated and not completely all that is on my mind. But I’ll try to wrap this up nicely in the next paragraph.

While I didn’t like the blatant misogyny in Dark Blue Suit I tried to sidestep it and focus on the Filipino identity of the characters. And it’s still funny to me how Filipino Culture was not a theme said by anyone (including myself LOL) in seminar. But I understand why that is.