The Philippine Online Chronicles

Put yourself in another's shoes goes the adage. We have only a pair of eyes and here they are buried in our skull. By design they are not meant to see in all directions. They cover only the present, the fleeting temporal now. But perspective is a privilege. Not everyone is willing to see from another angle. Not everyone can bear the cost of being locationally displaced. Most of us see only with our own pair of eyes and live only the experience of our localized bodies. But wondering how others see and live is a singularly human trait. It has allowed our species to coordinate unlike any other. We are designed or have evolved to be social beings. What is it like to be Other? What is it like to be not the Self?

I once expressed my displeasure over our last female president to a mid-level bureaucrat from Bangladesh. She was a very distinguished-looking woman in her forties. Articulate and charming in that gregarious South Asian way, she looked to me with a knowing twinkle in her eye. Ah. Is she having trouble with the generals? I do not know much about Bangladeshi politics so I assumed their generals give them perennial trouble. I replied no. She said, well she is a woman. She has to be stronger in these matters.

I sat back, not a little stunned. She thought I was complaining about my president because she was female. It hadn't occurred to me that my complaint could have been misconstrued to be gendered. I contemplated explaining to her that no, it had nothing to do with my president being female. And no, the military was not on the verge of throwing over her government because she was female. I contemplated telling her that she was not our first woman president. But the next speaker was called to the podium, an Indonesian in a brightly-colored hijab. I looked to the elderly female member of the Indonesian parliament, a rare species I am told. And then to the smiling Bangladeshi to my left. Not for the first time, in the company of these women, I felt privileged to be Filipina. I felt privileged to extremely dislike my president for her policies and actions and not on account of her having a uterus.

Somewhere in an Iranian prison a mother of two is scheduled to be stoned to death for committing the crime of adultery. Somewhere in Namibia a girl is having her labia sewn shut to control her sexuality. In a village in Pakistan a young woman is on the run from male relatives to escape punishment for having been raped. I thank my lucky stars I was not born Iranian, Namibian nor Pakistani. I was born Filipina.

When the Global Gender Gap Report first came out in 2006, the Philippines had the distinction of having been the only developing country in the top 10 of those doing best in closing the gender gap. To date we are still on that eminent list. Filipinas seem to have it good, if relatively. Not only have we had two women take on the highest public office, we have also had a growing number of women take on responsibilities in the public and private sectors.

I remember having a conversation with an old diplomat some years ago. I was arguing for the inclusion of a day or two on feminist politics in the syllabus of a certain class. The topic of the conversation had meandered on to women’s rights. He seemed genuinely intrigued by feminism. He’d said he couldn’t understand the use for it and went on to explain how he and his wife got along perfectly. The decades between us loomed wide. He had said it without malice, in that even and gentle voice. I breathed deep and said his wife was a lucky woman. But not all husbands were like him. And not all women were wives of diplomats. And certainly, not all women were privileged with (over)education like his interlocutor.

In August last year the Magna Carta of Women finally came out of the legislative wringer and was signed into law. Many feminists were ecstatic, despite a close call just as the bill had been consolidated at the bicameral level. Literally a call from a man of cloth had delayed the bill’s transmission from the House to the office of the President. But no matter, the temporary delay was a mere hiccup in the nearly decade-long history of this piece of legislation. The men of cloth were particularly wary of some provisions on reproductive health services and the prohibition of the expulsion of female faculty and students on account of getting pregnant. But nevertheless these provisions survived intact.

The Magna Carta’s of Women’s spirit is liberal. Its spirit rests on the assumption that all individuals are equal whether bearing two X chromosomes or no. It acknowledges that Filipino women are at a disadvantage in society and that these disadvantages are the most pronounced in the poorest strata of society. It is rights-based. And rights, according to the liberal tradition, are acquired by individuals for no other reason than that they exist.

The Magna Carta of Women places the responsibility of rectifying the inequality in status and opportunity between men and women squarely on the shoulders of the State. The state shall allocate resources to achieve the goals of this piece of legislation through the Gender and Development fund (GAD) which should total no less than 5 percent of the government’s total budget.

Not only should the State serve as guarantor of women’s rights but it should also foster their development and their inclusion in the policy formulation in all levels of public office – from the barangay all the way to regional entities. More women are to be encouraged to join the armed forces. Gendered violence will no longer be tolerated and all barangays are to have a Violence Against Women desks. The education bureaucracy is mandated to develop gender-sensitive curriculums in the next few years and media organizations are to undergo training on gender sensitivity.

This month the Magna Carta’s Implementing Rules and Regulations (IRR) was proudly unveiled by the Philippine Commission on Women. The IRR will serve as a guideline on how the law is to be implemented. It is a solid document. As with many other pieces of legislation, the Magna Carta of Women bears the ideal of what our people mean to achieve. It is a promise. But our institutions are notoriously weak in making these ideals manifest in the realm of the real. But the idea has been planted and there it rests in the annals of Congress and in the heart of the bureaucracy. We may not always have the capacity or the money to follow through, but that ideal and the spirit of the law will never go away.