Feminism on its head

My feminism could only be tested at that point when the invite came in for a Playboy Magazine launch party. The answer should’ve been “No” and yet I found myself braving what had been a tiring long day, dinner date traffic and the lack of parking in busy Tomas Morato. My rationalization was simple: I had never been invited to a male magazine event, had no sense really of what went on there. I’d like to be able to say that I don’t care, and reduce the whole male magazine industry to just the patriarchal oppression of women’s bodies. Instead, what I’m able to say now is this: been there, done that, and I can’t help but think of how it has made me question my feminism, which ideologically makes up much of who I am. A changed person via Playboy? And I’m no man.

My feminism is the kind that I’m judged for. An aunt once told me that I couldn’t be feminist and believe in love, that the former was uncompromising while the latter all about compromise. I knew she was pointing a finger at me for the loss of my romantic relationships; and yet I knew too that there was no contradiction here: any man would – should! – want a woman who believes in her rights as an individual. In many ways that can only be to his satisfaction. Besides, human rights are women’s rights. And women’s rights can only encompass my rights and my aunt’s, as well as these women who were standing on the opposite side of the room, two in Playboy bunny costumes, and six in outfits so skimpy I never really imagined women who’d wear them existed.

My feminism reminds me of sisterhood right there and then. My instinct was to talk to these women and tell them about the possibility of not being where they were. My gut told me that this was really a performance of kapit sa patalim – a matter of choicelessness, a matter of poverty. And yet my sense of how that gut is necessarily a misrepresentation, a conclusion derived by someone who’s extraneous to them, a judgment in itself, kept me from crossing that room and getting an interview. I must have also not wanted to hear their voices, because I was afraid of what they’d say. What if none of them needed to be saved? What if poverty as my rationale, wasn’t theirs at all. Later on, I find out that in fact all these women audition to take part in the magazine, and many of them do so not out of poverty, but out of narcissism. They want to be seen by the magazine and all that its masculine gaze allows. They want to perform their sexualities in the way the male magazine wants. Objectification be damned.

My feminism teaches me to seethe in anger, as I sit at the opposite end of the room, seeing how men of all ages/sizes/stereotypes ogled the Playboy girls. Instead I am awed at the possibilities of power these women hold. Obviously they won’t earn from any peso that the magazine makes, and mode of production tells us that this does all go back to the transnational franchising company that is Playboy International. And yet, at that moment, standing around director Peque Gallaga (who’s on the cover of the magazine for this month’s Pinoy cinema issue), these girls seem to hold more than just these men in the palm of their hands. I am taught to see them as victims. But here and now, with 1982 Bb. Pilipinas Universe and international model Maria Isabel Lopez, I can’t help but see them as women who hold their own and have a sense of self that’s particularly theirs. I am not allowed to claim sisterhood.

My feminism should know no bounds. It should see women as people. It should see the oppressions contingent upon being tied down by class. But in the face of skimpily clad women, who posed for Playboy, and carry an enviable confidence about themselves, it is difficult not to see gender. And sexuality. And women. Who know these two things, because they’ve encountered it in its everyday form. In the magazine industry that has put the woman’s body on a pedestal as it does objectify it with both the male and female gaze. In pop culture that tells the woman to look at herself in the mirror and be unhappy with herself. These women take what they learn and know and do something about it, bring it to its (il)logical end, and pose as they must, do what they can, with their bodies, within the frames of magazines whose gaze they do not mind, whose gaze they could possibly be questioning, in their mere willingness to be held by it. I could be flabbergasted and offended. Instead, these women who can say they posed for Playboy?

They floor me.

Photo: “Fussy Bunny” by Rasmus Olsen, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved

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