Desperate sluts

Why, they’re all over the place, out on our very own streets, or lounging in Starbucks depots, pretending to fiddle with their cell phones while their Frappucinos melt into slush way past midnight.

Up Quezon Avenue past the glitzy girlie bars, they stand by the curb, thumbing up passing cars. On Ayala Avenue and Paseo de Roxas, it’s a gender-bender prospect on high heels that outshines the lampposts. Three hours past midnight and they turn desperate, their rates plunging lower than their necklines.

In KTV lounges classy or rundown, strip joints from West Avenue to Cubao, to Pasay and elsewhere, desperation for the hard-earned buck is pegged to the inexorability of the hour hand.

It’s a universal condition, so we don’t hear Polish jokes re prostitutes, whores, streetwalkers, hookers, hustlers, hussies, harlots, tarts, floozies, tramps, trollops, bimbos, molls, strumpets, or sluts. Nor do we make up our own jokes on our usual Boholano bogeymen, er, women.

It takes a particular character trait, misperceived or otherwise, for a joke to take on a racist slur. The kike, the dago, the chink, the nip, the flip — these pejorative labels develop because the prevailing racial type in a certain place, in this case Mainland USA, takes note of the difference in physical and characteristic attributes of such “minorities.”

For years after WW2, the “Kraut” was depicted in comic bumbling ways in film and on TV. So was the “slit-eyed Jap,” while the “yellow peril” was seen to rival the dangers posed by Mexican “wetbacks.”

If one were German or Japanese in the ’50s and ’60s, and didn’t have innate national pride to salve the sensitivity quotient, why, Hollywood would have been targeted for protest by the “losers” in all those war movies.

But they took it with a grain of salt, albeit not exactly grinning and bearing it. Maybe the axis of national identity shared a common prescience for internal vs. international stereotyping. They must have known that there would also be WASP jokes, or that the “N” word would eventually become permissible only from the lips of the black brethren, bro to bro as cariño brutal, but never from anyone else. 

Consider that development as part of the onslaught of political correctness. Which brings us to where we now lie, in the crossroads of national identity and well within the crosshairs of sly commentary.

It’s been a history of insults alright, from “savages” to “ladrones” to “monkeys with no tails,” or in contemporary times, from scatological comic Lenny Bruce’s line that “Filipinos come quick” to the 1970s-’80s characterization of “the wily Filipino” in prose and film. Then there have been flaps over the Greek dictionary entry “filipineza” for maid and the “Filipino” cookie in Spain, said to be “white on the outside and dark inside.”

Each time our voices are raised in high dudgeon marks a strengthening of national character, as much as it betrays the irony that for a people who love to make fun of everything, we’re rather onion-skinned when we’re stereotyped. 

Or are we just registering disgust over the relatively light depiction of other people, especially when they’re of the ruling powers, such as the American as simply being brash, the Brit as stiff-upper-lipped, the French as rude and arrogant?

Don’t get mad, get even! So how do we join the globalization of denigration? “Sa kuko ng agila” doesn’t quite make it. So far, the most potent joke about the Kano has to do with the prepuce or foreskin. Westerners stink, we say among ourselves, and the once handsome Robert Redford is now revealed in close-up as all warts, wrinkles and freckles in redneck fashion. Then, too, Western women appear to age so fast beyond 30, owing to epidermal thickness, so unlike the Oriental’s silky smooth tenderness of flesh that renders them as goddesses even well into their 50s.

Why, they even become presidents, and may then be branded by CNN’s The Daily Show as a “slut.”

Do we take that “slut” word as a slur, or as an edgework (maybe even pathetic) attempt at off-humor? If it had been done to... no, not just Margaret Thatcher but Mother Teresa, would it have crossed the line? Off-humor is off-putting in its sense of indelicacy, such that it often partakes of a borderline bipolar personality.

On the other hand, when we see “presidentiable” Hillary Clinton photoshopped to appear naked in bed with her rival Barack Obama (“been laid’n”), we laugh in appreciation of cyber tricks played between Republicans and Democrats. 

Yankee, go home! No, that’s gotten too lame, much abused, no sting no moh. There has to be a fresher insult just waiting to be plucked out of the imperialist air. Something that can take a week’s double-whammy on our med school diplomas and sluts, and turn it around.

(By the by, some of my boy friends would say a slut is simply someone who’s free and easy with her slit. Wrong, as there are male sluts galore, as well. Why, they even troop to a palace for handouts.)

In any case, we might have pulled a class act (at no prejudice to a class suit) like whispering into DENR Sec. Lito Atienza’s ear to whisper into our national darling Manny Pacquiao’s ear to announce at his pre-fight press con that he was dedicating his televised tangle with Barrera “to all the medical professionals from my country who are serving in the hospitals in this country.”

Then he could have even quipped that he’s challenging the six-foot-two Tony Parker to a one-on-one on the ring, gloves off. That way, we would have gotten back at the ABC’s of geopolitics, taken on the French and the black and the Eva as Latina all at the same time.

Speaking of the languorous Ms. Longoria, in that “DH” (not our own exportable Eva but the show) episode, she appears sluttish alright, engaging in torrid clinches with a man who’s already taken, in another context. But that’s the desperation of American housewives as a stereotype.

As for the Teri Hatcher character, here are the lines of dialogue that lead to the “offensive” remark that has bonded most of us here and abroad.

The attending physician, who turns out to be a Harvard grad, says to her: “Everything seems normal, But you seem to be having irregular periods.” And further: “The word menopause has negative connotations. I know, for a lot of women, they hear of aging, brittle bones, loss of sexual desire...”

The Hatcher character responds in desperation, but garbles her lines in the video copy I’ve seen. She says something about herself, and it’s “... like sleeping with a Hibachi grill.” Here we can only suppose that the scriptwriter thumped his chest for scoring with a clever simile. 

Follows that remark about Philippine diplomas. Not a hah-hah punch line, but maybe, just maybe, as some of our more rational commentators like Bibeth Orteza has already pointed out, meant only to reflect a middle-class American housewife’s desperate mindset. She who fears menopause also fears minorities.

So did I watch a pirated copy? No, am not that desperate. It was part of a job, as a member of an MTRCB preview committee. And you can watch it yourself sometime this week, only a couple of episodes late compared to the original broadcast that spawned the controversy, as I understand it.

Has the scene been deleted, the way ABC has said it’s done for future replays or video sales? Not on your life. The committee figured that the local audience can be mature enough to judge for itself if it’s a racial insult or just a sorry aside from a culturally insensitive scriptwriter.

I’m not saying that the protest lodged by officialdom, and more importantly, by the Filipino-American community, isn’t meritorious. It is. Right on! If anything, we can thank this episode for the bonding entitlement. But those who may have taken a positive view of artistic license, in terms of fiction-as-fiction, are also right.

We can all come away from this stronger together. Then maybe we can also mature faster, to the point where we can even sing our national anthem any which way we feel we should sing it, because music is music, not only universal but subject to creative adaptation. 

At the very least, we should never appear to be so desperate in proving or manifesting our nationhood.

Late last month, three young poets — Chen Siyuan of Guangdong, China, Erica Clariz delos Reyes of Ateneo de Manila University, and Raymond John de Borja of the University of the Philippines — were proclaimed winners in the Chinese, Filipino and English language categories, respectively, of the 2007 Maningning Miclat Trilingual Poetry Awards.

The winning poets, all 28 years of age or younger, each received a cash prize of P28,000, a trophy sculpted by Julie Lluch, and hardbound collector’s editions of Voice from the Underworld: A Book of Verses in three languages by Maningning Miclat; the commemorative literary anthology Beauty for Ashes: Remembering Maningning; and Beyond the Great Wall: A Family Journal by Mario, Alma, Banaue and Maningning Miclat, which recently won a National Book Award for Biography from the Manila Critics Circle.

Chen Siyuan, a 21-year-old Literature major at Shaoguan Normal College, Guangdong province, came to receive her prize from Maningning Miclat Art Foundation Inc. (MMAFI) executive director Alma Miclat and the judges for Poetry in Chinese, namely James Na, Lyonel Ty and Shirley Lua.

Erica Clariz de los Reyes, a BS Management student and associate editor of the literary journal Heights, received her prize from National Artist for Literature Virgilio Almario and the judges for the Poetry in Filipino category, Benilda Santos, Luna Sicat-Cleto and Michael Coroza.            

Raymond John de Borja, a BS Electronics and Communications graduate and a fellow for poetry of UP Creative Writing Center, received his prize from National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera and MMAFI board director Edna Manlapaz, together with judges Marjorie Evasco, Neil Garcia and Joel Toledo.

The poetry awards are now held alternately with the awards for painting. MMAFI president Herman T. Gamboa and board director Fe Mangahas recalled how Maningning, who left us seven years ago, was a brilliant, multi-awarded artist, poet and writer in Chinese, Filipino and English. She was also a teacher and translator whose legacy gave birth to the foundation’s vision of encouraging and nurturing outstanding young artists and poets, and promoting appreciation of literature and the visual arts.

The awards rite held at Philamlife Theater on Sept. 26 featured readings of the winning poems as well as music from singer-composers Cynthia Alexander, Susan Fernandez and Girl Valencia. This year’s event drew support from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, San Miguel Corporation, Emerson Network Power, Huatong Xinli Flooring Co. Ltd., and World News Publications.