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BY SONIA D. DAQUILA
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Saturday, January 21, 2017
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MISS Dinagyang, Miss Universe, Miss Purok, Miss Barangay beauty pageants capitalize on women. Father Rebollo, our professor in St. Thomas Aquinas course, said we are soft because we are designed for motherhood. We have the bosom intended for comfort and compassion, and the womb to hold the fetus as it grows that the males can never have despite technological sophistication. Nature also supplies us with breast milk after giving birth to feed our young. This too, males can never have.
All over the world, women are the most exploited. In Egypt and in many parts of Africa, they still practice woman’s circumcision to improve the “girls’market value” which are usually of three kinds: the clitoridectomy where the girl’s clitoris is cut off; the infibulation where the woman’s inner labia are sewn together, leaving just a tiny opening for urinal passage; and, the excision where the inner and outer lips of the woman’s genitals are removed. All these are done to make sexual acts for women painful as they are deemed dirty.
Quantifying the tasks of an ordinary woman as a mother, and as a wife, a woman spends time double or triple that of her husband’s. Usually, while the husband watches TV or reads newspaper, a wife cooks or washes clothes. Fortunate are those wives and blessed are husbands who do not discriminate women by assigning to them exclusively the roles of a housewife from baby-sitting to cooking to washing clothes, to giving them massage or sexual pleasures, but take also their own share.
Society usually perceives women as merely toys or as sexual objects. Legally, the double standard of morality in the Revised Penal Code is obvious: from the requisites in the crime of adultery a woman commits, to the crime of concubinage committed by a husband, and the machismo where one is deemed attractive despite old age, balding head or bulging beer stomach while society frowns upon women who may still attract men though married.
You also have heard about battered wives or exploited girls from incestuous relationships, sexual harassment, acts of lasciviousness, to rape or prostitution. Society conditioned women the virtue or the vice of martyrdom complex. While the modern world changes a bit, the lopsided status and role of women still remain.
Nature provides women the weapon to be at par or even stronger than their counterpart. Remember how Delilah beguiled Samson to cut the source of his strength, his hair? Remember Cleopatra and Anthony? It is true that behind the success of a man is a woman but it is likewise true that behind the downfall of a man are women. Do you remember King Solomon?
Nature is so wise. Women are intuitive. As the song goes, “she asks you about the truth but she does not believe you anyway. She’s nobody’s fool… she’s ahead of her time…” It is in the women’s weakness where their strength lies. Thus, men are created or conditioned to be stronger than women. A woman holds or must hold the purse-string and it is her leverage against her man. We have no match with men’s muscles and capacity in weightlifting, yet we can carry them. If a man cannot be moved by the sharpness of a woman’s tongue, he can be melted by her soft tears.
Look at the word “woman.” Just insert “e” and it becomes “woeman” or man’s woe. I love being a woman. Perhaps, the strength in weaknesses is a paradox but many men are enticed to be in our camp. So, they exaggerate their wishes to become women or imitate us, wishing to have bosoms and wombs like us but they never can have what we, women, are naturally equipped with. (delsocorrodaquila@gmail.com/PN)
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