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Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Obenieta: Come on, man!
By Myke U. Obenieta
SOUND OF MOSAIC
Ask some women with a gender grudge, and they’d beat their breast: if ours were a man’s world, no wonder it’s round like a black eye or like a fist coming full circle as it forms a hole on the wall.
In Paul Schrader’s “Affliction,” a harrowing film about the effects of domestic violence on the male psyche, a character talks about the type of women rounded up as usual victims. “It’s like they lived their lives with the sound turned off. And then they’re gone,’’ his sad voice trails off.
When something goes bad, the women often get it worse. It takes a man like Schrader to understand the wages of woebegone machismo.
It’s a bloody boring tale, domestic violence. But even though the Ten Commandments did not prohibit the persistence of clichés, there are always variations on its theme to refresh the wounds, to lay bare the bruises in a new light.
Sometimes the woman-as-victim routine takes on a new twist, turning her into a culprit despite the awful fact that she’s the one black and blue all over. Like when she shows her man that she also got balls, as though taking her cue from Charlie’s Angels, until all hell breaks loose and he ends up dead.
Same thing holds when manhood is whittled down to a wimp’s level. Which, in the eyes of the man whose brains are calculable from the crunches of his bare knuckles, makes the woman the culpable one. Consider a little news story last Sunday about a certain Teresita Auditor, 22, who sustained bruises and the blame for her live-in partner’s death though she didn’t lift a finger! As though it was her fault that her man retreated from a “petty argument” and pumped a bullet into his temple, the man’s brother swooped down on her till she was covered with bruises and scratches.
Easy to agree what the bra burners hold: when his fist makes a point, it’s a man’s world. Who needs another story of men’s aggressive hostility stirred up by feelings of inadequacy?
Will the real conqueror please stand up?
Who you gonna call when the ghost of domestic violence makes the women and children whimper? Hush, here comes the “male gender advocates” to the rescue. As proposed by Councilor Gerardo Carillo, chairman of the committee on social services and women, City Hall will push for a man-to-man-talk sort of a counseling program for abusive husbands and other male members of the family. It will be done throughout the city’s barangays with the help of the Department of Social Welfare Services (DSWS) and a non-government organization. Not over bottles of beer, hopefully.
In the wake of his blind rage, the woman’s injury can be the man’s black eye, too. And if it would take a man to know another and to raise his awareness, maybe that’s when the women would loosen up the lasso of generalization about the side of the gender divide.
If that happens, maybe the women wouldn’t begrudge us anymore if masculinity becomes the force, of the moral kind, to reckon with in the house. It’s a long time coming, but it’s never too late for us beer-guzzlers to hope that we might go far by sitting down and talking about what it really takes to be a real man. And hear the women’s side of our story as well.
(Michael U. Obenieta welcomes your comments at his e-mail address: yomyko@yahoo.com)
(July 1, 2003 issue)
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