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Sunday, March 19, 2006
Tabada: Sedazines
By Mayette Q. Tabada
Matamata
What gives people more value for their money these days? Women’s magazines, of course.
You need not be a squatter in Malacañang to believe that reading has greatly changed. What used to be retiring and only mildly exciting has become sinister, even nihilistic.
Although we are far from being a nation of newspaper readers, the ones who don’t are accusing the ones who do of exaggerating what they read, primarily the lie that reading sets us free.
It is impossible now to distinguish lies, official versions, truths. It is so much easier to approximate a fact’s veracity as inversely related to its proximity to official sources. Reality should be as decipherable as purchase receipts. When I buy a pencil or a bag of brown sugar, my receipt informs me how much of my money purchases the product and how much subsidizes the presidential squatter.
Had I been made of revolutionary stuff, knowledge of the end-user of my taxes should induce me to substitute the pencil for a stick of home-made charcoal or to eschew sugar and swallow a lifetime of bitterness. As I am bourgeois-and struggling daily to remain one-I take the easier route to self-deception: I read magazines for women.
According to industry leaders like Genteel Living and Hearth and Tub (fake names to mirror fake realities), the perfect world is a glossy one where all moms live to make breakfast and pack lunches more breathtaking than their eye bags.
Occasionally, I do come across the odd article whose tips for darning the children’s clothes remind me how the Palace impostor reuses the gowns her mother wore to official functions, as well as the name of her father to coat her presidency with the illustriousness associated with his tenure.
Generally though, an escapist mood envelops me whenever I extract the magazine from its tamper-proof bag. (I do watch carefully that the winsome face under the cover liner spouting “good housekeeping” does not morph into Ignacio Bunye lugubriously explaining for our deeper incomprehension the state of our national disasters.)
With this month’s issue, I anticipated the usual lotus-eating-but-watch-the-calories interlude. While I flipped through the pages, three things dropped on my lap: a bag of chamomile tea, a sachet containing vitamin E-enriched facial moisturizer, and a purple pouch for contraceptives.
Who can turn down a sales pitch that ends on the lap, that most generous portion in human anatomy?
Rather than go after her enemies, the presidential squatter should learn a tip or two from these geniuses. Through social marketing, she, too, can insinuate a message while selling a service or product, such as Satin Soft Cuticles with Social Relevance or hypo-allergenic PPP 1017 (otherwise known as the Presidential Paranoia for Deodorizing the Philippines).
Magazine readers hardly adopt even a pseudo-scientific approach in evaluating freebies.
If she gives away free sachets of PPP 1017, I, for one, will be as open to its persuasion as any “herbal infusion” carried out by chamomile flowers “gathered and brewed by appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.”
Is it not worth tapping genius that can convince a reader of sedazines (magazines for sedation) that applying a face cream rejuvenates her 40-year-old cells to the moisturized perfection of the 20-year-old model?
If I can believe that drinking some murky slop makes me as serene-looking as the mannequin with the impossibly high cheekbones, I can perhaps accept the suspension of civil liberties as actually “enriching” and “blooming.”
Proof is that I now keep my mobile phone in the free purple pouch that also easily fits pills for responsible parenthood, contraceptives for value-oriented decision-making, and freedom abortifacients.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com or 09173226131)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (March 19, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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