Wednesday, March 12, 2008 Obenieta: Of mice and murders By Myke U. Obenieta So to speak
TOO awful for Abel, he died without knowing a rat's tail about the beauty of bonding with a sister. Would his fate have been less tragic if Cain were born a girl?
There will be blood just the same. But a female Cain, even if she felt down the dumps, would probably be more furious about having had to cope with menstrual cramps.
Sorry, can't take murder out of mind in this Women's Month. No need to hear the bra burners go hoarse about how victimization is fashionably female.
Indeed, vulnerability is redder than a lipstick if you consider the headlines lately. Two young women—Lauren Burk and student leader Eve Marie Carson—were shot to death a day apart from each other not far from their respective schools in Georgia.
Not too distant is the destiny of Ruby Jade Ruba, a nursing student at the Cebu Doctors' University, in the hands of a thug who preyed on her near the campus. Only beasts masquerading as men can do that, you'd say.
"No crime and lots of happy fat women," quipped Nicole Hollander, an American cartoonist in response to her own question: Can one imagine a world without men?
Assaulted by their husbands and boyfriends, four women die in America everyday. According to the National Organization for Women, "the number of women who have been murdered by their intimate partners is greater than the number of soldiers killed in the Vietnam War."
Despite a thousand and one miseries wrought by machismo, women still have the upper hand as they manage to survive longer than men. Talk about life expectancy, and there's no begrudging the feminists if they'd go as far as staking a claim at superiority (or, it lowers expectation and suggests lack of ambition when women seek to be equal with men, as one wit once cracked.)
"In the U.S., average life expectancy at birth is about 79 years for women and about 72 years for men," attested Thomas Perls, a geriatrician at Harvard Medical School, suggesting women's evolutionary drive to pass on her genes as well as their need to stay healthy enough to rear and care as many children as possible.
"In all developed countries and most undeveloped ones, women outlive men, sometimes by a margin of 10 years," he stressed. A 2002 report from the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that women outlived men in all but six countries (Nepal, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Bangladesh, and Swaziland). Gender gap is also evident among centenarians worldwide as women older than a hundred outnumber males nine to one.
Boys have to cry, too, over a paper by researchers from the University of Michigan. Men's death rate is on steroids because they are "more likely than women to engage in risky and sometimes violent behavior." Car mishaps and other types of accidents on top of homicides and suicides are more of a guy thing, the study disclosed.
Who says only women are on the verge of a breakdown?
Still, Cebu Provincial Board Member Agnes Murder seems to see red at some mayors, mostly male, who must have looked fit to have their throats ripped out regarding gender and development (GAD) programs. At the recent Women's Congress in Cebu, Magpale begrudged the lack of support and funding from local government units enough "to sustain women's advocacies." Without funding, she frowned: "Dili man gud kalihok ang mga kababayn-an…"
Then again, what Roseanne Barr once averred might be up Magpale's alley. "The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power," Barr said. "You just take it." Or, leave it to the cold-blooded.
