All indigenous peoples, which we all were once, wove folklore about the origin of the world. These myths were conceived in the social conditions of our primitive past and thus are without any scientific basis. They nevertheless took root and continue to this day to underpin people’s way of relating to one another, to the world and to the supernatural power that invariably plays a central role in these myths.
Among the Tagalogs, the first man (Malakas) and woman (Maganda) emerged together from a bamboo pole that the bird Amihan split open. Among the Mandayas, man and woman came from two eggs. In both myths, woman was created neither from nor after a man. They both came into the world together, differently but equally human.
Why is it then that woman had and still has to fight for equality with man? That can only be due to the fact that the most popular and influential myth is the Judeo-Christian and Islamic story that God made Eve from the rib of Adam. That explains why woman plays a subordinate role to man much more markedly in Islamic than in Judeo-Christian countries.
(The biblical account of Adam and Eve fits the definition of a myth. It is a folk tale that is without scientific basis about the world’s creation by a supernatural power. Anyway, it chips away at nothing essential to my Catholic faith.)
Thus, if we were not colonized first by Spaniards then by Americans that believe in the myth of Eve coming from the rib of Adam, there would probably be less discrimination against women in this country. Still, our own folklore has produced what at bottom is a matriarchal society. Filipino women have an ever so slight edge in social standing over the women of countries near exclusively influenced by traditional Islamic and Judeo-Christian myths.
The biblical myth got stitched into the fabric of our psyche when we converted to Spanish medieval Catholicism. This myth explains St. Paul’s (Ephesians 5:22 & 28) admonition to wives that they be subject to their husbands even as he enjoins husbands (please note the contradiction) to respect their wives as they respect their own bodies. This could also explain why women cannot be ordained priests in the Catholic Church.
Worse still, this myth might yet explain why Filipino children grow up being taught, at home, school and Church, to avoid sexual sins primarily but not the more despicable inhuman acts of cruelty to subordinates, underpayment of worker wages, in short, of injustice to fellow humans.
In religious terms, God created man, woman and every human in between as equals. In Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy, we are parts of one organic whole some of us call God. In this whole we play different roles as equals. Equality and not the mythical subordination of woman (and of the so-called third sex) to man should govern all human relationships.
Man owes it to woman to honor and respect her as an equal. A woman might be differently configured, but in no way is she not man’s equal. If anything, woman could have come first and is the superior sex. After all, what woman was born of a man? And what man was not born of a woman? In any case, that’s how much man owes woman.