To all the people who viewed Imelda during the past week:
Did anybody else notice the remarkable physical similarity between writer/socialite Carmen ‘Chitang’ Guerrero Nakpil and everybody’s favourite cantankerous old lady Bea Arthur
a.k.a. Dorothy Zbornak of The Golden Girls? It’s not really evident, but once you’ve seen the film, the resemblance is pretty undeniable, methinks.
Womanity refers to an annual campaign, undertaken by Summit Media and the ad firm J. Walter Thompson. It feautres a series of themed print ads, distributed throughout all of Summit’s glossy mags (including the Philippine editions of Cosmopolitan and FHM), with the aim of effecting positive change in the represenation of Filipina women.
According to the official Womanity site, last year’s debut campaign was intended to: empower women to stand up for themselves and their rights. Ten print ads encouraged women to defy domestic abuse, stereotypes (“bimbo”, “needy bitch”), and gender discrimination.
The present campaign is dubbed Show Some Womanity. Its ads depict the efforts of ten select women who have gotten involved with social work at the community level. Its stated goal is to inspire others — both women and men — to do the same.
First, the good news: the new campaign indirectly highlights crucial social justice and environmental issues, with an focus on tackling specific problems. Myles coordinates “learning activities and storytelling” in a group home for sexually-abused girls, emphasizing the importance of interpersonal communication, as the traumatized youth move from being ‘victims’ to ‘survivors’. Sandy offers free psychological counseling in a government-run prison, thus addressing the lack of concern ordinarily given to the mental and emotional needs of inmates. Senny plants trees on the mountainside to reverse the ill effects of deforestation.
Furthermore, the current spots often point out the liberatory qualities of art, creativity, and self-expression. Joy’s foundation offers dance lessons to street kids. Monica has uses everything from board games to kite-flying, to provide an outlet for young cancer victims undergoing chemotherapy. Their stories prove that leisure and cultural activities can be just as signficant as policy changes, financial assistance, or material resources.
Likewise, their experiences illustrate the power wielded by individuals to uplift the well-being of marginalized sectors, within the confines of existing institutions. (And if one feels the compelling urge to help them out, contact information is generously provided.)
It’s damn near impossible to fault these women for their voluntarism. Their efforts provide hands-on, practical relief from the hardships created by macro-scale, structuralized problems. Chances are, their actions offer hope, relief, maybe even will-to-live, for their benificiaries, even in a small way. There’s no disputing that claim.
However, the media campaign, as a whole, falls short of its lofty ideals, on several counts:
Show Some Womanity makes no attempt to expose the reasons behind these “unfortunate” circumstances. It fails to consider the social, political, and economic factors that give rise to shoddy healthcare facilities, or denuded forests, or inadequate public education services. These real-world troubles are presented as something to be immediately dealt with, in and of themselves, rather than viewing them as the result of flawed systems or institutions.
It also offers a narrow perspective of the means by which these issues can be addressed. All the women being profiled engage in remedial treatment of social ills, by giving up a chunk of their time, energy, and resources. They sacrifice a little of their privelege in favor of momentarily ‘sharing the burden’. Thus, stepping out of one’s air-conditioned comfort zone is viewed as an end in itself; the ad campaign never questions the structural inequalities that allow these women to carry out such work, in the first place. It’s a thoroughly burgis concept of ‘good deeds’, the kind that Mother Theresa popularized, Princess Diana is remembered for, and Imelda Marcos has built into a delusional complex.
Moreover, this image can be readily lauded by self-righteous nuns in exclusive Catholic schools, as well as multinational corporations looking for tax cuts on the basis of social outreach initiatives. It’s ‘safe’, unchallenging, and ultimately limited, no matter how many positive outcomes it leads to.
The media campaign leaves no room for fair trade programs that challenge the hegemony of sweatshop-based mass production. It overlooks the work of legislative advocates, peace workers, labor leaders, culture jammers, and direct action activists. It inhibits our capacity to visualize alternative means of distributing capital.
Worse still, its approach frames outreach work as a matter of personal responsibility. Magazine readers are being stirred into action, not because of a desire to correct an unjust system of wealth distribution, but to alleviate our shame for being complicit in it — it’s all one huge fucking guilt trip. By presenting us with glowing examples of selfless charity, we’re reminded of all the good that won’t come out of us.
Choice selections from the Philippine ‘blogverse’,
In the last few weeks.
Lille delivers a brief eulogy for Sanctum,
Which closed its doors for the final time on July 19?
Poetry is for everybody, or so Neva passionately believes.
She takes issue with the association between poetry and ‘high-brow’ snobbery. Not content with a straightforward literary rant, she also offers keen ideas for making poetry accessible for mass readership.
On a related note, Maita began with a quote from Adrienne Rich, and ended up with a fascinating discussion about the world-chaning qualities of poetry. (See the comments.)
Finally, Lia deftly explains the massive public sympathy for President Arroyo’s decision to withdraw Filipino tropps from Iraq, in exchange for the life of hostage truck driver, Angelo de la Cruz. An excerpt:
[I]n a third world country like the Philippines, where unemployment is in double digits, the overseas worker is a hero unlike any other. Almost everyone has at least one person in the family who has given up everything to work a shitty job abroad so they can send almost all the money they make back home to send their siblings or their nieces and nephews to school, make sure their sick parents can have surgery, build a proper house so their loved ones don’t have to sleep in ramshackle huts. We call them bagong bayanis, literally “our new heros”, because they make enormous personal sacrifices for the sake of their families. New Yorkers have the firefighters and policemen of September 11th; we have our overseas workers. That’s how much they mean to us.
