Now/here no/where woman

Undone. Come.

Tomorrow at 4PM, Mt. Cloud Bookshop will host a very special Author's Talk and Book Signing with 2011 CNN Hero, Robin Lim. To my mind, she is a true Wonder Woman. She tirelessly works for gentle births and healthy motherhood for people all over the world, she delivers babies with her own hands day in and day out, she has raised her own family and is now a grandmother, and she somehow found the time in all this important work to write seventeen books so far! She is one of those persons that make you wonder whether she is an ordinary human. When you meet her, you will see that yes, she is human, but extraordinarily so.

Let's think about breasts and their super-powers with these four women whose work I admire. Holly McNish on breastfeeding in public. Senator Pia Cayetano on the breast-feeding law and the need to embrace the breastfeeding culture in the Philippines. Amanda Palmer responds to the Daily Mail's coverage of her boob falling out of her bra during a performance in the Glastonbury Festival. (I love it when she motions for the crowd to calm down and says, "It's just a naked woman!" Haha! The lyrics of her letter to the Daily Mail appear here .) And last but not least, Ibu Robin Lim, who was chosen CNN Hero of 2011 for her tireless work as a midwife and her worldwide campaign for gentle births and healthy motherhood for everyone. Here she breastfeeds her eldest daughter, back in 1976. Source: Ibu Robin Lim's facebook page.

From Karlo Altomonte: "... some of those inside the Manila Cathedral that day were simply to pray, get closer to God. Perhaps one or two were praying for forgiveness, for the soul of a departed loved one, for salvation. Not everyone inside that church that day were either pro or anti-RH bill, some of them perhaps don’t care about it at all, so I will play the party pooper and stand by my opinion that while the cause is a very worthy one, there are other ways."

I just love firebrands who will stick their necks out for what they believe in, and who do it with style and a large dose of imagination too. Some people talk too much but do nothing, while others simply can't see past their own noses. I, for one, am obsessed with this 2-week old zit on my nose that just refuses to shrivel up and die. In his advocacy for reproductive health in the Philippines, a country held hostage in the dark ages by the Church,  Carlos Celdran takes things a big step further and says it like it is.

THIS IS A CONDOM AD "If an individual chooses to abstain, chooses to have sex before marriage, chooses to be promiscuous, chooses not to have children when married, chooses natural methods, chooses to have threesomes at high noon with a jumbo pack of condoms and a hot pink leather, he/she has that right. It’s called a democracy. Judge him/her for it, if you will, but the government cannot. A ban on sexual intercourse has yet to be included in the Constitution." The rest of the piece is brilliant too.

... are flat. They barely fill the bikinis I like to wear. And if you came to this post hoping to find something titillating, you are about to be disappointed further. Another fact about me and my breasts is that I try, as much as possible, to keep them free from bra-bondage. Given that there's nothing much there needing support, I don't really see the point. I wonder about our skewed notions of immodesty. Is going au naturel beneath the shirt and not wearing a bra more immodest than faking larger breast size and forcing the cleavage issue with underwiring and padded bras? (Unfortunately, the only kind of bra you can find in this country that doesn't have painful underwiring or extra padding is the trainer or the sports bra. What does that tell you?) This question of im/modesty reminds me of the legendary Laurie Anderson's Smoke Rings, in which she asks, Que es mas macho? Pineapple o knife?... Que es mas macho? Lightbulb o schoolbus?... Que es mas macho? Iceb...

Senator Villar would have us believe that he is the Guardian of Filipino Morality. I believe he is Small-Mindedness Personified and his Anti-Obscenity and Pornography Senate Bill No. 2464 demonstrates this beautifully. Nash, baka ka ma-arrest on arrival if this bill is passed! Why it doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to see how sex education or discussions on reproductive health could be considered "obscene" and thereby penalized. Here's John Silva's take on this ridiculous bill . Take the time to peruse the comments as well. Read it and weep, people. The powers that be are making idiots of us all. IMAGE CREDITS: JOHN SILVA P.S. John Silva draws an interesting comparison between this and a similar bill in Indonesia, where Muslims are the majority. Makes for lots of things to chew on combined with the link I posted above to an article on Islamic pop culture -- literature in particular!

This is my second year in high school PTA. After last year's PTA experience I swore to myself I wouldn't get roped in again but I seem to have this terrible compulsion to accept -- or worse, volunteer! -- for time-gobbling things that I don't need and that don't need me. So last week, to my dismay, I found myself in the position of secretary for the Education Committee of the PTA. Great. I was right back where I was last year. The Education Committee is in charge of organizing field trips, workshops, and other extra-curricular activities for the kids that will enhance their values, leadership skills, and spirituality. (Sounds awfully righteous, doesn't it?) But there was something notably different about this ED-COMM. Last year's ED-COMM had three pastors and one assistant pastor. We spent 50-minutes of every meeting I attended debating values, leadership, and spirituality. There were debates about whether you could teach values separately from spirituality, and...

GMA's legacy may be putting more and more mothers at risk. Read it and weep. We never had separation of Church and State in this cowntry. We're still in the Dark Ages of reproductive health. This is for Manang Precious , who we haven't seen in over a month now.

Three cheers for the Rebel Without A Clue! Liberated Pinay Power!

I went to church today for the baptism of my inaanak, Armstrong. At the sermon during the mass prior to the baptism, the priest preached against divorce, contraceptives, and abortion, because "God wants all Catholic families to be just like the Holy Family." He said, "Even if 300 congressmen say that divorce is good, God still says that divorce is bad! Huwag natin pansinin ang mga conressman-congressman at senador-senador na yan!" Be afraid. Be very afraid. I felt a burning sensation in my skull, early warning signs of an oncoming migraine. I left early, thereby blowing my cover. Now everybody knows I'm the evil fairy godmother.

One of the most memorable things I ever saw in Jakarta was a bus with a condom ad emblazoned all over it's side. In bright pink, green, and yellow letters it promised pleasure and variety in its line of different shapes and flavors of rubbers. (Nash, don't chastise me. I know rubbers are erasers in Oxford.) On this particular bus, the highlight of the ad was The Durian Condom. A giant durian was painted on its rear end. I couldn't figure out from the ad whether it was a durian-spiked condom, a durian-flavored condom, or both, and whether the condoms were available on that bus line. Much to my disappointment, the durian condom was out of stock in every drugstore, grocery, and warung in which I looked and asked. It is either extremely popular, or a total myth, or I was hallucinating. By the way, unlike the Peelipins, where we are still sooo 19th century about sex, Indonesia has a policy of two-children-only per family and this is kept in place by the easy availability of birt...

With apologies, to Frenzy condoms, co-sponsors to the BWG event mentioned above. But I just love this ad.

While busy procrastinating on the wide wide web, I found an excuse for having my say about sex (education) in the wake of Hallmark's Father's Day and the confluence of the following: a post on Frank Cimatu's blog about a new ad for Trojan condoms, a post on Howie Severino's blog about sperm, and an old article on BBC about sex abstinence . (I love following links and reading old news.) I like the Trojan ad. Anthropomorphic pigs in a bar. One of them buys a condom from a vending machine and turns into a handsome young man and immediately attracts a pretty young woman. I think the fairy tale aspect of this advertisement will appeal greatly to children. It has the brilliant potential of making future condom-users out of them, the way the indelible Marlboro ads make future smokers out of kids fascinated by the appeal of thundering hooves, heaving rivers, the raw, the wild, and the leather-faced legend of a man (All that in a cigarette!). The Trojan ad should be shown in t...

Twice or thrice a week Manang Precious gets on a commuters' van in San Fernando, La Union and pays the reasonable fare for the ride up the mountains, to Baguio. She carries with her two basket-loads of fish, meat, and vegetables. On a typical day, one basket will contain at least three different kinds of fish from the San Fernando market. Once in a while Manang Precious, or Precy as we call her, brings octopus. She also sells longganisa, tinapa, pork chops, beef, eggplant, puto, kutchinta, mangoes, chicos, mushrooms, okra, and other lowland vegetables. My guess is that she begins her day with 6 to 8 kilos in each basket. She says a good day is when her baskets are empty before noon, and her purse is filled with bills and coins adding up to 1,500 to 2,000 pesos gross. Out of this amount, she gets a profit of about 150 pesos. The rest goes back to her suppliers. She lugs her baskets of goods from house to house in our neighborhood. Some of us have known her for years and are gratefu...