Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

100 SESSION II
sector such as batik printing and street vending, or in
the service sector as restaurant work or cleaning. For the
male responsibility study, the Philippine respondents
consisted of 223 married and single women and men
mainly from working class and peasant communities.
Many had received secondary education. Most of the
single respondents were students. The married women
from the rural and transitional communities took care
of the home, worked in farms and backyard piggeries,
or engaged in vending while all urban women worked
in an export-processing factory. The married men worked
as farmers and fishermen, in the informal sector, or in
export-processing factories; a few were unemployed.
The 174 Malaysian respondents from working and
middle class households were largely Malays and
Indians working in plantations and agricultural areas; a
small number worked in urban areas. A few were middleclass
Malays, Indian and Chinese. (Thus, Chinese
Malaysians, the majority of whom are middle class, were
underrepresented in the male responsibility study). The
low income rural Indian respondents worked in rubber
or oil palm estates while the rural Malays farmed cash
crops, mainly rice and tobacco; the urban Indians, who
lived in squatter communities, were mainly employed as
factory workers, laborers, or service providers. Ethnic
Indians constitute a sizeable proportion of the urban
poor and together with rural Malays that of low income
estate labor population. The majority of the Malaysian
respondents had at least secondary education. The
method for data gathering in these researches consisted
of focus group discussions, with follow up in-depth
interviews to elicit life histories, and surveys. Other surveys
and studies in both countries supplemented these main
sources. I also carried out personal and write-in
interviews in Malaysia.
SEXUAL ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR IN
MALAYSIA AND THE PHILIPPINES: SOME
THEMES
In both Malaysia and the Philippines, the theme of
manhood and masculinity is dominated by ideas of
virility, strength, power, and control in heterosexual
relationships while that of femininity is suffused with
submission and nurturance. These ideas define who has
the right to sex, the right to pleasure, and the right to
marital fidelity.
The social dominance of men is exercised in their dominance
in the sexual sphere: they have much more freedom of
sexual expression and much more social support for
their sexuality. Men continue to have the prerogative
in the sexual sphere while women remain at a particular
cultural disadvantage in terms of their right to practice
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
sex, much less enjoy it. Malaysia’s ethnic diversity does
not temper male dominance as much as it plays out
variations on a theme. In the Philippines and Malaysia,
nature is called on as support for male privilege in the
sexual; in Malaysia, religion is added justification for
the Muslims, while it is culture for the Indians and the
Chinese.
The double standard prevails. In almost every aspect of
sexual behavior the standard is right for men, wrong
for women. Men are the privileged gender in almost
all aspects of sexual life: when to have sex, with whom,
how and of what sort. They are also privileged in
reproductive life: they make most of the decisions on
contraceptive use, which one and when to use them and
how many children to have.
The literature in both countries demonstrates how men
and women’s perceptions of their own and others’ sexualities
are mediated by different meanings of male and female
sexuality. Male discourse on sex is filled with the physical
aspects of satisfaction, pleasure and lust while female
discourse is flowing with love and intimacy.
The theme of women’s vulnerability to male dominance
is recurrent in the literature of both countries. Spousal
abuse ranging from hitting women to womanizing,
forced sex, unwanted sex acts, and infecting with a
sexually transmitted disease has become endemic to
sexual relationships. Spousal abuse is a repeated theme
of women’s complaints about their sexual relationships.
Abuse also spans across generations.
Yet while these are the generalities, these themes are
worked out in everyday life in a myriad of contradictory
ways, sometimes conflicting, other times reinforcing.
Male dominance and its version of masculinity are
simultaneously compromising and uncompromising,
and thus both challenged and reasserted at personal and
institutional levels. Female subordination is pervasive
and sometimes justified but it is also to some extent
contested and resisted.
How are these contradictions worked out in the light of
globalizing processes?
Studies in the 1970s and 1980s of women in productionrelated
activities in export-processing factories in
Malaysia and the Philippines reveal specific intersections
between economic change and sexual behavior. (Ong,
1987; Ariffin, 1994; Snow, 1977) Wage work for these
rural to urban migrant women while proving difficult
in terms of lay-offs, low wages and labor repression, did
give them some measure of social and sexual freedom.