Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

102 SESSION II
prostitutes or seeing this as a threat to their masculinity.
While the act of initiating may have its qualifications,
the issue of women’s right to refuse is unqualified. In
both countries, and especially among the Malays and
Indians in Malaysia, both women and men see sex as
duty and obligation in marriage and for women this
means that they do not really have the right to refuse.
Malay men feel that, according to Islam, it is their right
to have sex with their wives and that their wives cannot
refuse them (and women echo this male right because
they say that in Islam to refuse a husband is a sin).
Indeed both Malay and Indian women frequently
professed belief in a husband’s right to sexual satisfaction
on demand. In the Philippines, even if some women see
sex as obligation, they also feel that they have the right
to refuse, although it is rarely exercised while the men
also say women can refuse, but insist that they should
have a very “good” reason. All men in both societies see
themselves as having proprietary rights over women’s
bodies. Yet these same men also say that women should
not be forced to have sex with them. The fact is men do
not need to use force because there is always the threat,
often implicit and sometimes stated, that if their sexual
urges are not satisfied, men will either seek other women
or sue for divorce. Awareness of laws against rape in
both countries can mitigate some of these threats as has
exposure to western ideas of gender equality among urban
men, especially the more educated, and among the Chinese
in Malaysia.
Spousal violence is not rare. Yet, most men say that they
have no right to hit their wives, although many say that
they do have the right to discipline them. Muslim men
claim their religion allows them to chide or correct their
wife; while a few say it allows them to hit their wives.
But they also say that while they have the right to hit
they should not exercise it. The reason is less respect for
the wife as the weakness of women: women are weak
creatures who cannot fight back. A number of Indian
men claim that occasions when their authority and
masculinity is threatened, such as when a wife is arrogant
(“because she is working”), “rebellious” or talks back,
warrant a husband hitting her. A recurrent reason for
spousal abuse across male discourse is the wife’s refusal
or inability to meet his sexual demands: thus, violence is
a man’s assertion of the right to sexual satisfaction. For
a Muslim man, a wife’s marital infidelity can provoke
violence on his part. Many of these justifications are
echoed by men in the Philippines where spousal violence
reflects the inequities in power between the genders and
of a society where violence is seen as a way of resolving
conflicts. Men in the Philippines say that they hit women
when they get drunk or are provoked by “nagging”
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
wives but also because they simply can. Philippine and
Malaysian women have been vocal about the frequency
of forced sex and other forms of physical abuse in their
communities and they want to put an end to them. An
awareness of laws against spousal violence among a few
men in both countries delimits some of the violent actions
of men but the majority of women do not invoke their
legal rights.
Apart from physical violence, women also talk about
emotional abuse. In both countries a number of women
expressed indifference or explicitly negative attitudes in
their ability to obtain physical and emotional pleasure
from fantasy and sexual encounters. Across the
two countries, women’s words reveal a sense of
depersonalization, physical dissatisfaction, and even of
humiliation arising from the way their husbands insist
sex, the way their husbands treat them sexually and the
way their husbands threaten infidelity. All women in
both countries and across all ethnicities want men to
respect their bodies. Sex for a number of these women
rather than being a source of pleasure has become a
source of pain, anxiety and distress. The better educated,
urban men in Malaysia as in the Philippines acknowledge
marital infidelity as a form of emotional abuse.
Extramarital affairs remain firmly a male privilege and
largely a male practice although all men admit to its
immorality. In both countries women have stated a
lack of trust in their husband’s faithfulness to the marital
vow. In the Philippines women say marital infidelity
is a most painful emotion: it is hurtful to “one’s soul,
one’s feelings and one’s heart.” Yet they feel they must
tolerate it because they have few options. In both
the Philippines and Malaysia, men place the blame
squarely on nature and women for their marital
infidelities: marital infidelity is primarily a consequence
of a man’s naturally uncontrollable or insatiable
appetite and a wife’s inability or unwillingness to
satisfy him sexually. The belief in the male’s naturally
greater propensity for sex is well established across the
varying cultures and classes in these two countries to
the extent that male sexual desires must be satisfied
somehow, somewhere so that if left unsatisfied, the
compulsion may lead to rape. But rape is seen here
as a sexual act, and not an act of violence. In the
Philippines, husbands also claim that not only do wives
drive them to other women but it is also these other
women themselves who provoke the affairs by giving
them the “motivation”. In the same way, Indians have
images of woman as seductress or even of women
themselves having a stronger sexual desire or excessive
sexual needs than men. Among Indians and Malays as
well, the belief that women have a stronger sexual desire