Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

leads them to concede that they may seek other partners
if their husbands fail to satisfy them sexually.
Women’s engagement with extramarital sex, while
negligible, is increasing in both countries. In Malaysia,
a newspaper account indicates a fraction but growing
number of women, especially professional women,
across ethnic groups engaging in extramarital affairs. 7
In the Philippines a survey finds a small but notable
number of women having extramarital affairs. (Natividad,
2004) But this number should be placed in the context
of the consequences if women are found out. In the
Philippines, husbands can be expected—and wives expect
this, as well—to kill their unfaithful wives.
For couples across these two countries, the variable in
the issue of marital infidelity and violence is the option
of marital dissolution. Divorce is not allowed in the
Philippines as a result of Church pressure so that women
and men have no recourse to this option; women either
tolerate the infidelity or separate but do not have the
state to enforce financial support for themselves or their
children. Malaysia allows divorce for both non-Muslims
and Muslims but culture and legal procedures are
biased towards the male.8 Among Muslims it is much
easier for a man to seek divorce because of the
procedural requirements asked of women. Divorced
Chinese women suffer the stigma of separated women
and find remarrying difficult. Among Indians divorce
is culturally unacceptable so that women would rather
suffer an unhappy marriage than be divorced.
Entitlement to fertility control and the use of
contraceptives is wished for by almost all women in
both countries because they bear the pain and the
difficulty of childbearing and, as well, the responsibility
for child-caring. But women also say that many husbands
assert or try to assert their authority in these matters
because they are men and they are heads of households.
This assertion takes the form of deciding on
what contraceptive their wives should use and not on
whether they themselves should use one.
Thus, the issue is not simply a question of technology;
it is very much entangled with male dominance. The
use of condoms is demonstrative of male sexual right.
Condoms are a contraceptive option as well as
protection from sexually transmitted diseases. Yet in
both these cases, men refuse to use them because it takes
away from sexual pleasure and women are unable to do
anything about it. In another example of complicity of
male violence and power in both countries, a few men
will hide a sexually transmitted disease from their wives
rather than risk conflict in a marriage.
ENGAGING MODERNITY: RELIGION, GENDER, AND ART 103
THE BROADER SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC
CONTEXT
The foregoing discussion demonstrates the prominence
of gender politics in sexual attitudes and behavior. But
it also points to contradictions and dissonance—the
erosion of some sexual standards, the tolerance for male
infidelity, the vulnerability of women, the anxiety of
men, among others—and the entanglement of
sexuality with the broader context of ideology and
material life. Gender and sexuality are embedded in
social and economic processes at community, country
and global levels. The broader context reveals that while
male dominance in some form is a constant, there are
three variables which are salient, and although
implicated with each other, are analytically isolable:
religio-state forces, social class and ideological
constructions (in Malaysia, ethnicity is implicated in
all these variables). Three specific instances of
intersections illustrate the salience of these variables.
First, it appears that women in both countries, but for
totally different reasons, are supportive of their men
often at the expense of gender equality in the face of
global economic changes that may destabilize their
class position. While in both countries the emphasis on
women’s role as wife and mother is highly salient if not
hegemonic and continues simultaneously to define adult
femininity and womanhood, its specific articulation has
varied across classes. In the Philippines one sees this in
the ambivalence of women who earn more than men
or of women who are breadwinners: how their work
and their income threaten their unemployed husband’s
masculinity and how careful they are not to show any
“dominance” (their word) towards them. (Womanhealth,
2003) The image of a man who is a deficient
or non-provider is particularly devastating for working
class masculinity and in the Philippines women realize
this when they choose not to challenge male sexuality
in tolerating marital infidelity, not insisting on male
contraception, giving in to sex, and not exercising their
right to refuse. The employment of women at the expense
of men in the midst of a labor-surplus economy
does not result in long term benefits—sexual or otherwise
for women. The importance of social class—and the
weakness of a state—cannot be over emphasized in the
Philippines because it is only in poor or working class
families where we have large numbers of unemployed
men and of women as breadwinners whose work makes
possible the survival of the family—household. Thus,
women appear to be putting economic matters—the
primacy of material needs of the family-household (and
perhaps also the emotional sustenance within it)—in
front of gender-based interests. Or, because of poverty,
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows