Words Amanda Juico Dela Cruz
November 12, 2024

“Call them and tell them: ‘The Mayor has a new order not to kill you, just shoot you in the vagina so—No more vagina, you’re useless.’”

Former President Rodrigo Duterte, known as The Mayor for holding the seat in Davao City for seven terms equivalent to twenty-two years, ordered the soldiers to shoot female guerrilla fighters in the vagina. He said it right before two hundred former communists. He knew he was being live streamed for the people of the Republic of the Philippines to watch from our own homes. It was an order from the Commander-in-Chief. Yet, the audience laughed. Of course, his spokesperson said that it was not an actual order, but only a joke.

But it was more than a joke for Goldie Poblador, who was born and raised in Manila, and had moved to New York City then. She was struck. She remembered that former President Donald Trump said something equally misogynistic: “...when you’re a star, they let you do it...Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.” It was from a recording of a private conversation that was published by The Washington Post. “As both a woman and an immigrant,” Poblador said in an interview by Dona Gonsalves for The Wonder Journal by Adora, “I was feeling really, really censored and silenced by this and I felt that my presence here was somewhat in danger.”

Women’s rights advocates in the Philippines and in the United States were appalled and so they made statements condemning those made by strongmen, no less than state leaders. Poblador joined the condemnation too. In her studio, she delicately blew glass to form vulva-shaped drinkware in which one can literally drink from. A great discomfort was caused by the derogatory statements made about the female body that she decided to render these bodies sensuously into something beautiful and feminine— her way of reclaiming what was turned into something ugly and masculine. The process of which contrasted the callous treatment of the female body by strongmen.

The gustatory element is part of the aesthetic experience of this multi-sensory installation called Babae, which literally translated as “female” and “woman” in the Filipino language. The drinkware has a clitoris on it that the process of drinking resembles clitoral stimulation. “It seems clear to me that men, in fact, fear the clitoris as a threat to their masculinity,” Anne Koedt declared in her essay, The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. Penetration became the default mode of female pleasure, but this is all thanks to the male gaze. The truth is that penetration became an act of violence and domination. It even embedded itself in our language, as analyzed by Robert Baker in his essay Language of Sex: Our Conception of Sexual Intercourse. It is always “Jane was fucked by John” or “John fucked Jane.” Jane: the receiver, the passive, the object. John: the doer, the active, the subject. This is true in English, but it is true in Filipino too. “Si Maria ay natira ni Juan” or “Tinira ni Juan si Maria.” “Tira” is an act of attack in Filipino.