Coming Out of Grandmother
Posted: August 31, 2014 Filed under: Body, Family, Movement, Woman, Woman's Bodies | Tags: Death, Family, Grandmother, Grief, Memory, Women's Bodies 64 Comments2007
I saw a woman at the bank the other day. A bank teller. She had the same kind of liver spots on her face that my grandmother used to have, right on the side of her cheeks by her eyes. She had laugh lines like my grandmother did. The shape of her face was almost exactly like hers. So was the texture of her skin. I wondered if the woman’s skin, like my grandmother’s skin, is what old lady Filipina skin is supposed to look like… like a coconut but not so hard, smooth even though it looks rough.
Seeing this woman was like looking at grandmother again, as if she were standing in front of me even though it wasn’t really her. The teller also had drawn in eyebrows, except my grandmother never used black eyeliner to pencil in her eyebrows. She always used a brown pencil. (Although when my grandmother was in her seventies once, she drew one of her eyebrows in blue because she was in a hurry and didn’t notice. When my sister pointed it out hours later my grandmother laughed so hard that she had to put her hand over her mouth to keep the rest of her laughter from spilling out all over the floor.)
I wanted to touch this bank teller’s face. I wanted to press my face next to hers and inhale deep to see if she smelled like Pond’s cold cream and Johnson’s baby powder, just like my grandmother. If I could have stood in front of the teller window longer I would have looked at her hands to see if they were wrinkled in the same places where my grandmother’s fingers had been wrinkled too.
The Womb as Navigator, Executive Advisor, and Source of Feminine Power
Posted: August 19, 2014 Filed under: Body, Female Power, Feminine Power, Feminism, Womb | Tags: Feminism, Memory, Power, Tantric Dance of Feminine Power, Womb, Women's Bodies, Wonder Woman 49 CommentsI love to drop into my womb. I first learned about this practice when I started studying The Tantric Dance of Feminine Power™ over ten years ago. “Drop into your womb” is one of the instructions the teacher gives you before you can dance.
As someone who was used to connecting to my body from the outside-in—usually secondhand through the male gaze—I’d never thought to connect to my body from inside of myself, let alone to my womb of all places.
The Story of a Woman in Sexual Pleasure
Posted: May 30, 2014 Filed under: Body, Feminism, Pleasure, Sexism, Sexual Pleasure, Woman | Tags: Bodies, Feminism, Masturbation, Memory, Sexism, Sexual Pleasure, Sexuality, Women's Bodies 84 CommentsA few years ago I was asked to participate in a storytelling show. The piece I read was called “My Vibrator Story.” I had written it in a workshop and test read the story at the end of class. The audience, made up of the other participants, was primarily women that day. My story, a personal tale about masturbation, ended up getting lots of laughs—so much so that I was invited to share it in front of a much larger, public audience.
But when the time came to read “My Vibrator Story” at this bigger event—no one had told me there would be over 100 people there—I bombed in my delivery of the piece. I indicated to the audience when I wanted them to laugh. I kept looking at them and smiling as I read as if to say, “This is one big joke, let’s not take me or my story too seriously.” The audience’s response, as I read my work and when I finished, was lukewarm.
On Mother’s Day Greetings and the Sacred Feminine
Posted: May 19, 2014 Filed under: Body, Female Power, Feminism, Objectification/Sexualization, Sexism, Woman | Tags: Bodies, Embodied, Feminine Awakening, Feminism, Memoir, Memory, Mother, Mother's Day, Power, Sacred Feminine, The Tantric Dance of Feminine Power, Woman, Women's Bodies 31 CommentsOn Mother’s Day, I deleted a Facebook post before I had a chance to publish it. The update was going to acknowledge all the moms that I know. The reason I never posted the message was that there was more to it. The post in its entirety would have said: “Happy Mother’s Day… so grateful to you moms for embodying the Sacred Feminine.”
We live in a world where greeting card companies have come up with all kinds of ways to say Happy Mother’s Day—from funny greetings, to the poetic kind, to religious-themed greetings, to cards that are purposely inappropriate. Still, I hesitated to put up my greeting because I worried that someone out there might think I was just being “woo-woo” spiritual or, even worse, take offense that I’d linked “mothers” to the “sacred feminine”—as if to put the two together would be blasphemous.
As a teenager and through my twenties I didn’t see much use for my femininity except for whatever purpose it could serve for attracting the opposite sex. After I grew breasts and hips I learned how to wiggle and sashay in such a way that if I walked into a room you’d have to look at me. I would constantly bat my eyelashes, flip my hair from side to side to give off a “Charlie’s Angels” effect, and speak from my throat (rather than my diaphragm) so my voice would sound huskier.
Facing the Vagina
Posted: April 18, 2014 Filed under: Body, Body Image, Female Power, Feminism, Pleasure, Vagina, Woman | Tags: 101 Vagina, Babies, Bodies, Body, Body Image, Labiaplasty, Memory, Menstruation, Philip Werner, Vagina, Women's Bodies 48 CommentsI am a 9-year-old living with my family in Argentina. The day is so hot that if it weren’t a Saturday and we were at school the teachers would have fed us popsicles at recess to keep our temperatures from rising.
We are swimming in the shallow end of a pool. There are five of us.
It’s my turn to use the scuba mask. The other girls are bobbing around in a row.
I take a deep breath before dropping underwater… as I float by, each girl pushes the bottom of her bathing suit to the side to show me what’s behind the nylon fabric… thin slits between flesh are all I see… and then I’m up and out of the water, greeted by giggles as I gasp for air.
I take my place in line and pass the mask down to the next curious girl.
V-Day: Stopping the Violence
Posted: February 13, 2014 Filed under: Feminism, Violence Against Females, Woman | Tags: Abuse, Domestic violence, Eve Ensler, Feminism, Human rights, Memoir, Memory, V-Day, Vagina Monologues, Violence, Woman, Women's Bodies, WPLongform 58 CommentsIn my twenties one day, I found myself seated in a room of other women seeking support from each other. Looking around, I felt like a pretender.
As I listened to them share their stories… a husband smashing a dinner plate over the head of a wife, a brother high on heroine stabbing his sister with a knife, a mother with ribs broken apart by her son… I sank further down in my chair wondering if these women might be offended that I’d even bothered to show up.
The Vagina Talks
Posted: January 31, 2014 Filed under: Body, Body Image, Feminism, Sexuality, Uncategorized, Vagina, Woman | Tags: Bodies, Body, Body Image, Eve Ensler, Feminism, Memoir, Memory, Sexism, V-Day, Vagina, Vagina Monologues, Woman, Women's Bodies 58 CommentsWhy is it that I feel squeamish about saying “vagina” in public? I didn’t realize how much of an issue this still was for me until about a month ago when on a crowded plane, my boyfriend cracked some joke with a punch line ending with the word “hoo-hoo.” Immediately turning into a word monitor, I looked at him and said “SHH!!”
As I turned to make sure that the little girl seated in the row behind me didn’t hear what he said—I caught myself. Why am I freaking out?
Lose the Labels, See the Woman
Posted: December 13, 2013 Filed under: Body, Feminism, Sexism, Women in Media | Tags: Body, Body Image, Feminism, Gender, Memory, Sexism, Woman, Women's Bodies 29 CommentsAs someone who was born in the Philippines, I was thrilled to find out about the Pantene commercial airing there that has gone viral online. In it the contrasting ways that successful men and women are stereotyped are shown.
My first job out of college was as a video journalist for CNN. I worked so hard during the 4 ½ years I was there that every time I was eligible for promotion, I got the job. By my third year, I was writing and producing international news for the network’s CNN International channel.
I enjoyed what I was doing so much that working overnights, weekends, and coming in on my days off were not inconveniences but part of the job description as far as I was concerned. But what I hated about getting ahead—at the time, my movement in the company was considered rather rapid—was the whispering that went on behind my back.
Stories From the Belly 