Processing #53 for non-compliance

December 16, 2021 5:48 AM

✨NO. 1 FILIPINO GIRL ✨ A comic about social expectations in a dystopian Philippines. [Threadreader, PDF on Gumroad]
posted by simmering octagon (9 comments total)

I write this with the disclaimer that I am an expatriate who left the Phiiippines when I was a teen, and has only been back sporadically for two weeks at a time since we left, but I listen to stories from my mother and aunts, and so some of this is secondhand impression, and it's had very little direct impact on my life.

The middle class society that my mother grew up into ran on chismis (gossip). She couldn't go on a date with a classmate without coming home to find out that her mother and sisters knew about it. She couldn't deviate from the specific script of what was expected of her without word going out to all of her cousins and friends who would relish her good two shoes nature being tarnished. The global whisper network that's sort of written up for laughs in Crazy Rich Asians has absolutely been a thing in her life, and when she met a promising young man who dreamed of going to America to live away from the scrutiny and judgement of her social class, she literally ran into his arms.

Which is to say that a lot of this comic resonates with what my mother described of her life. I had thought that society would've evolved past that, but this sort of change happens slowly.
posted by bl1nk at 6:08 AM on December 16, 2021 [7 favorites]

Refreshing to see comics dealing with topics other than American superheroes or Japanese high schools.
posted by otherchaz at 7:03 AM on December 16, 2021

I wish I'll say on my death bed "I told you science fiction will save us" but I'm afraid it will be just "I told you..."
posted by hat_eater at 7:07 AM on December 16, 2021

I had thought that society would've evolved past that, but this sort of change happens slowly.

The saddest part is that once again, women are the fiercest enforcers of their oppression. Note that Denise's evaluator isn't some male government bureaucrat - they are a woman who exemplifies what the system is supposed to produce.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:35 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Twitter is such an awful platform for something like this. Would love to read it, but not enough to log into Twitter, and that leaves me with a small, cropped images.
posted by kjs3 at 10:30 AM on December 16, 2021

I mean, there's a link to a free PDF in the post and the images in threadreader are clickable without being logged in...
posted by simmering octagon at 10:39 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

The saddest part is that once again, women are the fiercest enforcers of their oppression. Note that Denise's evaluator isn't some male government bureaucrat - they are a woman who exemplifies what the system is supposed to produce.

Is this really, "Women suck," though? I thought it was more, "Society/patriarchal systems suck." Denise's evaluator could have thought that the best way to earn enough money for their dad's cancer treatments (or whatever personal/familial crises they went through in their time) was to conform and become the #1 Filipino girl -> raise their allowance -> make a good match -> "get taken care of" by a partner. We all have different ways of coping and adapting in a broken system.

In my immediate family, I think things are changing slowly, though we emigrated two decades ago so maybe that has something to do with it. The rude comments from nanays and titas have slowed down a lot (you gained weight / why are you still single / when are you having babies). A significant number of my extended family have said they are not interested in having kids. The fact that they felt comfortable saying this out loud is a big thing. A few people came out and the sky did not fall down.

Thank you for sharing this!
posted by tinydancer at 11:26 AM on December 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

When I click the links in the threadreader, I get a "login" overlay that I can't bypass to an image. When I click the PDF link, I get "Log in to buy this". So...
posted by kjs3 at 12:04 PM on December 16, 2021

"I had thought that society would've evolved past that, but this sort of change happens slowly." Who's to say it hasn't? I know you left ages ago, so your perspective may be a little flawed here. (Full disclosure: am Filipino, resident in the Philippines.)
posted by micketymoc at 5:44 PM on December 16, 2021 [1 favorite]