Death of a Metaphor

Feminists argue that women are not their own barriers to advancement. They blame the situation of women not being competitively active in the traditional workforce to the concept of “glass ceiling,” a metaphor that represents the gender biased condition where the workplace is more conducive to men and unwelcoming to women.

According to feminists, to “break the glass ceiling,” and thereby find upward mobility in the workplace, women have to overcome the codes and models of traditional workplaces that were fashioned for men’s needs, without input from women.

Traditional employment implies that employers don’t always look first at women when hiring or promoting because women want different things from their jobs. While men are driven to look at salary and chances for advancement, women look more often for meaning, satisfaction, flexibility and personal development – putting money and promotions further down the list of priorities.

The ‘glass ceiling’ came into being because of the traditional implication that women, in general, lack the “hunger” for promotion, making them less competitive, thereby not useful for corporate advancement.

To put it in simpler terms, the corporate rat race to the top mostly has male rats because the female rats are usually impeded by the proverbial glass ceiling that they first have to break if they are so predisposed to join the male rats in the rat race.

I will surely earn the ire of the feminists out there, but will nonetheless say that if women are interested in a career, they won’t have time for children; and if they’re bent on rearing children, they won’t have the time, effort, and imagination for getting to the top of a career. The notion that domestic engineering is a career in itself is purposely not used here. By career, I mean the work that a woman does outside of home management.

Hence, it is the female instinct to be more interested in having a family rather than join the competitive workforce that’s really the reason why we don’t see many women at the top of traditional careers. The biological calling supersedes any gender biased constrictions of the workplace as being the reason why women do not advance to the hilt in their careers. Sooner or later, most women will opt out of the workplace, or slacken on the workplace ambition, to raise a family.

This harks back to the question as to why women didn’t create civilizations. While men marched on to conquer territory and widen empires, as well as slew to guard the ramparts, women were left at home to take care of the brood and the flock. The argument that women did not establish civilizations is as debatable as the one about men unable to learn how to change diapers. Without homes, brood, and flock, the men wouldn’t have had a civilization to build on.

Superwoman must be single. And she chose to stay that way.

Had she decided to have kids, then she might claim to be a Superwoman as Mom. But, as we all know by now, this one will not keep her Superwoman title for long. Being a SuperMom and getting to the top of a career (as we traditionally know careers to be) do not mix.

Thus, the metaphor of the “glass ceiling” is dead.

And a dead metaphor is moot.

The glass ceiling metaphor was created and written by utterly ambitious men who did not want more participants in the rat race. That’s all there is to it. And, of course, (as usual) it’s been propagated by male-bashing feminists who are really men in drag.

Alpha Female: The Bitch

If you never get lost in traffic or look good in a miniskirt – or both – chances are you may be called an alpha female. This one is as strong and faithful to the attributes of gender as an alpha male is. Sexuality is the overriding principle and factor for success with both the alpha female and the alpha male.

Think Margaret Thatcher – durable, resilient, iron-clad, iron-willed, and vain with appearance. Hers was also the only cabinet with no other woman in it. The alpha female is the devil who wears Prada. In charge, aloof, and ahead just like Anna Wintour, the editor of US Vogue.

The alpha female looks comfortable in the boardroom, and comes power-dressed. She may wear a tie but with such élan as matching it with fire red lipstick. She is also, most likely, not married nor about to have children. Neither does she obsess about relationships. Her focus on ambition is second to none.

Now, if you’re a homemaker and nurturer of family, you can hardly be considered an alpha female. This is because the alpha female syndrome is based on a male model – or, more appropriately, the masculine model (this is the uncanny quality of being a provider instead of nurturer).

The tie-with-killer-lipstick package is really a rebellion against male domination – giving credence to the movement of female domination. The alpha syndrome in both genders depends entirely on the concept of innate superiority.

Which is really what a huge part of the feminist movement has turned out to be. Feminism is inescapably beholden to the concept of male domination because it is the revolt against the supremacy of the male.

In the same light, alpha females behave aggressively towards their climb to the top. In the process, and because the world is essentially patriarchal, the alpha females are really mavericks or gender hybrids.

In spite of much ado about the uber-feminist, not many women really like to be an alpha female. In the first place, not many women like alpha females. Women want to be liked.

Which brings on the most important connotation of the alpha female. This one is the bitch – all at once frightening and domineering.

The alpha female is yet another by-product that trickled out of the feminine stereotype. She is both an icon and a caricature. She is seen as inhuman rather than superhuman. While she may be envied for her talent and capability (not to mention, overflowing sexuality), she suffers from reduced empathy from others because empathy naturally subtracts from her intractable superiority. Total achievement is the focus of the alpha female.

She also despises alpha males who are, in turn, terrified of her. Male-bashing is the alpha female’s favorite pastime.

The bitch is the bitter female. Can you think of a male counterpart of the bitch in the English language?

If you can’t, then there’s probably none.

You know why?

Because there is no bitter male.

And what’s more absurd is the fact that instead of employing the best female qualities, alpha females ape the masculine. And because they pattern themselves from the male model, alpha females are really men in drag.

A Rose Upon a Hard Rock

Her name is a vernacular derivative of the word rose. Rosing was beautiful, all right, and her life was not lacking in thorns. But the woman was a fighter long before women of her generation knew how to fight.

Our common knowledge about her starts only from around circa WWII. It’s as if her story came to be told from this time onward. She lost her only brother during that world war, and fiercely protected her mother and young daughter from the abuses of the Japanese imperial forces that had occupied the Philippines at that time. They would hide in caves in the mountainous regions of northern Philippines whenever the Japanese would conduct carpet bombing over the areas. On quieter days, she would haul an entire carabao that had lost its way, bring the animal to her family’s hiding place, butcher it, cut it up, and sun dry the meat for hungrier days to add to the staple root crops that she dug on mountainsides.

Much to her mother’s alarm, she would leave their “home” – wherever they would be holing up for the moment – and buy a pineapple or two, slice up the fruits and sell them at retail to other families in hiding. These business ventures would have her walking around. Stubborn and fearless that she was, she would refuse to curtsy and bow to the Japanese soldiers at military sentries, a mandated gesture known as “kumbawa,” another local etymological derivative of the Japanese custom of greeting called konbanwa. This predictably earned the ire of the incomprehensible soldiers who were widely known for their irrational bursts of anger.

Still, she fought back in her own little way and stood her ground. She knew too well that under the Japanese rule, the performance of the bow was a sign of complete subservience to the colonizers and total recognition of their ownership of the Philippines. Her charm must have eventually captivated the soldiers. It was said that missing or skipping this perfunctory bow would cost someone his head by the ever-polished bayonet.

In the swinging 1950s, when the Philippines was enjoying a post-Liberation business boom, she hauled her mother and daughter to the capital city of Manila and single-handedly opened what would be the biggest fruit distributorship outlet in one of the major public markets in the city. Her incomes grew exponentially as she fearlessly augmented her products to include black market American brand cigarettes. In a time when the police was considered an indubitable force to reckon with, she defied all threats that sprang from her not willing to be a victim of police extortion.

With her mother gone and her daughter married in the 1980s, she decided to retire from the harried life of tending to business everyday. She was getting old. Her strength and energy became directly proportional to what was left of her waning business.

She bought herself a small piece of land in the far outskirts of the city where the sharp-edged cogon grass was taller than humans. She saw what remained of her future in a place that was not even fit for humans. During the following months, she single-handedly hewed the tall grass till only the moist reddish earth was visible. Every morning, she walked around on the hillsides, lugging two large empty bags, and proceeded to pick up huge stones. In no time at all, she was able to fill up her small patch of land with a landfill of those stones. A small nipa hut soon stood on the land. Several fruit trees and flowering bushes started to grow, too. The nipa hut would later turn into a small concrete structure that she called her spanking new home.

There she would spend the last years of her life, fighting the chill from the nearby mountains, fighting the greedy government agencies that saw the potential of the erstwhile uninhabitable lands on the hills, and fighting the thought that, in the end, she is really left all by her lonesome. Her daughter’s father was in a faraway city, with his real family.

She simply played the cards that were dealt her – and played them marvelously.

Till her last dying breath, she fought back. All within a span of thirty minutes, she died twice before the third and fatal cardiac arrest, brain dead on the second. On the evening of June 3, she passed away at 93 – still a rose upon a hard rock.