Running through the highlights for the month of September 2016 would seem incomplete without mentioning Jessy Mendiola’s being on the cover of FHM (For Him Magazine) Philippines. It also looks like she’ll be making the cover of Cosmpolitan PH for its October 2016 issue.
My colleague Ilda wrote about Jessy last July, in the context of her #1 ranking in FHM’s most recent 100 Sexiest poll. She was already getting her share of bashing while the polls were still open. Her bashers mainly focused on her physical attributes: how could she be considered “sexy” given her features of that size?
Excerpts from an interview also appear in the FHM September 2016 edition. For one, she mentions that she wasn’t rooting for herself to rise in the polls. It just happened that one of the pictures she posted of herself, in a swimsuit – which she does all the time, went viral. She also mentions that most of her haters happened to be women.; one of the particular criticisms lobbed on her was, “she isn’t humble, because she openly acknowledged her self-worth and beauty.”
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It seems fairly obvious, to me at least, that an underlying issue here is that Filipinos have yet to be comfortable with women who are confident in their own skin. There are certain expected behaviors of women in Filipino society: they have to be “humble”, they are submissive to men and have to compete with each other for their attention, and, most glaring of all, their self-worth needs to be defined by others around them.
The definition of “sexy” need not be limited to physical attributes. As Jessy Mendiola has so demonstrated, it can and should include self-confidence, irrespective of body size. I hear certain Filipinos scream all the time that people, including women, need to speak up, need to have more confidence in themselves, yet when they finally do assert themselves, the rest of the community acts to “put them in their place”.
It is a sign of a society still struggling with its self-identity, and the type of values it seeks to impart and impose on its inhabitants. That it would take a celebrity from the entertainment industry to point it out for the rest of the Filipinos should make you go hmm…
I guess following entertainment news does have its merits, after all.
А вы, друзья, как ни садитесь, все в музыканты не годитесь. – But you, my friends, however you sit, not all as musicians fit.
The one luxury that I’ll never give up is women.
Some (or even many) people may find such a pic/portrait sleazy, slutty, vulgair, lewd and/or inappropriate.
I, personally think its a display of total freedom and a way to flaunt what a person got.
However, I dont like the size of her breasts. They are too big and will cause her – most likely – back problems (gravity and weight and all that).
So I would most definately recommend her to have surgery on her breasts and have them made smaller to avoid any real problems later in life with her back.
Fixed that for you 🙂
If Filipinos could just stop hanging each other out to dry over the most trivial social infraction, they might actually be able to work together and achieve something.
This constant hammering-down of the nail that sticks out is what keeps the country in a state of permanent mediocrity. Nobody is allowed to succeed, because successful people highlight the abject failure of everyone else.
I suggested elsewhere that the #1 thing parents could do to help fix this country is to encourage their children to succeed: that is, as human beings, not as cash cows for the lazy family. Let them off the leash. Stop criticizing them and molding their thoughts into patterns of failure. Let them do what they were born to do.
Perhaps even this isn’t possible. Children who succeed will one day come back to tell the older generation: look at you. How could you have done this to our country? No parent can cope with that loss of respect.
So they keep their children down.
Marius,
I fully agree with you.
However, you are talking about the ‘end game’. Just this week – in my country – a city counsellor – suggested the introduction of mandatory/compulsory use of birth control for mentally ill (autistic) prospect future parents/mothers.
To implement such thing clashes with the freedom of forming/creating a family of one’s own.
So what is more important?
The freedom to create a family or the fact that a child has the right to have parents who are able to raise that kid in a proper and good way. (Its obvious that autistic adults (and other adults who suffer from a mentall illness) are NOT capable of doing that).
I would like to take it to the next level:
Make birth control mandatory for every poor adult so that he/she cannot procreate anymore and therefore poverty will be flashed out in a natural way.
Poor people (not only financially but also poor in all other aspects: education, mindset and behavior) have no real contribution to the economy.
There is one downside to my suggestion: people will say – after reading my suggestion – “so, procreation is only for the middle -, upper class & elite?”
My answer is: if you wanna build something good, you have to start with a perfect foundation.
Robert: there’s no doubt it needs to be done, but you can’t make birth control mandatory without somebody screaming “eugenics!”.
Have you ever watched the movie “idiocracy?”. I swear Mike Judge got the idea after visiting the Philippines (he’d never admit that, of course – he’d be shot by the Pinoy Pride brigade). Anyway, watch it. You will recognise every single scene.
Point is twofold:
1) An idiocracy is exactly what happens when you get if you (a) punish the middle class with high taxes and stupid laws and (b) encourage the idiots to breed with lavish incentives (free land, free money, allowing squatters to illegally extort money from landholders, etc etc). Not to mention the Catholic Church telling everyone that God wants you to have kids you can’t afford feed.
2) At the conclusion of the story (sorry, spoiler follows) the intelligent protagonist stops trying to explain logically to the idiots what the problems are, and just gives them some bullshit explanation, which they happily accept. That’s what you’d need to do here. My solution would involve bribing Catholic priests. Give them all a new BMW if they promise to preach about birth control to the brainless masses.
Your definition of poverty is correct. Financial poverty is a direct result of mental poverty. I was trying to get this through (with zero success) to gnogid.
Marius,
you mean this one:
https://yts.ag/movie/idiocracy-2006
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
As last resort, we can also try doing it Duterte-style (kill them all) but that aint my style.
Or we can try chemical or surgical castration (for males) or oophorectomy (for females; removal of ovary) and/or bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (removal of ovary plus removal of fallopian tubes).
Marius,
the biggest problem with my suggestions is, who is to play god (so to speak) by selecting and telling those poor people they have to give up their procreation rights (or entitlements).
Indeed. Can you imagine Filipinos running a eugenics commission? It would just turn into:
a) Another feeding frenzy at the funding trough. “Sorry po, no more money for contraceptives. We don’t know where it went”.
b) A murder spree. “Oh, we can’t afford contraceptives. I wonder if bullets are cheaper? Same result, right?”.
The Singapore solution seems to have worked. Funnily enough, the CARP proposals (for giving away land) were quite similar. In theory, land should have been given to people who promise to use it productively, and demonstrate some skill for doing so.
There should also have been some provision for taking land away from people who lied (which would of course be about 90% of applicants).
In practice, the CARP officials just gave land away as quickly as possible to whoever (a) turned up and (b) paid bribes. Surprise! It’s more fun in the Philippines!
Don’t know if it’s still state policy but Singapore encouraged its more affluent citizens to procreate and offered less incentives to lower income people to do so.
That would be a better way to do it. It’s less coercive.
I’m sure Filipinos would approve. “Those who have will be given more; to those who have not, even what they have will be taken away”.
The whole country pretty much runs on that principle (FWIW, I don’t think Jesus was saying how things ought to be in that quote – he was spelling out how things are in the real world).
Personally I believe she would look far more beautiful if she was not so white, and looked more like a Filipina than a half European or American person.