What does it mean to be a Filipina and an Atheist all at the same time? I guess there are very few women who would want to ask this question. The problem of the argument of some theists in terms of the justification of women’s role in the Bible as something that is “very vital” to serve a greater purpose for me appears to be a pure language game. Looking on how women are treated and viewed during the old times is simply obvious- serve your god, follow your husband, be an accessory for the sake of attaining a the perfect plan of the supreme creator.

Honestly, I don’t really fancy justifying (my) feminism and providing a universal definition that would fit the subjective realities of men, women, and other institutions there is. For me, my “dominance” in this “world” is relative on how I view it, and such provides utility in terms of how I can create my own meaning independent of the conventions of the Filipino faith, independent of our social norms, independent of the usual linguistic connotations that the society wish to define a Filipina. Fact is, every form of “justified belief” anchoring on virtue of epistemology is a form of knowledge, and being the case every form of knowledge has the right to be respected. The problem though on our usual definitions of a Filipina creates a form of reality which as a whole does not really maximizes the utility that we can give to our selves and the society as a whole. Perhaps this argument could be very utilitarian as some might want to point out, but truth is this is what is happening. Filipinas no matter how they think how liberated, educated and empowered they are still unconsciously succumb to the frameworks that she have been accustomed to since birth.

Self determination, awareness of one’s weaknesses, capitalizing on strengths, further self redefinition, self-accountability, further search for knowledge and truth, critical thinking, creating one’s own notion of eaudaimonia… these are the virtues that I hold to as a Filipina and an Atheist. My meaning of my self and my reality could be highly different from how a typical Filipina should be, but does it mean that these “virtues” make me immoral, unethical, psychologically imbalanced, dumb-ass, abnormal, and a huge turn-off? Honestly, I really don’t care what people would think. I don’t really care if men would frown due to the fact that I am not simply a “meet the parents material”; I don’t really care if some of them do get intimidated by the fact that I am relatively using my brain more than they did; I really don’t care if people whom I meet at the first time dare not approach me, thinking I would bite their heads off; I don’t really care if after I finished my thesis, I have been the talk of the town; I really don’t care about people’s compliments or criticisms and imperatives on how should I live my life. My reality, my meaning and how I wanted to live it is all clear in my head. Really, thanks but no thanks.

Every woman have their own set of weaknesses and we should live with that fact and try as much as we can to either accept it, diminish it, or totally overcome it. However I guess the huge culprit in terms of the usual connotation of the need for women to be taken cared of emerged from the biological and neural perspective that women’s brain are more in tune with emotions. Albeit this does not mean that women are more inferior in terms of their logical and analytic capacity. The study of the University of California in 2005 states that although men excel more in tasks requiring more logical processing like mathematics, women on the other hand are more dominant in terms of integrating and assimilating informations. These two different neurological pathways in the brain could be very different but study of Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist in the University of California states that such differences still result in an equivalent overall performance on measures of cognitive ability as evident from the results of intelligence tests conducted on both sexes. The regional difference on men and women’s intelligence could be seen on how the so-called gray matter indicating intellectual performance is distributed. According to the study of the University of California, 84-86% of both gray and white matter regions associated with intellectual performance of women are found more in their frontal lobes. On the other hand, in this area, only 45% of gray and white matter is found on men, and the rest being distributed on other parts of the brain.

My point is, the capacity of a person to use his or her critical and analytic thinking comes through constant exercise of the aforementioned. If Filipinas would view their empowerment solely on things that billions of women are believing right now, can we justifiably say that such is really empowerment, or more like an idea that was once empowering when Audrey Hepburn was still in the movie mainstream. Heraclitus, an Ancient Greek philosopher first uttered the famous cliche that the only constant thing is change. If our view of our empowerment is the same as how our grandmother activists view it, then ahem don’t you think, you ought to do more “knowledge searching”?