Sympathy is a cheap luxury; it is the easy fruit of power. You feel sympathy for the elderly couple scavenging in the neon shadows of a convenience store, or for the children swatting flies in the sweltering corners of Manila—a reality that, to the world, does not exist, buried by the sanitized dream in airline brochures and commercials. In this age, the internet gives us dopamine, the amplification, and offers the escape we desperately seek; but this is the hard truth we need to come to terms with. For the Philippines to move forward, the Filipinos must stop looking for a saviour. No foreign power has ever, nor will ever, have our best interest at heart.
If sympathy is easy because it’s passive and requires distance, then: has the Philippines grown so thin in empathy that it has come to love and glorify intruders? To remember them fondly, even, as though the compromises they demanded were kindness rather than conquest?
When I think about that contradiction, I think of my mother and her sister first—girls in Misamis, sun-browned and stubborn, unimpressed by the idea of waiting for someone to intervene when the boys got too bold when a broken slat from the fence was enough. The lesson for every girl who stood on her own two feet was trouble leaves quicker when you meet it halfway.
That is the inheritance for us.
That memory has always made the stereotype of the Filipina woman difficult to accept. The story we repeat about ourselves—that of the patient, gentle Filipina who accepts silently and defers easily—is nothing short of a fairytale, a lie. We talk about deference as if it were a natural trait or a biological setting, rather than a habit carved into us by centuries of hierarchy. The language of that stereotype is unmistakably rooted in subservience; it demands a woman whose virtue is measured by how well she accommodates authority and never by how she questions it.
Yet, the history of this country has never been as obedient as that myth insists. Look to the Lanao sun: a Datu once chose to burn her own home to ash rather than be bartered to a suitor she didn't want. That story survives for a reason, it survives because it refuses the logic of submission that outsiders project. Her decision wasn't some romanticized, tragic martyrdom; but a necessary refusal to let her life be arranged for someone else’s convenience. In that refusal, there is a stubborn, searing clarity about autonomy—one that feels far more real, far more true to the women I know, than the obedient, ghost-like figures we’ve been told to aspire to.
So, keep your sympathy; it was never ours to begin with. The history of the Filipino women is not a tragedy to be viewed through the safe distance of a screen, nor a sanitized dream waiting for a foreign blessing. We are the daughters of the Datu who chose the fire, and the sisters who held the fence slats, women who know that autonomy is not a gift granted by the powerful, but a right reclaimed.
Whatever this life brings, wherever I reside, and whatever tongue I speak, I am a Filipino woman. In every lifetime, I would choose this.
Written by Zen, Insight PH
Zen, Insight PH is a dedicated campus journalist and contributor. Their insightful writing sparks meaningful conversations and keeps the community informed.
