Got this from Wander Girl (How far will you go for love?), a book I just read, by Tweet Sering...
Let's assume you're a woman of normal/average intelligence; you know what ripe mangoes look like. You pick what looks to you to be the best ones -- smooth, firm, yellow -- and expect them to be juicy and delicious.
Then you go home and slice one only to find a good part of the insides rotten. But since you are a patient woman, that's fine, you can just eat the good parts, suffer the bad parts a little and the next day get better ones -- at the same store because look, it's so near where you live. How convenient is that?
The next day you having a mix of smooth and a-bit-bruised mangoes just to make sure. But this yields the same results -- there's always something wrong with them.
They are not the mangoes you want. So far, since going to that grocery, you still haven't sat down to enjoy ripe, juicy, delicious mangoes.
What do you do?
A) Go back to the same grocery store, buy the mangoes hoping against hope that they be good this time, and when they aren't, complain and bitch about it to friends as you eat them anyway (telling yourself that, at least, you have mangoes; 'yung iba nga dyan wala, eh.)
B) Tell the grocer that you will no longer buy mangoes from his store unless he enforces strict quality control and sells only the best.
C) Look for the best mangoes, even if it means driving past nearby grocery and travelling all the way across town to get them.
Pinoy men are like mangoes in a grocery store with low quality control standards, and where the shoppers are happy to take just any mango. The rotten product is not one person's fault -- it's a conspiracy, a joint effort of both grocer and shopper.
We Pinays are shoppers in that grocery store. We are dissatisfied with our mangoes and yet we bite into one, swallow a chunk with grimace, and then go back for more. We complain about the sub-standard men in our lives -- how they womanize, drink too much, abuse us both physically and verbally, disrespect us -- and yet we're still with them. We don't go up the grocer and say, "Sir, the mangoes in your store are rotten. Tomorrow, when I buy your mangoes -- despite the two occasions they have disappointed me -- I want them to be juicy and delicious. Otherwise, I will look elsewhere and never set foot on this store again," and then make good our word.
Pinoy men...are emotional underachievers because we don't exact high standards from them. They are brats because we spoil them. They give so little and take a lot because we give a lot and take so little.
They are weak mama's boys who drink all night with their buddies and won't speak to you when they're having a bad day because we wait with hot coffee, ready to remove their shoes, when they come home drunk.
They are disrespectful pricks who raise their voices at us in public because we just stand there and take it.
Why not, as an experiment, try barring the door and changing the lock? (Or better yet, shove an application for annulment form under the door, highlighting the reasons your relationship qualifies for one?) Why not, when he ups his voice level just a notch above normal, scurry the nearest security guard and tell him that the man yelling from the opposite end of the street was trying to extort money from you. Finish with a nervous, "Taga-mental yata, boss."
-- Do you agree???
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