Pregnant men and the under-appreciated democracy of Tagalog

It's not news for a media outfit to be pelted with a barrage of negative comments, but one Saturday last May, GMA News Online was plagued with taunts after it posted a story with the headline: Heart Evangelista and her husband Senator Chiz Escudero are pregnant!

Heart and Chiz are pregnant? Everyone knows that human males cannot biologically bear children. The sentence was preposterous and simply unacceptable.

Or is it?

“We’re pregnant” may sound new to many, but the first recorded print use of “we’re pregnant” was more than 40 years ago, way back in 1975, in the book, "David, We're Pregnant! 101 Cartoons for Expecting Parents" by Lynn Johnson.

The classic cover is of a woman calling her husband David and inside are tips in comics form for couples about to become mommy and daddy.

Linguist Mhawi Rosero tells GMA News Online that while men obviously cannot get pregnant, “culturally, I know may involvement ang men sa women's pregnancy."

Rosero points out that saying “we’re pregnant” is synonymous to “we are having our baby”, which is a more popular form.

“The form is being used already as such. But the question is, will it be sustained? Will it stay? Or is it just some fad, like jejemon?” he adds.

Advocates of what is known as “gender-fair language” certainly hope that more inclusive speech is more than just a fad.

The Philippine Commission on Women (PCW), for example, has developed a handbook in an attempt to counter the use of needlessly gendered speech.

“Gendered speech” might be an unfamiliar concept for some, if not most. After all, it’s not a prominent feature of Philippine languages like Tagalog. It’s most evident in the use of pronouns in English — he for men, she for women.

Particular words are also gendered. For example, in addition to Chiz being pregnant, a number of readers also found issue with Heart being described as an “actor.” She’s a woman, they say, and the female form of the word actor should be used, per our elementary education.

Other languages, like Spanish, assign gender to concepts. Words ending in 'a' are feminine, while pretty much everything else, masculine. When learning Spanish as a foreign language, a student accepts this without explanation. It’s the “correct” form.

Consider, however, the word "bridge". In English, “it” is neither male nor female. In Spanish, it’s male (“el puente”) and in German, it’s female (“die brucke”). Syntactic rules feel rigid, but the fact that these three languages assigned three different traits to the bridge demonstrates the arbitrary nature of speech.

But while it may seem random, the effects of gendered language aren't inconsistent. In a TED Talk by language researcher Lera Boroditsky, she notes: "It is striking that even a fluke of grammar (the arbitrary designation of a noun as masculine or feminine) can have an effect on how people think about things in the world."

Gender and Tagalog

Picture a “manggagawa” (factory worker) or “magsasaka” (farmer). Is the image in your mind a man or a woman?

Bernadette Neri, former Deputy Director for Training and Outreach at the University of the Philippines Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, says it’s likely that we imagine a man wearing overalls when we think of factories — even though half or more than half of actual factory workers are females.

When we think of Panday, the first thing that comes to find is Fernando Poe, Jr. Yet panday, Neri notes, simply means blacksmith — a job that women can also perform. “Nowadays, it's not about making tools. 'Yong popular na imahen ng panday ngayon ay may espada, nakikipaglaban, may magic."

In the same way that panday can refer to both male and female blacksmiths, the words datu, babaylan, bagani, and diwata are also used for both sexes — yes, even diwata. It was only the Spanish colonizers who assumed that diwata referred only to females because it ended in “a”, Neri says.

“Sa panahon na tayo ay nasakop ng mga Kastila at mga Amerikano, sila 'yong nasa kapangyarihan so ginagamit nila 'yong mga social institution sa kanilang benefit,” she adds.

“Ang isa sa may problema ay 'yong kultura na kinamulatan natin. Namulat tayo na may malakas na impluwensya ang patriyarkiya sa ating kultura.”

She cites the terms congressmen and congresswomen as an example of language influencing our perception, sometimes without us noticing. The immediate identification of gender places the focus on that aspect, as if it’s a pertinent criteria for the job.

“Hindi ito usapin ng pagiging babae o lalake. Usapin ito ng paglilingkod doon sa bayan. Doon dapat nakatuon,” she asserted.

Circling back to the topic of pregnancy and building a family, Neri says the term parenthood should be used more prominently over motherhood or fatherhood. “Wala namang kasarian ang pagiging magulang. Ang kailangan mahusay kang mag-alaga, magmahal, at magparaya sa iyong mga anak,” she says.

Neri, a Palanca Award-winning writer, believes in the power of words.

“Ang wika, tagapagdala siya ng kultura. Ibig sabihin, sinasalamin niya kung ano 'yong namamayaning ideyolohiya sa isang espasyo … Ito rin ang magdadala ng mas mapagpalayang perspective kaugnay ng iba't ibang mga bagay sa iba't ibang larangan,” she says.

Media and gender

Social institutions like mass media are typically tagged as enforcers of stereotypes, but this doesn’t have to be the case.

“Syempre, makakatulong ang media kung iwawasto niya ang kaniyang sarili,” Neri says.

This sentiment is shared by Danilo Arao, Assistant Professor of Journalism in the Department of Mass Communications in the University of the Philippines-Diliman.

He tells GMA News Online: “The unconscious action of discrimination has a stronger tendency among journalists who use English.”

The PCW’s Gender-Fair Media Guidebook is continuously being developed to counter this discrimination and is designed to “help the media asses their own practice and recalibrate their own content development process, so that it works to promote gender equality instead of perpetuating gender biases.”

Unlearning what we’ve worked hard to master is not an easy task. “This is most especially true when you're using a language that is foreign to you and sometimes within the Filipino culture, we claim to pretend to have expertise when it comes to the English language,” Arao says.

“If you want to be gender-sensitive or gender-neutral in your choice of words, it's not just a matter of mastery over the language or knowing how the English language has evolved through the years, because the way English has been taught before... it's quite different from the way we use English now,” he adds.

That’s the beauty of language: It’s alive and the people who use it are pregnant with ideas that give birth to new ways of using it. The task of the journalist now, Arao says, to help raise the level of discourse.

Among other things, reporters and editors must consistently question the vocabulary that they’ve inherited.

It’s commonplace to read about “catfights” between two women, even if it’s two high-ranking political figures, but why insist on using this phrase. “Just because the word exists, it doesn't mean you have to use it,” Arao  muses.

Deciding to omit certain words, he continues, not only helps in fulfilling the principle of economy of words in journalism, also gives people the message — no matter how subtle or implied it may be — that gender is not an issue.

“The primary mission of a journalist, as you know, is to help in the shaping of public opinion by providing relevant information… and by relevant information we mean the use of words — the use of right words — to be more inclusive and to be more gender neutral or gender sensitive," he says.

“Of course it takes time, sometimes you would get bashed left and right, especially by those who claim to be ‘experts’ with regards to the English language. But I think these are things that would have to be sustained.”

The anger toward the Heart and Chiz headline is perhaps rooted in the misplaced notion that pregnancy is just simply a woman's responsibility. “We are pregnant is a commendable title, it's a statement that it's a shared responsibility and a conversation was sparked by it,” he says.

READ: The father's role in pregnancy: Hey, you're in this together!

We learn to talk by listening and if what we hear creates a clear division between male and female, equality stays in the realm of fiction. — LA/JST, GMA News