Claudine’s 'taray' is refreshing

  Without working CCTV cameras at this country’s newest international airport terminal, it seems that we will be treated to a long soap opera version of who threw the first punch in the Tulfo-Santiago brawl.   Now it will be one man’s word against another’s, it will be one Tulfo brotherhood (three out of four weren’t there) versus Raymart and Claudine Santiago and their group of friends, it will be one side’s witnesses versus the other’s. Media will be tested on taking the side of “one of them” versus trying to get the story regardless; the Tulfos use precisely their media spaces to get back and threaten Raymart with classic “pasalamat ka nag-iisa ang Kuya namin no’n!” rhetoric.   Oh yes, it’s as macho as it sounds. And that’s also what informs the anti-Claudine rhetoric that’s on the interwebs, i.e., Twitter and Facebook. So in a fistfight that began between two men, the backlash has been on the one woman in the story; and while it’s been fascinating watching Raymart and Mon Tulfo going at it on television, the backlash has been more strongly against the woman.   That this woman is Claudine is precisely the point, if we are to look at how even the more intelligent among us have cloaked their judgments of her by mentioning – even if only based on rumors – the bigger controversies that have hounded her in the past. And then we blame her for everything because she was angry that her posse’s luggage was put on another flight to Manila; we blame her even as all we’ve got is the story that she had raised her voice at Cebu Pacific’s ground crew.   Now I don’t know about you, but I’d be angry too – there is nothing like inefficient service to let the taray kick in. At the same time, I know I’d be handling my anger differently from the next person. I know that not much is achieved by going the file-a-formal-complaint route, at least not on these shores. This is the way a company like Cebu Pacific survives despite customer complaints: how many of us will find the time to do it formally, which is really the only complaint that matters.   Unless of course it’s a celebrity that forces Cebu Pacific’s inefficiencies into the limelight, and tadah! we got government paying attention. Otherwise, the regular non-celebrity consumer suffers with cheap flights that sacrifice service, ganyan talaga, ‘wag na tayo magalit. Even when we should be angry, even as we have the right to be.   It’s in this sense that Claudine’s anger, her taray, is to me refreshing. Granted that she was scolding employees who also had no control over the situation, granted that lashing out would not mean getting their bags back any faster, much might be said about releasing frustration in the face of inefficiency. Yes, these are unfortunate employees faced with such anger, but that is not so much Claudine’s fault, as it is the company’s which knows only too well that those in the lower rungs are the ones who will suffer. We might call Claudine out on verbal abuse, but then again what are the limits to complaining about bad service? No cuss words? No threatening that employees will lose their jobs? No screaming? How to measure anger?   That Claudine was this angry – and again we don’t know exactly how angry – despite being a celebrity tells me that she was ready to face the consequences of her actions. It tells me that at that point she was nothing but customer, angry at bad service, waiting for this company to deal. Was she wrong for being angry? No. Was she wrong for being that angry? That’s a judgment of one anger over another. I draw the line at physical abuse.   As I will draw the line at calling her ill-bred, which is what’s on the interwebs, as if we do not know of the class biases of such a judgment. And how can we not be in crisis by the fact that if we are using notions of breeding for this story at all, then we should be pointing the finger at Tulfo. He who saw the situation and decided that documenting it was in order. He who could’ve decided otherwise and just gone on with his life, let the story happen as it would on these shores, via tsismis and blind items, may be a small story in the showbiz section that would prompt Claudine and Raymart to maybe make a short public statement about the incident.   But Tulfo decided to involve himself in the matter ala paparazzi, and no, none of us know what actually happened after Raymart discovered that someone was documenting his wife. What we do know is how we’ve reacted to the brawl, limited as our view is to the video showing Claudine running after and pouncing on Tulfo, something which we are judging her for. Shouldn’t she have tried to stop her husband from getting into that fight, we ask? She should’ve stopped that fight, we demand.   Why, I ask. Why do we see this woman throwing punches and demand that she be otherwise? Regardless of who threw the first punch, why couldn’t this woman be as angry as a man, be as aggressive as the other men in this video are? Why do we demand differently of a person as aggrieved if not even more so? And then we judge her as ill-bred and tactless, as basagulera and nakakahiya, because she dared kick ass.   Which reminds us all that we can’t handle a woman doing exactly that, as we fall back on stereotypes to describe her. We will be blind to the fact that at the core of hitting Claudine with words that hurt is a demand on the woman to be the good ol’ stereotype of soft spoken and mahinhin. We want the woman who waits for the man to defend her, yes? And in which case the ones who get angry enough to shout, those who know to fight back, we prove that we cannot handle those women.   Of course we will delude ourselves into thinking that this is all and just about this one woman who got so angry at inefficient service. In truth it’s about this: in a land where we’d like to think women are more free, she will be judged for defending herself, if not her husband. In a land where we like to put our women on pedestals, we will not do the same for a woman who kicks ass. And yes, this is about women going against other women because many of us think like our men; that is a tragedy in itself.   That this means being unable to appreciate it when a woman shows us we can be bigger than the Maria Clara stereotype we’ve been stuck with all this time goes without saying. That we fail to appreciate Claudine kicking ass the way she has? That is our bigger tragedy. - GMA News