Entitlement: Gender-based psychological war

Entitlement is a strong word. It is synonymous to privilege and prerogative. Entitlement is also a dangerous word. It is filled with pompous self-proclaimed right.

In relationships, entitlement is a sanction; the ultimate “all-access-pass” with a “get-out-of-jail-free” card.

What makes a man think it’s acceptable to cheat on his wife or girlfriend? What makes a man think it’s OK to physically hurt a woman to teach her a lesson? Because he’s the man. He’s entitled to and it’s expected of him.

In politics, entitlement is equal to a false sense of impunity from the law.

It is why the deputy national security advisor allegedly used government equipment to conduct reconnaissance operations on his common law wife.

His sense of entitlement gave him the right to beat and whip her, like a wild animal that needs to be tamed. His sense of entitlement gave his bodyguards the right to strip her boyfriend, take photos of his penis, and torture him.

His self-perceived power emboldened him to literally broadcast all these lurid details on national radio and placate his badly bruised ego for being cuckolded.

He, however, restrained him from his privilege of killing them.

Does that mean a level playing field? Quid pro quo? Does that mean she also has the right to kill him had she found him with another woman? To make the other woman strip and humiliate her by taking photos of her genitalia?

Probably not.

Is entitlement the mental embodiment of misogyny and patriarchy? Words that are so deeply engrained in our culture that they become a way of thinking. Why else would you will hear some say that a woman deserves abuse and in the case of the aforementioned, was indeed fortunate that her life and that of her boyfriend, was spared?

According to the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) gender fact sheet:

• Around the world, at least two in every three women has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused by a man in her lifetime.

• More than 20 percent of women are reported to have been abused by men with whom they live.

• Among women aged 15 to 44 years old, gender-based violence accounts for more death than disability among women than the combined effects of cancer, malaria, traffic injury and war.

Realizing men’s role in the mammoth task of social rehabilitation needed to rectify justification for physical violence, UNIFEM has launched its global White Ribbon Campaign in the Philippines. The White Ribbon Campaign is aimed at involving men in the fight to prevent violence against women. Men are asked to wear a white ribbon to show that they condone all forms of abusive behavior.

The National Commission on the Role of Filipino Women (NCRFW) has also started Men Opposed to Violence Against Women Everywhere (MOVE). MOVE is a group of forward-thinking men who want to take an active part in advocating the elimination of violence against women.

These organizations and its male supporters know that the fight to challenge an engrained mindset is not played out in the media where it is today’s sensational gossip headlines and tomorrow’s old news. It is not played out in the courtroom where it is diluted by legalities, bastardized and dismissed based on someone else’s better interpretation (or manipulation) of the law and better command of the art of eloquence.

It is battle to be waged in people’s minds. That is the only place where change can start and any small victory towards reform may be claimed. –Ana Santos, Manila Times

For details on MOVE, visit www.ncrfw.gov.ph. For details on the Say No/White Ribbon Campaign, call 631-6192.

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