by ALECKS P. PABICO

“Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” — Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845

	THE writer with two of the "pushy" females in his life.

I HAVE three things in common with former president and certified macho man Joseph ‘Erap’ Estrada: the same birthday, facial hair, and the constant presence of women. But while he may believe being constantly around women is a good thing and could be a much needed boost to one's masculinity, it’s a situation I have ambivalent feelings about.

Well, I probably won’t have that dilemma if we were talking in terms of a harem, where all the world is made to revolve around one truly lucky guy, the center of attention of sensual ladies (wives and servants) whose job it is to always ensure his personal satisfaction. But a harem — at least, as far as Western writings imagined it to be — is so archaic an arrangement, and chauvinistic at that. Besides I'm no royal, blue-blooded heir of a sultan. My only dubious link to royalty is the name I was christened with, one I share with my dearly departed father and two younger brothers: that of a Macedonian hunk of a conqueror and emperor who was also said to have loved males more passionately than his wives. Hmmm ...

But I digress. As I was saying, I’m surrounded by females round the clock, every single day of my chaotic life, and most times I feel like I’m in an unenviable position. Over at our humble Tandang Sora abode, members of the female species outnumber me three to one: my wife Mira and our two daughters, Marlee, 10, and Kaya, five. At work, I am the only male employee in an office that has always suffered from gender imbalance since it was set up almost two decades ago. In fact, it was only when I joined the PCIJ back in 1994 that the center's male staff population swelled to a high of three. But the number would soon dwindle back to two when Howie Severino left in 1997 to join GMA-7 to venture into broadcast journalism, and to just my solitary self late last year when we had to let go of our driver-messenger.

I say unenviable because I haven't been dealing with ordinary females here. My colleagues at the PCIJ, past and present, are strong and aggressive women who do not subscribe to the myth of male superiority. That is why I've always maintained that the women's liberation movement had long raised the flag of victory in its struggle for gender equality over at the Center.

So it is at home with Mira and already to some extent our two daughters, who both exhibited a discomfortingly mean streak at an early age by yelling “Ayoko sa 'yo! (I don’t like you!)” whenever they woke up in the morning and the first thing they saw was me. (Who wouldn't?)

That morning ritual is already a thing of the past now that they've grown into adorable young girls. But, like their mother, they surely know how to demand my attention, albeit in contrasting ways. Marlee often resorts to silent, irritating tantrums, while Kaya is the screaming banshee foreboding my impending doom should I fail to comprehend or miss out on something she said.

Not that I'm really complaining about the “pushy” females in my life. My personal and professional relationships with them, I do acknowledge, have only made me strive to become a better man, or person. But I think it helped that I was also somehow brought up as a “soft” man — the '90s term for males trying to get in touch with their sensitive side.

AS THE second child in a brood of six (three girls and three boys) and the eldest among the boys, I assumed more responsibilities compared to my sisters, something not quite typical of a Filipino family. In our household, my sisters had it easy as they were confined only to the house to perform domestic chores. It was I who became my hardworking mother's trusted assistant, who helped her tend our grocery store, dutifully ran errands for her, and even did the marketing. By the time I was just 11 or 12 years old, I already knew my way around the Divisoria market where we bought most of the goods we sold. I would wake up early to open the store, which was located in a neighborhood far from where we stayed, and attend to the morning sales before I went to my high school classes in the afternoon. After school, I would go straight to the store and mind the shop until it closed at 10 or 11 p.m.

Because both our parents worked, it was also not strange for my siblings and I to have learned to cope by ourselves. That's how I acquired the skills of doing the laundry and ironing the clothes. Cooking came to me much later, although I believe it’s in my genes, an inheritance from my father who was quite a fantastic conjurer of gastronomical surprises.

These days, my part in the division of labor at home — given that we've renounced the need for a house help — consists mainly of washing the dishes, ironing the clothes, and bringing Kaya to her preschool (same as with Marlee when she was that age). Cooking rice and brewing our morning coffee are also part of my daily to-do list. I haven't been able to whip up dishes as often as I'd like to but I make do occasionally. Meanwhile, domicile cleaning and maintenance, like child-rearing, is a partnership arrangement.

I also remember defying my father, a macho in the mold of Erap, who wanted me to engage a boy of my age in a fistfight because he had teased and made my younger sister cry. But it was just not in my nature to resort to a contest of valiant testosterones to resolve matters. Unfortunately, in those days, such hesitance was sure to mark one as being effeminate or even homosexual — something my father used to bring up to challenge my “manliness.” But he always ended up frustrated, and I kept all the bones in my hands unbroken (the better to type out stories, mop the floor, and stir the stew).

Perhaps my elementary years in an exclusive girls' school — the Immaculate Conception Academy of Manila admitted boys from kindergarten up to Grade IV — somehow prepared me as well for my now predominantly female world of work and family. So when I reached college, societal change-seekers who at the same time question the culturally imposed concept that males are the superior gender appealed to me more.