Sexuality, Individuality, and the Filipino Culture. Research Paper

Sexuality, Individuality, and the Filipino Culture
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June 12, 2020
According to Giddens, it was during the modern period when the individualism began to flourish and be widely practiced. Individualism paved the way for people, especially women, to explore outside the confines of their houses. This led people to have a variety of choices and options which they never experienced during pre-modernity. Marriage in pre-modernity, one in which the couple had no say, is usually determined and set up by the parents. However, as soon as the modernity began to take place, things started to change as well. Now, an individual has the freedom to choose whom he or she wants to marry, or whether he or she wants to marry at all. Modernity brought out a path wherein a person can live a kind of lifestyle he or she wishes to have. According to Giddens, lifestyle refers to “decisions are taken and courses of action followed under conditions of severe material constraint” CITATION Soh17 \l 1033 (Sohlberg & Leiulfsrud, 2017). This is one of the essential elements that gave rise to the pure relationship. In this article, the author would like to analyze some of the changes in the freedom of sexuality among individuals in a relatively ‘conservative’ culture. The author believes that despite the current ‘liberalization’ of Filipino culture, differences in social class acts as a boundary to these shifts in society.
The Filipino Culture
In the Philippines, where a considerable line delineates the rich and the poor, the latter is nowhere in the receiving end. The financial state they are in hardly gives them the privilege to have the choices or options which the people of the modern period are supposed to have, according to Giddens. Taking this into account, these individuals cannot wish for something more than they should. A Filipino country girl who is too impoverished to afford a decent education for herself does not stand a great chance in landing a big job and finding a husband whom she loves and one who can take her family away from poverty. With modernity taking over, Giddens assumed that everyone now has a variety of choices or options to choose from when they do not, and this is mostly attributed to the material constraint they are under.
Individualism of Filipinos
Individualism, as the author believes, is not very much observed in the Filipino context as much as in the Western context. It is because most Filipinos are socially dependent in the sense that they have close family ties, and they value the aspect of belongingness to specific groups. Also, because Filipinos rely mostly on their families or friends, no matter what one thinks of or what their goals are, they are always included and thought of in every decision they make CITATION Mul92 \l 1033 (Mulder, 1992). Now and then, people, especially the family, would regard what you are doing as either good or bad.
There are certain limitations as to how people think and act. Filipinos still consider what other people would say if they do or failed to do certain things because of moral reasons embedded in the culture’s institutions, which take much time to be fully achieved once they change CITATION Lor16 \l 1033 (Lorenzo & Clarissa, 2016). Just like what Jamieson has stated in her critique that individualism is going too far and it distorts the individual’s recognition of social problems that one becomes too narcissistic, selfish, and self-involved; some Filipinos have been trying to adapt the ways of the Western societies through the internet and social networking sites that make other people wonder whether people still have lives outside the virtual world.
Relationship Ties of the Filipinos
When it comes to relationships, however, people, especially Filipinos, do not only think of themselves and always expect the worst in every challenge they encounter, but rather, they have an optimistic view of their relationship. The dissolution of the relationship or disentanglement to the other p...