“Those people go naked, wearing but one piece of palm-tree cloth about their private parts.” Wrote Antonio Pigafetta (1491 – 1534), the Venetian who, in 1519, joined the expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan to the Moluccas Spice Islands. By March 1521, they landed in the Visayan Islands of today’s Philippines. In his diary, Pigafetta described the men and women they encountered there.
“The males, both young and old, have their penis pierced from one side to the other near the head, with a gold or tin bolt as large as a goose quill, and in both ends of the same bolt, some have what resembles a spur, with points upon the ends, and others [have] what resembles the head of a cart nail. I very often asked many, both old and young, to see their penis, because I could not believe it. In the middle of the bolt is a hole, through which they urinate. The bolt and the spurs always hold firm.”
Pigafetta even recorded its purpose. “They say that their women wish it so, and that if they did otherwise they would not have intercourse with them. When the men wish to have intercourse with their women, the women themselves take the penis, not in the regular way, and commence very gently to introduce it [into their vagina], with the spur on top first, and then the other part. When it is inside it takes its regular position; and thus the penis always stays inside until it gets soft, for otherwise they could not pull it out.”
“Those people make use of that device because they are of a weak nature. They have as many wives as they wish, but one of them is the principal wife.”
This English translation shared by the “Philippine Diary Project” came from Theodore J. Cachey Jr.’s 2007 version of Lord Stanley’s 1874 translation of Pigafetta’s manuscript, first published in Italian in 1550. Albeit viewed through a 16th-century European lens, Pigafetta’s eyewitness account revealed how precolonial women enjoyed sexual autonomy.
The contemporaneous Boxer Codex corroborated Pigafetta’s 1521 assertion that women openly demanded physical pleasure from their men. Compiled in Manila around 1590 – 1595, this illustrated manuscript detailed Philippine ethnography. Other chronicles—by Miguel de Loarca in 1582, Antonio de Morga in 1609, and Father Juan de Medina in 1893—also noted that women could refuse sex with men who were without genital modifications like “tugbuk” (pins) or “sagra”(rings). Unsurprisingly, these piercings and the purpose they served were condemned by Catholic missionaries.
Maria Clara
In 1668, over a hundred years after Pigafetta’s account, the Jesuit priest Francisco Alcina in the “History of Bisayan Islands” wrote that the practice had disappeared. But an informal 1999 health survey cited by The Atlantic found that up to 57% of selected Filipino sailors at the Port in Manila had “bolitas” or small pellet-like penile implants. This time, the alleged motivation for enduring the procedure is for men to enhance their sexual prowess. Having bolitas implanted subcutaneously was a badge of hyper-masculinity.
Before colonization, women did not only enjoy the freedom to express their sexuality, the society also did not put a premium on virginity. Today, the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) offers a glimpse of a courtship, mate selection, and marriage process not hung up on chastity or abstinence. CAR is home to indigenous peoples who remained beyond effective Spanish administrative control. Their mores and customs have survived.
Beyond exercising the right to sexual satisfaction, precolonial women also had agency to walk away from a husband. She left with her own property intact and a fair share of the conjugal property for her and her children. Colonization disproportionately took that power away.
Through three centuries of Spanish rule, the colonial administrative and ecclesiastical patriarchies absorbed the preexisting patrilineal “datu” (chieftain) military-political leadership. But they aggressively eliminated the matrilineal babaylan spiritual authority. They demonized the role that the precolonial “barangay” society assigned to women.
The erasure of gender-based “dual authority” relegated women to a much lower socio-political and economic status. Before colonization, a woman could become a datu or a babaylan, a spiritual leader. She could inherit and own property, engage in commerce, and divorce her husband. But through generational indoctrination, she came to embody the “Maria Clara” archetype— domestic, modest, submissive, religious, and a virgin before matrimony.
By Any Other Name
The costliest among the losses a Filipino woman still endures today is the Catholic ban on legal divorce. Other than the Vatican City, the Philippines is the only remaining sovereign country in the world without absolute divorce in the law. Sadly, her children too pay the price for this policy.
Today, if a Filipino wife and mother has the time to wait, and she can afford not to work, or she can pay for childcare, legal fees, and a lawyer, then the legal exit out of an unhappy, abusive, or violent marriage is “annulment.” It is a legal decree that declares a marriage never existed because it was not valid in the first place.
To retroactively erase a marriage, one party must claim that the other was seriously sick of a sexually transmitted disease, of unsound mind, or had psychological or physical incapacity at the time of the wedding. Fraud or the absence of parental consent could also be grounds for annulment. The two parties amicably “calling it quits” is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, court-granted “Legal separation” allows the couple to live apart and divide assets. But it does not dissolve the marriage or let any of the parties remarry. So, many couples simply go their separate ways without the benefit of an annulment or legal separation. Informally separated individuals, however, remain married to their estranged spouses. So, they cannot legally remarry. They risk committing bigamy, a punishable crime under the law. Moreover, children born from the union are legally considered “illegitimate.”
Also, the husband and father can just abandon his wife and children with impunity. Without legal divorce and its financial obligations, like state law-mandated child support and alimony (spousal support), men feel unencumbered to leave or take on another relationship.
Reality
Adelina (not her real name) shared that after confronting her husband at his mistress’s house, she knew she would raise her six children alone. She took her eldest daughter to a better-off relative who promised to send her to school in exchange for domestic work she would render. She found another patron for the second daughter who became the family’s live-in nanny.
Left with four younger children to feed, Adelina would wake up early every morning to buy bread for breakfast. Then she would walk around a middle-class neighborhood a short distance from the informal settlement where they lived. Until she found regular clients, she initially had to offer her services, such as hand-washing laundry, to any household willing to pay her a daily wage. Her employer for the day provided her lunch. But she would rush home by 5 P.M. to buy her children dinner. Any leftovers would be her children’s lunch the next day.
Even if Adelina wanted to press her philandering husband for alimony and child support, she had no spare cash, time, or information to access the legal system that could compel him. She focused on survival. She also had to deal with the hurt and stigma of being left for another woman. But to add insult to injury, decades later, the husband came back to her self-built home. He was sick and expecting to be welcomed back by her and now working adult children.
“Will I spend my last ten thousand pesos to hire me a lawyer, bring up heartache to find grounds for annulment, or start the legal separation process? And then what… claim financial support for my children from their unstable father? Or do I put that money towards my children’s education?” Lourdes (not her real name) recalled navigating the confusion and mixed emotions of the days right after her verbally abusive husband left for good.
Lourdes had a graduate education and a high-paying job before taking a break to spend time with her growing children. When she became a single mother to two teens, she had no full-time job, access to legal, financial, or emotional support from the society that also expected her to care for an aging parent.
“First, I needed to find a job to raise my children. They were about to go to college. So, I didn’t have time for anything else. I also avoided big family gatherings because I didn’t want to explain why my husband was missing.”
How many women are in this situation?
In 2020, the government recorded over 2 million individuals, or 1.9% of the population aged 10 and older, as “divorced (likely granted abroad) / separated/annulled.” But no other distinctions were made. Sadly, the informally separated single mother who remains married to her absentee husband is too busy to even ask to be counted.
