Imagine this. It’s 1996 and The Web is a new experience to explore. It’s exciting and fun… You’ve been using the web to shop for cars and find good prices… You’ve been chatting with friends from around the world… You’ve been reading, writing and posting stuff online about things that interest you… You’ve discovered yahoo.com, one of the first web directories online and can find sites under every topic… You find out that if you click on the location field of your mozilla browser and type in a word, any word, the browser will automatically add “www” in front of the word and “.com” in the back of the word and take you to the website of that domain “www.word.com”. Imagine you are a filipina and you type in “filipina” and you get the site of www.filipina.com. Then imagine that you are so upset and disbelieving of what you find there that you go to yahoo.com to find better sites about filipinas, but find worse things… like porn and sex tours.

Well that is what happened to me.

Here is an image gallery that represents filipina cyber presence between 1995-2003. They are screen captures and images from filipina.com and various search engine results for filipina.

You will note that the sites represented by these images, are published by men for men. Take note of the words chosen to describe, the slant for selling and marketing of, and the overall, sexualized, biased representation of filipinas online.

www.filipina.com (archives)

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i was delighted to find Filipina images blog online around last year. today, i checked and Filipina images is ranking 2nd in search results for “filipina” at google! congratulations ladies! and just now, i was delighted that i could join this blog and contribute. wow! what a great idea you have here, Lorna and all.

i’ve been creating filipina sites and linking to other filipina sites for many years now. i’ve even linked my sites to “yan ang pinay” which now has donated its great logo to this blog. you see, i’ve been watching these searches for “filipina” since around 1995-96.

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The FilipinaImages.com advocacy is mainly a Search Engine Optimization strategy to create a balance on search engine results. One question asked during the last iBlog 4 was “what is the offline counterpart of the Filipina Campaign”?

One way of promoting the Filipina is to be proud of calling ourselves Filipina. Don’t be ashamed to use it whatever way you can, especially abroad.

A new ccTLD opened its doors to the public yesterday — .me.

I immediately took the domain name Filipina.me to make sure it will not be used for dating websites. Right now it points to my personal blog Touched by An Angel.

The timeless Filipina campaign starts within us. Keep the Filipina campaign alive in your blogs.

Vector Illustration : Darlene Sanguenza Copyright ©