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)

Above: Filipina.com screen capture circa 2003.

The “free wives” in hot pink towards the bottom of this screen image bothered me. it exhibits how men can create an illusion for themselves and others that women are objects, to be bought and sold, or given away for free.

www.filipina.com existed as a “mail-order-bride” service site at least starting around 1996 when i found them. Overall, my feeling for this site was disgust and disappointment because I wanted to find a site for and by Filipinas. www.filipina.com publishers had pages announcing that the Philippine government could not do anything legally to take down their site. If you search the wayback machine archives you should be able to research how this and other aspects of how the site worked.

The following pictures were also posted at filipina.com. It was one of their marketing tools for selling filipinas as mail-order-brides.

Read those last two lines? Now that’s great marketing for the “discerning man” in the market for a mail order bride. Are you wondering why a man would not want any other kind of woman?

This article was published in the 40s or 50s. Probably in Good Housekeeping or in another similar publication. The publishers of www.filipina.com proudly displayed the images of the Good Wife guide article in their site, implying that the filipina mail-order-brides that they had in their catalogs were going to be delivered and were to perform up to this industry standard of this type of “Good Wife.”

Search engines:

above: search results for “filipina” on altavista.com, circa 2003.

Porn sites for “filipina” representation (WARNING! These results have offensive content):

Above 2 images are the porn search results for “filipina” on google.com, circa 2003.

These 2003 google search results are similar to the results I got in 1996 when I used searched “filipina” at yahoo.com. I was very very upset when I found out about these types of sites, and how there were so many that used the word “filipina” in their domain name, i.e., www.______filipina.com, or www.filipina_____.net. Alot of these smutty sites still exist.

This image gallery, showing what filipina cyberpresence was like around 1995, represents why the community site of NEWfilipina.com was born in 1998. It is why FilipinaImages.com was born to carry on the torch so filipina cyberpresence can continue to heal.

It is why more filipinas and filipinos need to step forward too and have their webpage or website also help heal and balance filipina identity online.

The cybertyping of filipinas in the above ways is still going on.

What will you do with this knowledge?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 11:37 pm and is filed under The Filipina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.