Unhidden Faces of Woman

By Fritz Blackburn

There are faces of woman that are getting lost to a modern world where declining fertility and femininity, as well as cancers of the reproductive system, threaten to expose what Western woman has really become--a decorated Barbie doll without true confidence or actual woman power! The first three chapters of this book deal with the “Barbie doll syndrome” and the matriarchal and tyrannical forces that no longer allow a man to live authentically as a man; that dispossess good fathers and force males to build man-caves just to behave naturally once in a while. The initial chapters also begin to sketch a new vision of feminism that would not only ask for equal rights but strive for equal authenticity, for equal self-responsibility and self-development as women who respect themselves, and who prefer to respectfully work with men instead of against. The face of western woman is revealed as a mask, a "make-up" for the insecurities of the Barbie doll. In order to arrive at a realistic version of feminism, women need to recognize where they went wrong, and that the pretenses and decorations, the tearing out of body-hair, and their obsession with clothes and body-weight is not what makes a woman happy, strong, attractive or respectable to anyone.
What can a man do, where no woman listens to his muffled screams for unperfumed air, when he loses his kids on separation, or when his sperm count drops by fifty percent from sheer emasculation?
This account is based on the author’s personal experience with tribal Filipino women who have not yet lost any of their femininity, or their competence, to narcissistic vanity and self-delusion; it introduces a portrait of woman that like the smile of Mona Lisa hints at a mysterious knowledge of being female.
The extraordinarily beautiful city of Dumaguete, where tribal people from all over Negros flow to sell their produce at the market, or to study, is the hub of an experience with that kind of woman that can restore all lost faith in womanhood and allow a man in his fifties to feel young and sexy again. Where an older and wiser man is still attractive to young women, and where he can feel respected enough as a male to be sexually authentic--a more soulful and playful quality of sex not only facilitates the transition from suppressed and apologetic male into a free and empowered man in his prime, but also opens a first door to truly know what is essentially female beyond all culture. It helps reading those faces that still speak the mysteries of the Goddess...
This story, which is unashamedly a love story, can be enjoyed by women who have the courage and humility to look at what men really think and who do not mind facing painful truths and higher standards on their path to self-knowledge. True feminists will love the honesty of a fresh and culturally comparative perspective, but controversy is assured by all those females who prefer to think of themselves as perfect princesses. For older men, this story is a beam of hope, as it promises light at the end of a very dark and lonely tunnel, and men of every age will enjoy this read, and feel understood and encouraged to accept themselves as legitimately alive. This account, which gives valuable practical insights into Dumaguete, one of the most spectacular places on earth, invites a respect for that kind of woman that most men don’t suspect can even exist--the fully authentic woman; the Goddess!
The quickly disappearing faces of the Goddess are the central focus of this spiritually sensitive guide to the soul of authentic woman, which could be a men’s bible to liberation and happiness, as much as it can structure a more enlightened version of feminism that would seek to recover some of the femininity and actual woman power lost in consumer societies. This book will be of interest to the gay/lesbian community as much as to the woman who seeks to recover her lost femininity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fritz Blackburn
• Release date: Jun 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9780473359416

Fritz Blackburn

Born 1955 in Germany, studies of law and economics at Augsburg University.At age twenty, the author was an international globetrotter, and dedicated to psychic experiments and spiritual disciplines.While studying law, he found months each year to train with shamans in remote places and natural societies.He left Europe and law at age 28 for a cave in the Philippines, but ended up having children in New Zealand and raising them on his own.Throughout his life he pursued a spiritual path, particularly the Taoist disciplines of transforming sexual energy into higher awareness, and shamanism.Apart from being a dad, travel, building houses and landscaping, he spent his creative time teaching chess, spiritual counselling, healing, traveling inner worlds, gardening, tree-planting and writing.The author’s source of insight is not intellectual thought, but acute observation, untainted by any one cultural or personal perspective. He spent the last twenty years mostly living in the “bush” in NZ, in relative isolation from society, meditating on timeless things and cultivating inner abilities...He foresees a very difficult future for mankind and therefore wishes to contribute by publishing some of his unusual work.

Book preview

Unhidden Faces of Woman

By: Fritz Blackburn

Copyright © 2016 Fritz Blackburn

Cover design: Karl Drummond

Photo: Fritz Blackburn

Book design: Fritz Blackburn

Editor: Jessica Montegrejo

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Peanut Girl

Chapter 2: Barbie Doll and sperm count

Chapter 3: Modern Matriarchs

Chapter 4: The Tyrants

Chapter 5: Daring to live as a man

Chapter 6: Girls of Dumaguete

Chapter 7: The Sorceress

Chapter 8: The Mother

Chapter 9: Whores and Saints

Chapter 10: The Virgin

Chapter 11: The Witches

Chapter 12: The Teacher

Chapter 13: Lady-boy

Chapter 14: The Feminist

Chapter 15: The Mountain Goat

Chapter 16: Goddess

Chapter 1: The Peanut Girl

She is everywhere you go in the Philippines. You just can’t always see her. The peanut girl only becomes visible when you walk out of a hospital in tears, or just after a break-up, or during a sudden onslaught of rain when you seek cover under a square inch of roof with lots of other people, when you’re right here and right now, distracted and without a plan. Or, of course, when you feel like peanuts! Then she will smile at you from a place you’ve never been and make you an offer: Peanuts, sir, roasted peanuts, five pesos only! The smile stays if you turn her down. She says thank you, sir, smiles again, and then fades away or passes on to smile at another person who looks like he has the time to stop for life or peanuts. But sometimes she may be all you got and peanuts the only food you can find late at night, or else five pesos may not seem too much reward for such a smile. Then you may sit down and buy nuts from the girl or even talk to her. You may discover her secret while waiting for a jeepney, and even miss her after you’re back on your long-chosen way and she still stands there with her tray, beside the road, hoping her peanuts won’t cool down too much before she can sell them. The peanut girl appears only in those sparse moments between real events that do not lead up to anything, but exist outside of time and despite purposeful logic. She will offer you a peanut just when nothing else matters more.

I met the peanut girl many times. During a typhoon, on the beach, between tricycles, in lonely streets at night—and I try never to miss my appointments with her, as that would mean to lose those tiny bits of conscious life and human presence that I came here to find and that nourish my soul.

She found me at Jutsz Café just when I needed her, with seagulls still in my head, calling across an ocean—gooone, gooone, forever gooone—and my grilled vegetable kebabs by now too cold to be eaten. Fresh hot peanuts, sir! Where is your girlfriend? Best peanuts my mama make! You try, sir! And yes, I needed some peanuts and she, as fate would have it, could use a calamansi juice! The waiter first tried to keep her outside the enclosure, protecting the precious customer from beggars and sellers, but I proclaimed her to be my guest and he was then quite happy to guide her and all her nuts to my table. Her smile made her look like a freshly roasted, brown and spicy peanut herself, fresh out of its peel. It came so readily, she could sit there without a word and keep breaking into new smiles from just looking at an old nitwit. I’m Inday, she said after I had introduced myself, inday meaning girl, and she was the one who sold her mother’s roasted peanuts every night, if she could. Peanut, five pesos only, sir, she jokingly called out at a passer-by who waved and smiled. Yes, I am the on, she said again. My peanuts are the best!

Over a chocolate cake the peanut girl told me how she helps her sick mother to roast or boil the nuts. When they have coconut oil they would roast the husked nuts in that. Otherwise they mix the unpeeled nuts with heated sand from the beach and cook them in the wok. At age seven, the girl came home from school, did the daily laundry, got the peanuts ready and, after eating some rice, started to walk the streets of Dumaguete. On a very good night she would sell out and make two-hundred pesos a night. At a cost of one-hundred pesos this brought her a profit of a hundred pesos. And there were the bad nights, where she sold nothing at all, and some dog ate the peanuts, or she herself when she became too hungry. Her older sister was working to pay for her mother’s medicine. She was a dancer and she had a baby their mother tried to look after. But it was the peanut girl who cared for the little one much of the time, and who did most of the cooking and the cleaning and of whatever else needed to get done.

I was into my third packet of peanuts and the peanut girl still smiled and was happy to tell her story. She was ‘only an adopted girl’, she confided with just a slight catch in her voice, and the woman she called mother was not her real mother. Her sister was not her real sister. Her biological mother was long dead and she had never known her dad. But I can help! To say thank you for being accepted! she said with fierce pride. I am not useless!

What is your biggest dream? I asked her then, unprepared for her quick response: I want to be like Jacky Chan! When I showed her a photo of my two daughters belted up in black for karate, she stood up and took a tiger-style stance, looking grim enough to scare most tigers, and went through a flurry of well-intuited long-fist moves that would have left anybody standing too close badly worried. There were no other outdoor customers and so the waiter only smiled happily. I had met with a few great teachers here and there, I thought, but a student like this karate kid here would be a one off. I knew talent when I saw it. Why here then, in this poverty, under such hard conditions? How? Somehow I was no longer much surprised when we also discovered a mutual interest in chess. She had loved chess ever since somebody had taken the time to show her, and although she didn’t own a board or pieces of her own she took every opportunity to catch a game where she could. We should play some time, I somewhat lamely suggested, not really too much willing to put on my intellectual working cap—and she looked at me knowing I didn’t mean it enough for it to be real. She was only the peanut girl after all. She stood up again and quickly collected her left-over peanuts and her pesos. When she thanked me for her chocolate cake I held her back: there is a small chess set for sale at ‘Lee Super,’ girl! Here is the money. Buy it and practise! Next time I see you we will play. The smile I received was like early sunrise over a secret grove of flowering Ylang Ylang. Thank you, sir, thank you! I will practise! I was quite sure nonetheless that she would buy food instead or give the pesos to her mother. I still enjoyed the lingering taste of her peanuts well after she had left. They were indeed the best I had eaten anywhere in the world, including Latin America. And the seabirds had left my head.

A week or two later I wandered to Canday-ong to find a woman I had met earlier, without really knowing where to look. Everybody knows me! had been her instructions as to address, and so I explored the narrow, colourful little passage-ways that meandered alongside the river, where the poorest people of Dumaguete live with regular floods and non-existent sewage systems, in inadequate houses and often stagnant heat. Asking for a rather common name got me nowhere, so I added manual descriptions of body-shape and a few eloquent dance-moves designed to describe her personality. It achieved nothing, but earned me the indulgent smiles customarily assigned to the mentally unstable and to harmless idiots. Turning a corner, I came upon a well where a few girls sat doing their family’s laundry, one having a bucket shower. A little girl squatting behind a big pile of clothes and sheets waved at me wildly and called my name. Sir Fritz! Her face looked brown and shiny like a freshly roasted peanut. I felt the sudden taste of very good and perfectly salted nuts in my mouth and with that recognized the peanut girl. I swallowed my imaginary nuts before I greeted her and asked about the lady I tried to find. Oh, she is my big sister! I can show you our house! Nearly finished with laundry!

The house was in the process of falling over when we arrived and the roof was more a patched-up and apologetic concession to visual normality than it offered any actual protection from the rain. There were open drains, flies sitting on thick grey slime, no electricity, no running water. The only water source was the well which was a little too salty to drink from. Drinking water had to be bought in. When she had hung her laundry up to dry, the peanut girl nevertheless fixed me a calamansi juice; then she fed the cat and what she called my chekin-duck, which were one single white chicken and two yellow ducklings. I had not been allowed to help her with the laundry, because I was a foreigner, a white man, and a guest. White people never work, she said by way of an explanation, and when I disputed that she added— I never see foreigner help when people need help. And foreigners never do their own laundry! I do it for them sometimes and they give me money! I told her that I usually wash my own things and that skin colour does not define a man, or some similarly hopeful remark. I said it in simpler words, but she looked at me as if I had just descended from the moon. With sudden impulse she asked— will you play chess with me? You remember your promise? I practise already! I will and I do and—good girl I said, but as we had started to set up the pieces, the baby stirred, followed by a woman’s voice, and the peanut girl excused herself, talked to her adoptive mother inside her bedroom and returned with a restive but quite happily grinning baby. No problem! I will feed the baby while we play chess. Then I will wash mother, she is very hot. My sister will be back soon for dinner. Who’s going to cook the food then? I asked. I will be the one! May be my sister can help sometimes. Mother does the peanuts, or I will. How can you possibly manage to do all that work before and after school? How are your grades? Quite good! I’m spelling champion! And this is not work, only family! Being useful! I do things that make me better. Like buying a chess set! Big cocky smile.

She fed the baby some formula and it promptly nodded back to sleep just when we had completed a variant of the Sicilian opening and had engaged in an intriguing middle game. At this stage her sister arrived and gave me a kiss and spoke a few words. She then put the baby back inside, went to the well to have a shower—and we went right back into our game, forgetting all else for a while. The peanut girl proved to be one of those exceptionally clear-minded jungle geniuses who take to chess like fish take to water and who recognize it as a limitless range for a fresh mind to explore itself in an arena where language is no handicap and the lack of so-called education no disadvantage. This girl always had a plan, but never failed to be responsive to my own maneuvers over it, weaving it all along with diligent, even precise coherence, into the most interesting positions that required her to see four, five moves ahead to just conceive of their creation. Her sister, the dancer, was somewhere around at some stage, saying a few words in Visaya—but we were only peripherally aware of her while we created a potential queen sacrifice for a five-move mate, as well as a knight check that might fork the queen and king two moves later. The peanut girl shone with enthusiasm and commitment! She wasn’t really a thinker. She was a superbly acute observer and a doer, and therefore she saw the problem and went about fixing it with the responsibility of a plumber before the water goes on. What people recognize as brilliant is seldom more than the ability to see the world as it really is, plus the faith to make the most of that. This girl really wanted to get things done, not fail to do them! She was determined to know my plan and the future and all the traps to be avoided, and she was very clear about her own options. I had only just explained the en passant rule to her and the various ways to castle—and already she played with the tactical clarity, and certainly the sincerity, of an experienced tournament player!

The sister then went to the market to buy some food and took the baby, but the peanut girl soon missed the winning move on account of the chekin-duck that, as a trio, had decided that they too were players and zapped her concentration with attempts to make it up onto her lap. Her elevated awareness lapsing, I squeezed in a rather lucky mate. I’m terrible at that! I never let people win just to keep them happy—especially not children. Chess is about truth and about reality of perception. And mostly it is about respect. I tried to tell the peanut girl in short and clear words how much I admired her game and pointed at the beauty of her plan. But she did not need any pity-praise or paternal consolation and accepted my compliment with a quick nod. Then the chekin-duck fluttered from floor to lap to chessboard in a perfectly executed and perfectly destructive manoeuvre that sent my king flying like a missile and a few pawns trying to escape through the gaps in the split bamboo floor. Faster than Jacky Chan, the peanut girl rescued the pawns, caught the king, and caught up, almost simultaneously, with the chekin-duck, whisking it out and tying it up with a few scraps. Sorry, said the peanut girl, for the bad action of the naughty chekin-duck! It was such a pretty game! She actually had a tear rolling out of nowhere. And sorry also I must now wash mother, I already late. My sister coming back soon! Thank you very much for the game! And off she was, making a fire to heat up water and getting the sick woman from her room, after preparing a little seat for her in the washing area, which was a low wall beside where I was sitting. My natural impulse was to help the peanut girl conveying the lady along, and my cultural one to flee a situation where I had to watch her wash the naked woman right in front of me, an outsider. But the lady was quite jolly and after introductions were made she quickly forestalled all embarrassment on my part by asking me to stand ready in case she fell over or needed help scratching her back. I was welcome company but wasn’t allowed to fetch the water as the entire neighborhood would have questioned a foreigner pulling water from the well for the family. Now that would have been truly embarrassing! I will be the one, said the peanut girl and lugged back bucket after bucket, while the woman sat there naked and in lively conversation with me and the omnipresent chekin-duck who seemed to enjoy the watery pleasure too much to worry about the soapy spray. The peanut girl then carefully positioned her head and washed the woman’s lustrous long hair with such tender grace that it was almost painfully beautiful to watch them against the background of the discolored wall which, like a Spitzweg painting, artfully assembled a symphony of light and shadow filtering through overhead branches to pattern skin, wall, bucket and floor, and effectively camouflaging the chekin-duck and the cat which darted in and out of the painting. There was unbelievable dignity in the peanut girl as she sweetly but thoroughly washed the woman’s magnificent black hair, neck, armpits and breasts, soaping her up without haste, not trying to get the work done quickly but enjoying the honour of performing this daughterly service. Every move of the peanut girl was an act of deepest respect, and the woman herself sat there with complete trust, without a speck of vanity or pretence, or even a shadow of discomfort, enjoying herself within a relaxed sensuality and an unbelievably feminine surrender that interacted and lived under the girl’s competent hands. What reason could there exist to be uncomfortable with watching such a plain and pure picture of human nakedness and absolute grace, I asked myself while the girl soaped her mother’s vagina and buttocks, dropping a large soapy speck on the head of the chekin to the utter amusement of the little ducklings who tried their best to peck it off. The last bucket of water sent them all flying and the woman was now ready to be dried off, which the peanut girl accomplished with the well-practised efficiency of one who feels honored in doing what she does. It was just simple goodness, and an expression of human essence beyond word and art.

There were tiny plants growing from cracks in the wall that had pinhead sized red flowers. The woman lifted her arms in submission to be towel-dried under her arms and breasts, while a small butterfly landed on the little red flowers. The wall seemed ancient and full with memories for a moment, when the young girl gently dried the feet of the woman, taking heed of every toe and fold and lightly lifting her dried feet onto clean sandals. The old wall and the naked woman and the young girl were a dance of palm leaves, light and shadow, a divine tattoo on the skin of simple reality that might last only as long as the dream of a butterfly. Even caught up in the movement I could for moments see the still-life underneath, hold a single timeless moment with the eyes of Spitzweg and glimpse what is, throughout the ages, essentially human and timelessly real. I touched the meaning of love, of surrender, of divine grace and began to fathom why flowers would be tempted to grow out of pure rock in this place. After the girl had brushed out the long hair of the mother the light must have changed and I started breathing again, and the butterfly flew away from the tiny flowers.

The sister returned from the market and the mother settled down to fry peanuts while her long hair was drying in the heat. Gigutom ka? she asked me about my appetite. Not so much, I said. Can I help cutting things? Who is doing the cooking? I will be the one, said the peanut girl. You are our guest! And you don’t know how to make saluyot soup! You are a foreigner! Go and talk sweet to my sister, she is waiting for you already!

At this moment, a phenomenally drunk Filipino, probably a sailor, half stormed, half fell into the place, holding a machete and a bottle and staring at me with eyes well beyond sane contemplation, uttering sounds that could have been any language or