Marital law

NOT martial law but mari­tal law. Hours after presi­dential spokesperson Harry Roque asked wives to take over as enforcers of the community quarantine and keep blockheads and nitwits at home, including their drinking, cheating husbands, President Duterte echoed the suggestion.

The women, he said, should not let the money being dis­tributed to poor households from falling into the hands of their Mister, who will only spend it on gambling, cock­fights, alcohol, and violating all the rules of curfew and social distancing.

The President has had it. The blockheads and nitwits don’t get it, that their reck­less behavior threatens to set us back from weeks of an inconvenient lockdown. As the US, Spain, China and other countries are gradu­ally phasing in a return to economic activity, we are tightening the screws of our ECQ because of those irre­sponsible, happy-go-lucky “tambay,” punks, ne’er-do-wells. What do you know, they’re all males. (Where do you keep 125,000 curfew vio­lators under lock and key?)

While their wives, mothers, sisters scrape by as they ad­just to the lack of cash, food, and certain freedoms, as they risk courting the coro­navirus with every visit to the palengke, the men are busy at their picnic playing with their pals, roosters, dice, and cards at some out-of-the-way street corner. (A clutch of cockfighting aficionados was caught only because the roosters made so much noise with their crowing. Their penalty? Slaughtering their birds, cooking them, eating them. Let’s see more innova­tive punishments like this, Generals Gamboa, Eleazar, Sinas! More gut-wrenching than being forced to sit for six hours staring at an empty coffin.)

Not that ALL women have been more than lily-white in obeying the rules, but this group would surely belong to an insignificant minority. Interesting to find out why from sociologists, psycholo­gists, anthropologists. In the same breath, may we ask DoH Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire to share with us the demographics of coronavirus transmissions not only by age and local­ity but by gender also. The rate of women infected is generally at 30-40 percent globally; would it be the same here?

Dr. Sharon Moalem in his book, The Better Sex, ex­plains: Women have two locks, called the double-X factor (XX), that COVID-19 has to unlock. Locky us! Men have only one lock.