P.S. Cola cola needs to stop giving away free cans to people living near the factories and contributing to modern day imperialism by the West.

In the late 1800s when the Philippines were revolting against Spanish inquisition, the Americans came, promising to help. Initially, Filipinos didn’t want the help, suspecting that Americans may have less than benign motives. However, President McKinley gave his word that the U.S. “had no design of aggrandizement and no ambition of conquest.” Thus, the alliance formed and the U.S. helped the Filipinos defeat the Spanish.

Before the Filipinos could establish the Republic of the Philippines, however, the U.S. refused to recognize the republic and instead issued the Proclamation of Benevolent Assimilation in which President McKinley announced the U.S.’s intention to annex the Philippines. To make it legal, the U.S. paid Spain 20 million silver pesos–or two silver pesos per Filipino.

Filipinos again resisted. The Philippine American war raged on for more than a decade, murdering over 250,000 Filipinos…and that’s just the death toll they could count officially. Whole towns were decimated by famine and disease, not to mention the U.S. used slash-and-burn techniques sweeping across the villages. More than half of the Phillipines laid in waste from the destruction. Did any of us learn about THAT in U.S. history?

This was when they started referring to Filipinas as “little brown fucking machinese powered by rice.” The sex industry there offered U.S. military men “a girl for the price of a burger.” It was the imperialistic conquest of the islands by the Americans that really jump-started the sex entertainment industry there. It sucked in women and children, sometimes girls as young as 7 or 8 years old. The U.S. military men didn’t care. All Asian women looked young anyway. UNICEF did a study recently on women prostitutes in the Phillipines. Of 500,000 women prostitutes, 100,000 were children. The Philippines now ranks 4th among 9 countries with the most number of prostituted children, all of which originated predominantly from the Philippine-American war.

(Source: Rachel Bundang, Scars ARE History: Colonialism, Written on the Body, On the Occasion of the Centennial of Philippine “Independence,” in Remembering Conquest: Feminist/Womanist Perspectives on Religion, Colonization, and Sexual Violence (1999).)

Ok. I swear I’m done ranting….

During both WWII, Vietnam, and other East Asian wars where there was significant Euro-Western military presence, American GIs who were stationed in the Phillipines would wear uniform T-shirts that said “I love little brown fucking machines.” Strong evidence leads many scholars to believe that these T-shirts (and the prostitution stations themselves) were funded by the U.S. government.

1.

Depictions of Filipinas as sexual commodities on the Internet have also been linked to the mail order bride industry in Australia. Researchers further speculate that online sexual commodification of Filipinas may at least partially explain why Filipinas experience disproportionate levels of domestic violence compared to non-Filipina women. The pornography industry markets Asian women as “passive, yet artful and eager to please,” a stereotype derived from the history of U.S. involvement in Asian wars.

(Source: Chris Cunneen and Julie Stubbs, Male Violence, Male Fantasy and the Commodification of Women Through the Internet, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: GLOBAL RESPONSES 7:5-28 (2000))

2.

The musical Miss Saigon reworks Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly plot into a more contemporary setting—the Vietnam War. An American marine arranges a one-night-stand with Kim, a Vietnamese bar-girl in Saigon shortly before the fall of the city. After her village was destroyed, Kim fled to Saigon fantasizing about finding a “strong GI to protect her.” The American marine then leaves Vietnam, leaving Kim behind stranded in Ho Chi Minh City with their son, Tam. The marine returns home to the United States where he marries a white woman. He continues with his life happily. Meanwhile, Kim tries to escape and reunite with the marine. She ends up in Bangkok, Thailand with her son, where she works at a massage parlor. The marine and his white wife meet Kim there to adopt Tam. When Kim realizes her American lover has no intention of marrying her, she commits suicide, leaving Tam under the care of the marine and his new wife.

Filipina singer-actress Lea Salonga was cast as the first Kim ever. Following up on her success and enduring popularity, the producers now regularly hold casting calls in Manila and other places with a sizable Asian female population. The upshot: Kim has been played most often-if not always-by Filipinas . . . The message between the lines is that all these women in this kind of situation are usable bodies, interchangeable parts, messy complications behind the male games of military history and foreign affairs. Kim is an icon . . . of the sex tour industry that has grown up around military installations in the Philippines and in other Asian nations with a history of significant U.S. military presence.

(Source: Rachel Bundang, Scars ARE History: Colonialism, Written on the Body, in Nantawan Boonprasat Lewis and Marie M. Fortune, REMEMBERING CONQUEST: FEMINIST/WOMANIST PERSPECTIVES ON RELIGION, COLONIZATION, AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE 60 (Haworth Press 1999).)

3.

There are also a few law review articles I found published in 2005 and 2006 about sexual violence against mail order brides that will make your skin crawl. I’ll send those by e-mail.