LERIOS, Kristine Noelle Prof. Felipe Jocano Jr.

MANUEL, Reiou Regie Anthro 179 THW

OREJANA, Alfred Jerome May 27, 2016
RONQUILLO, Frances Louise

Real to Reel: Their Changing Image as Wives to LBFM

As the boundaries demarcating our world continue to blur with the rise of globalization,

our meanings and identities have shifted accordingly to this larger space. Within this space,

many Filipino women chose to work overseas as semi-skilled laborers, domestic helpers and

entertainers. Their decision to find labor abroad perpetuated narrow stereotypes of the Filipina as

being either domestic helpers or prostitutes (Liu & Chen, 2006). Virtually, on the Internet, the

Filipina had been packaged in likewise the same manner as ‘mail-order brides’ or MOBs

(Tolentino, 1996; Rondina, 2004), and in pornography as ‘little brown fucking machines’ or

LBFMs (Hofmann, 1997).

Filipinas as Mail-Order Brides

To better understand how Filipino women are represented in online pornography, we first

look into how they were thought of as ‘mail-order brides’ or MOBs. While the Filipinas in

pornography are usually bar girls or prostituted women absolved of any commitment apart from

sexual intercourse, they are, in the same manner as MOBs, presented as commodities whose

worth is measured by what they can offer in the household (as with MOBs) or in bed (as with

prostituted women).

Filipino women in a transnational space could now assume more roles and pursue more

opportunities that were previously avenues open only to men. Tolentino (1996) notes that

because of the Filipina’s migration, she take on the role of the economic provider for her family.

At the same time, however, she is still bound by the same societal expectations that pressure her

to maintain her physical appearance:

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 By being circulated in transnational space, the Filipina's body ... becomes a tool for
(limited) economic empowerment, placing the Filipina in the nontraditional role as "wage
earner" or “head of the family.” On the other hand, the Filipina's body becomes the very
requisite for being positioned in this “new” economic situation: her supposedly nimble
finders and perfect eyesight, her youth, her unmarried status all add up to a stereotypical
performative body in transnational circuits. (p. 53)

By marrying a foreigner, the MOB system worked around the economic and social

problems that Filipino women faced. For the first time, Filipinas has a chance to improve their

living conditions and experience, for once, what it is like to be middle-class:

Filipinas pursue, for lack of better options, the promise of making concrete the cultural
standards of middle class living ... This is also the logic behind mail-order brides and, in a
more general schema, the reason women and men allow themselves to be circuited in a
transnational space to begin with. (Tolentino, 1996, p. 58)
The MOB system embodies what Rondina (2004) calls the “fairy-tale rescue narrative,”

with the “Filipina, as Third-World wife plays damsel-in-distress to the Western/American’s

First-World husband, knight-in-shining-armor archetype” (p. 51).

When looked at from the perspective of the Western man, the MOB system entices him

because of the “boastful proprietorship” (Rondina, 2004, p. 52) that comes with having a Filipina

for a wife. On the other hand, for the Filipina, it is a life of “subservience and servitude” in

which she becomes merely a “disembodied and disempowered commodity hoping to be chosen,

waiting to be bought” (Rondina, 2004, p. 52).

Filipinas as Little Brown Fucking Machine (LBFM)

The prevailing images of Filipino women have been a turbulent site of power struggle,

thereby, carry discourses. According to Foucault (1966), discourse is a “system of possibility for

knowledge” (as cited in Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989, p. 167) that governs how we see the

world. We believe that the discourse of LBFM operates under the rules of patriarchy that have

long abused and oppressed women.

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 It is about a male social system in place to ensure the satisfaction of male demand for

sexual servicing and for objectified sex. The requirement, therefore, is abundant supply of

women’s bodies, which debased and dehumanized the women’s sexuality (Jeffreys, 2009).

This belief continues as Filipinas are seen as prostitutes who are willing to experience

and do various sex positions for the pleasure of her partner. Hearsays about Filipinas as sex

objects were not only transmitted from White men but has been the “talk of the town” among all

races because of the changing technology. Various fora serve as venues of exchanging

information about Filipinas on how they can satisfy dominant men in bed, may it be in real life

or virtually.

A forum inside the website “topix.com” talks about Filipinas as sex objects and how

Filipinas function in bed. Men from different countries, particularly from USA, share their

experiences and fantasies about Filipinas. Filipinas present in the same forum answer their

queries and sometimes give their number for a hot night sex when they visit the country.

According to these men, Filipinas’ submission fortifies the strength of the White men

which feeds the men’s ego. Filipinas practice exotic and bareback sex such as anal sex, love for

big “d”, and 3-hole-sex, that men in the forum describes her as a “wildcat”. It gives them

excitement to see Filipinas, in pornography, letting the men “do her any way [they] wanted”.

Filipinas “never said no to anything sexually” and is “confident in herself and her petite body”.

Second, Filipino women have been thrown away as a postcolonial Other and Orient –

sexualized, exoticized, and commodified as LBFM. Said (1979) argues that the Orient was

created by and for the West:

The Orient is not an inert act of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is
not just there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own
history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography …
Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of

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thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. (pp.
4-5).

In Philippine context, the Filipina as a postcolonial Other is one “whose value and

signification is rooted in the Western/American colonial domination of the Philippines”

(Rondina, 2004, p. 51) and thus, made to satisfy Western desires.

As seen in a banter in topix.com, Filipinas’ small vaginas drive the crazy out of White

men by seeing the wild expression from the women’s faces. Despite the pain Filipinas

experience because of the so-called “big hotdogs” of the West, their bodies have an

instantaneous and “wet response” in the intercourse. The desire of fucking, even in pain,

considers these Filipinas as Little Brown Fucking Machines.

According to Hofmann (1997), the derogatory term ‘little brown fucking machine fuelled

by rice’ or LBFM was used by servicemen of U.S. military who occupied Philippine soil. The

term refers to the Filipino women they used merely for sex, contrary to the aspirations of

Filipinas to someday fall in love and marry an American serviceman.

As seen in the same forum, Filipinas do such wild acts for money. As one of the users

said, “Pinay women want guys with a real big credit card”. There is also a banter in the forum

where White men ask a Filipina if she graduated from a university or not, implying that

prostitutes come from lower class and those who have education ask for sex not just because for

pleasure, but for a long term relationship. The term LBFM was mentioned afterwards fortifying

the belief that Filipinas from lower class do “all-the-way sex” to generate income and to fend for

themselves. A lot of White men take advantage of this as they know that this is their “only way

to make a good living in the country” as the “Philippines is still deeply entrenched in 3rd World

economically.

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Filipinas as LBFM in Porno

When American military bases were first installed in the Philippines during the 1990s,

these served as sites that attracted lots of Filipinas whom offered sexual labor (Lim, Wal, &

Dissanayake, 1999). These women performed tasks that serviced these military men’s rest and

recreation, and this was the time when the Filipina image as Little Brown Fucking Machine was

first popularized. The LBFM image constituted that of “the domestic helper, the maid, the

Filipina as the server to the world, or as servants of globalization,” (Burns, 2012). However, with

the passage of time, we could see how this former LBFM image that serviced and entertained

military men physically in these bases have transformed into a new virtual LBFM Filipina image

largely and rapidly distributed around the world, through the innovation of technology in the

aspect of pornography, which is over-all caused by globalization’s deterritorialization process.

Malcolm Waters (2001) explains that technology makes it possible for the dissemination of

symbols widely and rapidly, and has made symbolic exchanges detached from territories. This

deterritorialization has paved the way for the objectification of these Filipinas through

simultaneous viewing by multiple spectators online.

Through the years, Filipinas have gained prominence and have acquired their own niche

market in the porn industry. Searching the word filipina porn in search engines reveals lots of

porn sites featuring only Filipinas. Doing so on Google will show top result PinaySmut.com,

which according to their site “offers complete selection of hot pinay sluts online. We update

every day with new Filipina Porn Movies.” The other results are top international pornsites

showing their collection of videos with the filipina tag. As of May 26, 2016, leading pornsite

xvideos.com has a collection of 9313 videos with the filipina tag and 13,011 videos with the

Pinay tag, while Pornhub.com has 942 videos, and Redtube.com with 473. It cannot go

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unnoticed that the titles of these filtered videos seem to always contain the words “filipina”,

“pinay”, “asian”, or “exotic”. These facts more or less suggest that filipinas on the web have

distinct features that viewers seem to thirst for. The question is, what are these characteristics

that Western men seem to crave for?

There exists a site entitled Filipina Sex Review, which is a Filipino porn review site that

offers information on bargirls, photo models, mailorder brides, cyberdating, and porn scandals

(filipinasex.org, n.d.). According to the site’s creator:

Filipina women’s great-ethnic diversity and hospitality are desired by men all
over the world. Millions of them work as Oversea Foreign Workers (OFW) as caring
nurses in the USA, sexy sales ladies in Dubai, attentive waitresses in Singapore, as
hostesses in Japan and as prostitutes in Amsterdam. Filipinos are a mix of Chinese,
Indonesian, Hispanic, American and Japanese ancestors and they look very exotic.
Together with personal warmth they are considered very lovely, exotic and sexually
attractive.

To add to this, in an article review of the porn site asianamericangirls.com, the reviewer

claims that a large number of Filipina immigrants in the United States are making a move into

adult movies and that Fil-Ams are “loved for their exotic look and wet orgasms.”

But more than a Filipina’s physical attractiveness and hospitality, in an article review of

the site pimonger.com, we get to understand that Filipina’s cheap sexual labor makes them a

popular target in the porn industry. PiMonger is “a small community set up by monger for

monger and Philippine addicts.” The site contains pictures and videos of Filipina bargirls

performing sexual acts. The reviewer explains that a monger is a person who is addicted in sex

and lives the lifestyle of a playboy on a small scale. He adds that “little money in a third world

country like the Philippines attracts a lot of female talent who want a bit of wealth from a hot

guy.” The site states that a PiMonger describes the Philippines as a “Third world playboy

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paradise where pussy is cheaper than a decent meal at a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles or

London.”

In another review, which claims trikepatrol.com as “by far the best Filipina bargirl porn

site with videos online,” we get to see another site that features a foreigner escapading the

provinces of the Philippines in the search of local women willing to get paid to get filmed. The

reviewer explains that the reasons for the site’s popularity is that “it contains the largest

collection of pinay whores making love with foreigner sexpats”, describing Filipinas as cheap

“Filipina Fuck Dolls” who would get paid to perform sex with joy.

An article review on Asian Sex Diary reveals it to be another site featuring a western man

on a sexual escapade to meet and film Filipinas in action. The site calls the protagonist John

Tron, the girls are called “trophies”, and the list of movies is called “conquests”. The

protagonists travels across the country to meet girls like “gold-diggers on husband watch,

freelancers, bargirls and genuine street hookers.” The reviewer claims the site to be the most

innovative porn site in the Philippines, and beyond.

All these mentioned articles gives us a sense of why Filipinas are a target in the porn

industry. Their exotic physical feature, hospitality, and need for fast cash have made them an

easy target for content producers and spectators alike. Interestingly enough, Filipinas in

pornography seem to be packaged the same way as the original LBFM image conceived back in

the 1990s. They are still the same “exotic women” from a white man’s gaze. They are still the

same “hospitable women” who offer service and entertain. And lastly, they are still the same

“sexual laborers” who are attracted by the fast cash, as caused by the poor state of economy.

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Conclusion

Due to the economic situation of the Philippines, poor Filipinas regard white men as their

saviors against poverty which lead them to sell themselves as wives. However this prostitution

constitutes the hegemonizing of the West that has limited her definition to that of exotic and

subservient to the beck and call of the white male. As the struggle of the Filipinas to sustain

themselves intensifies and with the advancement of technology, they have taken advantage of the

image created by the West through pornography. This economic struggle paved way for the

changing images of prostitution in the Philippines and the images of Filipinas from a household

wife to a fucking machine.

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