The Lady In Front

Let's take a closer look at one peculiar Filipino tradition. 

When I was a fan of Jewel In The Palace, I remember watching the closing scene featuring the main protagonist, Jang-geum, walking along the beach with her lover, Min Jung-ho. The man is in front closely followed by the woman. 

Now take this. In the Philippines, that's unheard of (if you exclude the Chinese community). Either both man and woman walk together (in the cliche "Holding Hands While Walking" or HHWW scene) or the woman is ahead of the man. It might not mean much but it does show a fairly accurate portrayal of how Filipinos treat Filipinas or women in general. 

There's a joke surrounding the practice of women walking behind their man, though. In a thread from the website, TurntoIslam, Barbara Walters, a journalist, was visiting Afghanistan again after a previous stint in the country:  

She noted (then) that women customarily walked five paces behind their husbands. Now, she observed that women still walked behind their husbands. Despite the overthrow of the oppressive Taliban regime, the women now seem to, and are happy to, maintain the old custom. 

Ms. Walters approached one of the Afghan women and asked, "Why do you now seem happy with an old custom that you once tried so desperately to change?" 

The woman looked Ms. Walters straight in the eyes, and without hesitation said, "Land Mines." 

The thread would go on to some discussions about the necessity of putting a man in front of a woman, namely, to "shield" the woman from "tsansing" or the inevitable, albeit accidental, brushing of a woman's body against any incoming person. But that's not something I would like to expound on here (since the joke was about an Arabic custom, I prefer that Arabs do the explaining, not me). 

For me, having a woman walk in front instead of behind a man reflects our egalitarian structure when it comes to gender. Specifically, there are three points to be mentioned here, all stemming from this practice:

First: the woman sets the pace. Since she's in front, she dictates how fast or how slow the whole party goes. Though this does not spell relief for the bedraggled husband carrying his wife's shopping bags across the mall, it does show how considerate we are to the needs of the opposite sex. 

Second: the woman sets the direction of the travel. She dictates where to go because she's in front and she's the boss. 

Third: the woman is shown, not hidden. Unlike our Arabic counterparts, we prefer that our mothers, our sisters, our daughters, or our wives/girlfriends walk in front of us and greet everyone else with their beauty and grace. 

Basically, this custom, our custom, boils down to respect. We respect our women enough that we allow them to set the pace, dictate directions, and be whoever they want to be. And that's neat, if you ask me.