Awkward compliment but still a compliment

 A Scottish member of parliament wisely resigned from a committee chairmanship after he was caught on microphone quietly discussing with a clerk during a meeting how a woman in the audience looked very attracting with her dark and dusky "Filipino look."

I say Labour Party politician Frank McAveety "wisely resigned" because had he not stepped down from the public petitions committee that he headed, I am pretty sure the entire Filipino nation would have risen in arms against his remarks.

Based on similar incidents in the past, I have come to the conclusion that many Filipinos are overly sensitive to remarks made by foreigners and very quick to take offense even without understanding what the remarks meant or knowing the context in which they were made.

To many Filipinos, it seems that it is enough that a remark or an action has been made or taken by a foreign country or a citizen of that country, about or against the Philippines or its citizens, for them to immediately go ballistic.

Take the current case of McAveety. Based on newspaper reports, here is what he said: "There's a very attractive girl in the second row. Dark and dusky. I'll maybe have to put a wee word out for her.

"She's very attractive-looking. Nice, very nice. The heat's getting to me. True, true, true. She's got that Filipino look, you know, the kind you would see in a Gauguin painting. There's a wee bit of culture."

Now pray tell me if there is anything derogatory about those comments? The way I look at it, McAveety was in fact paying a great compliment to the beauty of Filipino women, which in fact is true, as I find Filipino women as among the most beautiful in the world.

If there is any part of the comments of McAveety that may come close to being offensive, it is the part that says: "The heat's getting to me." But then I presume McAveety is every inch a man, who probably just reacted the way any man would in the presence of an attractive woman.

Nowhere in the comments of McAveety do I see any conscious attempt on his part to disparage the Filipino woman or, for that matter, Filipinos in general. I do not think his comments were sexist or racist.

Of course, McAveety resigned not because of fear of any backlash from Filipinos but because of the flap it caused in his own country when the media there made public the comments he made.

But it is well that he did because the thing had the makings of another international incident had Filipinos learned about it before he resigned. At least the tempest has dissipated before it can gain strength.

It is not that I would not stand up for the Filipino. My point is that it is wrong to take offense where no offense is meant. We do not live alone in this world. We interact with others and in the course of that interaction we may say things we do not actually mean.

If the truth be told, we Filipinos are very notorious about making disparaging comments about other peoples. For instance, if we do not confine ourselves to nasty jokes about the Chinese and Indians, we actually make some truly snide remarks about them.

Yet these people take it all in stride. And I do not think this is due to fear or the need to be acquiescent. I do not see it as a lack of nationalistic fervor or even self-respect. I see it simply as the kind of open-mindedness that maturity brings.

On the other hand, I see the quickness and readiness of the Filipino to take offense at the slightest provocation as a sign not only of the myopic tendencies of the immature but, more crucially, of a false sense of national pride.