Gender Roles
Although sex discrimination in daily activities is unknown in Balinese
society, men's and women's tasks and roles are clearly defined and quite
separate. There's a certain hardiness in Balinese women and a softness
in Balinese men that seems to reflect an ease with their sexuality and
gender role. Men and women both play male and female roles in Balinese
dance. Both sexes wear sarong skirts. Though once the exclusive
preserves of men, women are now becoming more involved in painting, sculpture,
and woodcarving. There's an acclaimed woman's gamelan orchestra
in Peliatan and a women's art gallery in Ubud.
Women often have independent incomes and
are in charge of raising pigs and cultivating the fields. They also prepare
for all the milestones in family life considered important or magical:
birth, the first cutting of nails and hair, filing of teeth, the piercing
of earlobes, marriage, and death.
Women prepare temple offerings and are responsible
for the main work of festivals. They perform much of the backbreaking labor
in the building industry.
Walking upright and graceful as queens, Balinese
women can carry 30 kilogram loads that stand up to 1.5 meters tall on their
heads, while men take up the rear cradling their parang. A young
Balinese girl can train herself to carry 40 coconuts, stacks of fruit,
or great water jars on her head-all this while riding a bicycle down a
bumpy country road.
Men make most of the family and village decisions.
Men also look after the fields and do all the chopping and food preparation
at festivals. While women care for most of the animals, the handling of
cocks and cockfights is the exclusive domain of men. The market is almost
solely a woman's environment, a place of abundant female energy and initiative
where females derive most of their earnings. Buying and selling cattle
is the province of men.
The Balinese are extraordinarily welcoming,
inviting visitors to take part in village life. They expect guests to adhere
to their rules and customs. If you live in a village, you learn how to
live communally. You know you're accepted when the villagers don't hesitate
to ask for favors.
Menstrual Blood
As in many traditional Indonesian societies, strict taboos used to govern
menstruation. Women could not prepare food, enter a temple or kitchen,
make offerings, or attend feasts. In aristocratic families menstruating
women were even sent out of the home to board in a special house or compound.
A Balinese man believed if menstrual blood
ever touched his scalp he would become impotent for the rest of his life
and follow his wife around like a dog. If a woman's menstrual blood fell
into the hands of an enemy it could be used as a powerful weapon by practitioners
of black magic. Today such practices and beliefs are on the wane.
Dress and Grooming
Most older Balinese women wear a kain or sarung and kebaya
wrapped artfully around their slim bodies. Men wear bright sarung
as well. Among the young girls, jeans and T-shirt are the latter day sarung
or kebaya. Ceremonial dress is elaborate and employs a number of
precious textiles: hip cloths (kamben) extending from waist to ankle,
ribbon-like belts (sabuk), and tightly bound chest cloths (anteng).
Shoulder cloths (selendang) are only worn in the Old Balinese villages
of Tenganan and Trunyan.
The custom of appearing topless was discouraged
when Europeans began arriving in numbers in the 1930s. Formerly, women
were always naked to the waist in public-only prostitutes wore blouses.
In the 1950s, with Indonesia's new found revolutionary fervor, tourists
were forbidden to snap photos of bare breasts, cameras and film were confiscated,
the women themselves fined. Today Balinese women wear bras like Western
women wear bikini tops.
Women have long, silky, black hair which
they tie in a number of ways around the head, without use of hairpins,
or interweave with scarves. Unmarried women often sport a loose lock of
hair hanging down the back over one shoulder with a gonjer (flower)
dangling in it. Hair can also be rolled inside itself in a great puff,
held in place by a few separated strands.
Many Balinese women had their ears pierced
when they were children. Women delouse each other and their children as
a social pastime and an affirmation of familial love.
Occasionally, you see children with the traditional clipped
short hair but for a single lock hanging down in front; the Balinese believe
the child will become ill if this lock is cut.