Writer Andrea Panaligan on ‘Regla Dust’ and centering feminism

It was through Rookie, the American online magazine for teens that is still online but no longer publishing new content, that Andrea Panaligan, at a young age, discovered the feminist gaze. It was a space where works of young artists and writers were “taken seriously,” she said.

“It’s kinda sad that I had to resort to a US-based magazine for that,” Panaligan continued. “But I was really enticed by it, that I need not become a full adult for my writing to be taken seriously.” 

Though feminist politics was already, unwittingly, introduced to her early on — in grade school, she was a campus journalist writing about reproductive health and similar social issues — it was Rookie that bluntly articulated such politics she embodies to this day. One might say Tavi Gevinson, the magazine’s founding editor, raised a more politically discerning generation of girls. 

“It really colored my experience not just as a young person but as a young woman,” Panaligan said.

This month, Panaligan debuted her chapbook Regla Dust, a title under indie press Everything’s Fine, at the Philippine Book Festival. 

First released as an abridged zine at the Better Living Through Xeroxography (BLTX) indie press fair in 2024, the bifurcated work is an acute rumination on the five stages of a pregnancy scare, taking its cue from the Kübler-Ross grief model, and on the precarious state of reproductive health and sex education in the Philippines.

Brief as it is, Regla Dust is, oftentimes, incisively too real, a writing that’s clearly forged by painful lived truth. It’s funny by accident, perhaps because there are only so many ways to make sense of one’s womanhood in a country that’s seemingly turning more backward than progressive in its material treatment of women.

“Did God also teach a lesson to the boy whose condom slipped? Did he also send him waves of guilt when I carried the side effects of Plan B for days while he carried on to work, or do I have to carry that too?” wrote Panaligan, who’s hoping to turn the material into a full-blown essay collection.

Despite her campus journalism training, Panaligan pursued a Behavioral Science degree at the University of the Philippines Manila. But culture writing, especially for Young STAR where she works as chief editor, is where her heart has always been.

“I realized that, personally, writing is so instrumental, regardless of whether it becomes my day job or not… that if [I’m not a writer, I] wouldn’t know how to live,” she said. 

“No matter what I do, I always go back to writing.” 

Around that time, Panaligan was already well into digital content creation centered on feminist literature, which began in 2021 after becoming a voracious reader at the height of the pandemic, and as a response to the growing demand for a more diverse literature online.

As “girlbossinred” on TikTok, she reviews and recommends books worthy of our ever-declining attention span and offers brief, researched takes on our online habits — from our parasocial relationships with artificial intelligence to anik-anik culture — and swelling symptoms of structural violence against women.

Initially, the videos she shared on the platform went without having any voiceover or revealing her identity onscreen, until it was time to do so. 

“I didn’t have anyone to talk to about books because, at the time, a lot of my friends weren’t reading as much as I did, so I just poured my thoughts into those videos,” recalled Panaligan.

It didn’t take that long for her to grow a real audience, turning her vast personal library into a digitally public one. 

“I don’t regard it as a sense of duty,” she clarified, “but I noticed that there’s real curiosity and willingness on their part to read books by women.”

Some of her all-time book recos include Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, Lola Olufem’s Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power, Tracy Clark-Flory’s Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey into the Heart of Desire (a specific inspiration for Regla Dust), John Bengan’s Armor, and Everything’s Fine co-founder Katrina Stuart Santiago’s Of Love and Other Lemons. 

Panaligan said being a TikTok content creator is worlds apart from being a writer “because of the way they consume what you say there.” 

“You have to fend off a lot of distractions, and you have to be articulate enough for them to absorb what you tell them even when they’re only listening with one ear.” 

But the writer-editor stressed that her takes must account for something of value, though without being the final word on anything. 

“I make it a point that I contribute to the conversation, instead of simply regurgitating what others already said,” she said. “I’m not saying my videos are the best thing out there, but I want to have some extra consideration about what I say and what I research. It’s a very intentional process.”

Of course, Panaligan’s videos are not safe from contrarians or, at times, right-wing trolls fishing for engagement. For instance, a heated post about the problematic views of Charlie Kirk, following his death last year, prompted loyal followers of a popular rage-bait account to swarm and spam her content with a load of non sequiturs and ad hominems, including comments on her weight and appearance.

“It’s true that disagreement is crucial to progress, but online ‘debates’ are not discourse as much as a mass humiliation ritual,” she wrote in a Substack essay in response to the issue.

But over time, Panaligan has learned the reliable art of compartmentalization, as many women have in a country where misogyny is present at every turn. 

“It’s exhausting, of course, but it’s overpowered by people who are actually curious and genuinely interested,” she said.

“The more I live my life, the less convinced I am of my own capacity to survive it,” she wrote in a heartbreaking turn in Regla Dust. “I so badly wish to surveil the lives of others and simply copy how they live. I am in no position to be someone’s mother.”

In the long run, Panaligan is hopeful that support for women would reflect through structural changes, like passing the divorce bill and the teenage pregnancy prevention bill into law, which could then lead to a genuine cultural shift.

“I don’t really think I’m changing [young people’s] lives, but just for them to see writing as something they can do in their lives that can maybe help them like how it helps me,” she said. – Rappler.com

Note: Some quotes in Filipino have been translated into English for brevity.