This might have been the most horrific way of opening the National Women’s Month.
A time meant to center on women’s resilience and invaluable contributions has instead been reduced to a stream of political quote cards — men in power stripping women of their dignity and dragging the feminist movement back to battles it has long fought to overcome.
Yes, call Bong Suntay out. Condemn Alvin Aragon to hell. Curse them with the nastiest f word. But if we are to pick the fruit and cut its branches, it is just as important to trace the roots and pluck where they all started — from one man to another.
A year after former President Rodrigo Duterte was detained in The Hague, for his crimes against humanity, you would think that his influence on the Filipinos must have at least begun to fade.
However, as evidenced by the undying call to #BringPRRDHome and the now sexist remarks that have been infesting the country, it might have just been worse.
How can a nation forget a president who ordered his soldiers to shoot female rebels in their vagina so they’d become “useless”? Who nonconsensually kissed a married woman in front of an overseas audience? Who joked that he, the mayor of Davao City, should’ve been first to rape a 1989 Australian rape and murder victim?
These, among other sickening public remarks Duterte has made, were never just tasteless jokes. They normalized a poisonous precedent: that a man in power can say anything he wants about women without being held accountable for it.
When Duterte’s rape jokes made people laugh instead of angry, they made men believe that if he can objectify, dehumanize, and degrade women, without getting punished for it, so can they.
As X user v01sual pointed out, “Duterte made it too easy for male politicians to harass women — even when the whole nation is watching. His rape jokes got laughs and endless justifications. Wala [nang] naging puwang ang kahihiyan at accountability kahit sa gobyerno ng pinas.”
Once Duterte planted the seed, the trunk began to grow.
Who could forget Christian Sia, the Pasig Congressional candidate who was disqualified by the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) for making lewd remarks on single mothers? Or Robin Padilla’s justification of marital rape on the basis that men are naturally “in heat”?
These are not isolated cases of sexism in the government; they are branches of the same tree. Women are stripped of autonomy over their bodies and are shredded into pieces for public consumption and entertainment.
What makes these remarks dangerous is how comfortably they are spoken in front of the public, with no warrant for the millions of Filipinos who can hear them.
This raises the question: if male politicians can comfortably dehumanize women in public, then how much worse do these conversations go in private?
These aren’t any ordinary men. They are lawmakers. Public officials elected for the common good. Public officials who cannot even abide by the very laws meant to protect women, including the Safe Spaces Act.
Public officials fed and funded by the same women they so casually demean.
If Suntay, Aragon, Topacio, Estrada — and the list goes on ‘til I lose count — can speak about women with such casual disrespect in public hearings, press briefings, and national platforms, then what message does that send to the rest of the country?
When the very men who write laws to protect women cannot heed them, then the power of the law loses its teeth. It just catcalls and whistles.
It is time for us to pull the roots engraved with Duterte’s DNA and do what we failed to impose before: demand accountability. Call them out, shame them, humiliate them. And never stop at nothing, even if they say sorry, even more if their wives are the ones who will.
From one man writing this, to another: men, it’s time to stop.
You must be culpable for your gravest mistakes, not only because it’s National Women’s Month or because you’ve been called out. It must come from genuine recognition that words, especially from those in power, shape the culture that the next generation inherits.
Because misogyny does not only exist on quote cards and news headlines; instead, they thrive in homes, streets, classrooms, offices — anywhere silence condones it to grow.
As Anne Curtis emphasized in her response to the issue, “What happened to me isn’t rare. It happens to women every day…in offices, in group chats, in rooms where men think no one is listening, or worse, in rooms where they know everyone is and simply don’t care.”
Misogyny, displayed in the public lens, is already enraging and outrageous. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. What more to those that translate to battery, abuse, rape, and death, where no one bats an eye or ear?
What can a future generation of men learn about respecting women if this is the example set before them?
National Women’s Month should not merely celebrate women. It should challenge the systems that continue to degrade them.
Let us be accountable for our mistakes, of our speeches, whether they may be public or private; let us respect women not only because we’re called out to do so. Because dismantling patriarchy does not begin with women alone.
It must begin from the roots. From one man to another.
The views and opinion of the writer do not necessarily reflect those of the publication.
