Suntay’s sickening sexism
Just when you thought that public misogyny had joined its progenitor in The Hague, comes now an heir apparent to former President Rodrigo Duterte’s sexist mindset.
During Tuesday’s House hearing on the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte, Quezon City Rep. Bong Suntay sought to downplay her words with an analogy that exploded in his face.
He once saw actress Anne Curtis at Shangri-La, he said, and was awe-stricken with her looks. “Desire” started rising in him … “(N)ag-init talaga. Na-imagine ko na lang kung ano ang pwedeng mangyari.”
Slammed widely for such Neanderthal thinking that would define women merely as objects of desire and consumption, Suntay initially refused to apologize. “There is nothing sexual in what I said … I just said I imagined something.” Curtis should even feel complimented, he added.
In what planet and what century, Congressman?
On Wednesday, after being publicly pilloried by his colleagues, netizens, and civil society, Suntay issued a grudging apology that however blamed those who found his remarks offensive. “If some people were offended … I’m sorry. However, if you read the context, there was truly no malice in it; it depends on whether the reader interpreted it with malice,” he said.
Unmitigated toxic machismo
Such gaslighting provoked even more bashing, especially since the antiwomen analogy was expressed during Women’s Month, an event that most government agencies and local government units mark every year by acknowledging how women hold up half the sky.
As Curtis’ sister, Jasmine Curtis-Smith expressed in her Facebook account, the issue goes beyond “one female celebrity” and reflects how all women are continuously “reduced to bodies in spaces dominated by men in power.”
Unfortunately, six years of Duterte’s unmitigated toxic machismo has normalized such boorish behavior. There are too many Duterte sexual episodes to recall, but the message has apparently been internalized by his followers who think it amusing or ego-boosting to humiliate women. How many 2025 candidates were booted out of the ballot for suggestive remarks about their female staff and their women constituents? And rightly so.
What makes this worse is that Suntay was part of the Quezon City Council that passed the city’s Gender and Development Code, and was majority floor leader when the city passed the Bawal Bastos Ordinance in 2016, years ahead of the national Safe Spaces Act, both of which declare that lewd, malicious, and demeaning remarks and acts have no place in public life.
Degrading remarks
For its part, the Philippine Commission on Women (PCW) called Suntay’s statement “a declaration of predatory desire directed at a woman” that reduces her to “an object of male desire, normalizing a culture of harassment that Filipino women experience every day in streets, workplaces, and public spaces.”
It also warned the congressman that his “unbridled language” could hold him liable under several laws, among them Republic Act No. 11313, or the Safe Spaces Act, where gender-based harassment includes “acts that use sexist, derogatory, and degrading remarks or gestures based on sex and gender.”
RA 9710 or The Magna Carta of Women meanwhile guarantees under Section 9 a woman’s right to be free from all forms of violence and to be treated with dignity and respect in all spheres of life, especially by public officials who “are held to a heightened standard precisely because their words carry the weight of institutional power.”
Then there’s RA 6713, the Code of Conduct and Ethical Standards for Public Officials and Employees, where Section 4 requires public officials “to refrain from doing acts contrary to law, good morals, good customs, public policy, public order, public safety and public interest.”
Gender sensitivity training
Not to be overlooked is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women where, as state party, the Philippines is bound by its obligation under Article 5 to work toward the elimination of prejudices, customs, and practices grounded on the idea of women’s inferiority and on stereotyped roles for women and men.
Aside from an “immediate, unqualified public apology” that takes “full and unambiguous responsibility for the harm his words have caused,” the PCW has urged Suntay to undergo gender sensitivity training, as should all public officials.
The women’s rights group Every Woman reminded Congress to police its ranks and create mechanisms that will help make it truly a safe space for women. It’s commendable that an ethics complaint has been filed against Suntay in the House. If Cavite Rep. Kiko Barzaga was suspended for 60 days for indecent pictures in his social media account, why let Suntay get away with his unethical behavior?
The honorable members of the House should not let this sickening episode pass without slapping some disciplinary measures on Suntay, who has certainly shown himself undeserving of being called the gentleman from Quezon City.
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