MARCH had barely begun, purple ribbons had barely been pinned, and the country had barely warmed up to Women’s Month when Congress handed us one of those scenes that make you put down your coffee and stare at the screen in secondhand shame.
Forgive this piece, too, if it runs a little longer than my usual columns; some matters resist shortcut, and this one deserves more than a quick sigh and a clever line.
During a House hearing on the impeachment complaint against VP Sara Duterte, Quezon City Rep. Bong Suntay tried to defend the idea that imagination is not an offense by offering an analogy about actress Anne Curtis that was not merely clumsy, but lurid. He said that after seeing her, “desire” rose in him, that he “felt the heat,” and that he imagined what might happen, though it remained only in his mind.
The House later voted to strike the remark from the record, and the ethics committee was authorized to look into it. What he seemed to think was clever lawyering sounded instead like a bad barbershop anecdote that had wandered into a constitutional proceeding wearing a barong and a title.
That it happened at the start of Women’s Month made it worse, not because the calendar is sacred, but because the timing exposed the gap between our annual slogans and our actual instinct
Let us be fair about the point before we judge the delivery. One can argue, as Suntay tried to, that thoughts are not the same as overt acts. That is a legal distinction people make all the time.
But that was never the heart of the backlash. The outrage was not about criminalizing imagination. It was about a lawmaker in an official hearing publicly narrating a sexualized fantasy about a real woman to make his point. That is not admiration. That is objectification dressed up as rhetoric.
The Philippine Commission on Women (PCW) did not mince words: it called the statement a “public act of sexual objectification” and a “declaration of predatory desire,” warning that such language normalizes the kind of harassment women face in streets, offices, schools, and online spaces.
San Juan Rep. Ysabel Zamora said there was no need for such an example anywhere, much less in a hearing. Gabriela Rep. Sarah Elago put it more plainly: there is no place for sexism and the objectification of women by public officials. None of that is prudishness. It is simply naming the thing correctly. A compliment says a person is admirable. Objectification turns a person into material for male commentary.
Incidents like this do not arise in isolation. Over the past several years, the tone of public discourse in Philippine politics has gradually shifted, and not always for the better. Many observers have noted how the previous administration proved alarmingly effective in normalizing macho-style rhetoric—where sexist jokes, objectifying language, and the dismissal of criticism as “oversensitivity” were often brushed off as humor or candor.
When such language is repeatedly modeled by those in power, it quietly lowers the bar of what others believe is acceptable. Remarks that once would have been immediately condemned begin to pass as ordinary political talk. In that environment, statements like Suntay’s do not feel like shocking departures; they feel like echoes of a tone that has already been allowed to linger in public life.
That distinction matters to me in a way that is not theoretical. (To be continued)/PN
