The thing with six years of a fascist leadership like Duterte’s, built on fragile masculinity and misogyny and violent rhetoric and male chauvinism is that it changes us culturally. Women and the LGBTQIA+ community are more sensitive, and therefore angrier, and rightfully so. We are also exhausted.
But the men. Oh the men.
It’s one thing to have had to deal with the likes of Banat By and Jeffrey Celis during Duterte years and the first years or so of Marcos governance when SMNI continued to give them a platform. It’s another thing altogether to find that even men who should know better, ones who claim they are better, media personalities even, can use exactly the same tone and tenor, the arrogance, the same machismo, as that which the six years of Duterte had enabled and encouraged.
And of course this could only surface at scale when they are talking about a woman like Sara Duterte. Because there is nothing like a woman in rage to get men frothing at the mouth.
I will admit that the impulse to label SaraD for her year-end political performances was strong. After all, we had come from six years of old man Duterte doing those midnight madness press cons, and her Blairwitch Project version just brought it all back. Consider too that those press conferences about imagining beheadings and wanting to exhume the dead and talking to assassins to take down the Pres-FirstLady-SpeakerOfTheHouse trio were happening alongside Congressional Inquiries where she refused to take the oath and Senate Inquiries where she shiminetted her way through all the questions about accountability and public funds.
Which is all to say that it was easy, too too easy, to simply fall back on calling her every kind of crazy after the two press cons. After all, we called her father that, too. But what is unique to SaraD is that macho commentary reduced her to only that. And given the digital and media platforms that have the same male opinions on repeat, then it is normalized as discourse for a certain algorithm: the woman in rage is an unhinged woman.
Ronald Llamas is at the forefront of this male chauvinism, but it is because he is being given the platform across mainstream media’s Storycon (also hosted by men, with a woman on live video) and guestings on shows like Karen Davila’s Headstart, as he always is on digital platforms from Christian Esguerra to Richard Heydarian, and is co-host of Bilyonaryo’s four-male panel called Kwatro Kantos. These hosts practically give Llamas free rein over conversations, and in relation to the SaraD press cons already frame the conversations so that it justifies the sexism.
In October, for example, Esguerra’s headline doesn’t only read: Sara nag-beast-mode, Esguerra also begins the conversation with the framing: “Paiba-iba ang mood ‘no, merong swings?” Which begs the question: when was the last time a man has been judged on his mood swings? Would the mood even matter if this was a male politico they were talking about? It of course gets worse. Llamas says of SaraD:
“Baka hindi maganda ang gising niya. <…> Naging unhinged. Parang naging unhinged siya. Parang wala na siyang control sa sarili niya. <…> Masisira ang mga profiling dito ha. Masisira. Parang mas kailangan niya psychiatrist. <…> Tayo logical tayo eh. Kung may gagawin tayo, may dahilan, may logic. And meron tayong konting pretention. Ito walang pretention eh. May element ng stream of consciousness, may element ng galit, may element ng childhood. Ini-imagine ko yung childhood niya eh.”
This is an “analysis” that Llamas is allowed to repeat, over and over, across different platforms. Even in the mainstream. On Karen Davila’s Headstart:
“Worse than a meltdown, para siyang very unhinged. Bahagi ng kanyang sinabi, alam na natin, pero siguro dapat hindi siya ang nagsasabi. <…> Ang bago rito, yung lumampas ka na sa limit ng what is proper, or what is improper. <…> Hindi lang siya toxic eh, morbid eh. <…> ‘Yan beastmode na ‘yan ay authenticity. ‘Yang beastmode mo ay nagko-cause ng iyong unraveling. <…> Hindi na effective ‘yon, sa panahon ng social media. Imbes na damage control, naging damaging. Imbes na method in the madness, ang nakita lang natin, madness.”
As with much of male chauvinism, the woman here is being talked about in relation to what is proper and improper, in relation to what is deemed as the limits of female articulation. She is fashioned as someone who is unhinged—who has completely lost it. Beastmode is used against her, and she is fashioned as someone who has self-destructed: she is self-damaging and mad.
But this is precisely how the angry woman has been viewed since forever. A man should know better than to simply fall into the trap of using the same. Any man who has also been fashioned as the pundit of the present should also know better than to assert that “maybe the woman shouldn’t be the one saying this”—because we are at a time when all women should be able to say what they want, when they want. After all this industry of pare bro punditry is doing exactly that—across multiple programs and platforms, on the premise that what they think and what they say is worth sharing.
Heydarian meanwhile is at the forefront of this “bro, pare” conversation, the worst being when he’s talking to Leloy Claudio who is far more sensitive than any of these men combined (and really should disengage and begin his own conversations instead of being reeled into these existing ones). In a recent conversation between the two on Heydarian’s platform entitled The Fall of House of Duterte!??, Claudio fell back on the easy exercise of calling SaraD’s late night press cons as “tantrums”, which is also what the men of the quadcomm called it, i.e., House Majority Leader Manuel Jose Dalipe’s “These tantrums won’t hide the truth”, which is of course also a way to reframe the conversation around his own political foibles—he is a part of a political dynasty and has been tagged by Senate President Chiz Escudero for having led the fake people’s initiative earlier in the year.
I am certain Claudio would rather not be using the same lines as these men in Congress, who have as much to hide as the Vice President, and who are gaining mileage by being dismissive of what she says given the way she says it.
Heydarian himself, while more careful with labelling SaraD as crazy or unhinged, did his own macho-pundit-performance when it came to the VP’s anger. In a November video entitled Sara Duterte: Binantaan si Marcos Jr., which was put up soon after the VP’s statements against BBM, Heydarian decided to simply show an old video of SaraD dancing, saying that this was what was trending before the press con. Heydarian then poked fun at the dancing video, wearing shades, egging her on. He then paralleled this with the angry video, and laughed at the two versions of the same woman on screen.
Is this any better than Llamas? Of course not. It is just another way for men to deny the woman her anger, another way for men to reduce what she says to how she says it. Heydarian poking fun at Sara is no different from Llamas and Esguerra shaking their heads in pretend-disbelief as as they judge her on what they perceive as mood swings and illogical behaviour.
Probably the best proof of the misogyny in this pare bro punditry of the present is the way in which the “credible” guest these platforms use is not only Llamas, but also former Senator Sonny Trillanes. He with the coup plots, he with a history of political manoeuvring, and with a shit-ton of self-interest. On Heydarian’s channel talking about the SaraD impeachment complaint filed by the liberals, Trillanes said:
‘Yung second meltdown ni Sara, yun ang perfect time to file it. Kasi kung before the second meltdown na file itong impeachment, marami pa ring mga tao ang hindi sold to the idea na krungkrung itong si Sara. The first one was bad enough, pero hindi gaanong kumalat. Kaya kung na-file yung impeachment back then, baka mas malakas ang push back. <…> Makita mo may anger management issue siya eh. You don’t give presidential power to such persons.”
This is the kind of credible guest the pare bros like Heydarian and Esguerra allow. It lets a man like Trillanes who has mounted numerous coup attempts, a man who has declared war on every politician that doesn’t care for him or his arrogance, it lets this man call a woman krungkrung and in need of anger management. And by doing so, it is complicit in letting Trillanes rewrite recent history about him and his own krungkrung.
The best part about these misogynistic attacks on SaraD by the pare-bro punditry is that as with all men who decide that women who are angry are just crazy, it doesn’t really know what to do when the woman is strategic and decides thoughtfully and deliberately to shift her tone and tenor. In that October Esguerra episode show, Llamas says: “Actually mas nakakatakot siya kapag sino-soften niya ang image niya. Kesa magpakita siya ng galit at emosyon. Mas predictable ‘yon eh.”
So as with all women, SaraD is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. When she’s angry, she is crazy; when she’s calm, she’s scary. Either way the men are suspicious; either way she will be the target of the macho shit of the pare bro punditry.
Just as problematic is the way Presidential sister Imee Marcos is subjected to this kind of macho dismissiveness. In the Storycon episode of December 20, co-host Amy Pamintuan rightfully mentions Senator Marcos’s Senate speech on the irregularities in the passage of the 2025 budget. But the two men—Ed Lingao who was host, and Llamas as guest—did not want to talk about the budget. Instead it was reduced to Imee being “patronizing already” according to Lingao; to which Llamas responds: “Patronizing nga. Masyado kang mabait. Patronizing talaga, condescending, lahat ng -ing.”
Were this an older brother talking about a younger brother, would it be seen as patronizing and condescending? An even better question for the male pundits: did we really need to talk about Imee’s tone, as opposed to all the things she was saying about the 2025 budget passage? In the same breath: did we really need to reduce SaraD to her anger in those press cons as opposed to actually talking about the issues she was raising: from the First Lady’s role in those DepEd envelopes, to Martin Romualdez’s control over the House of Representatives, to sure, her conditional threat of assassinating the President which certainly comes from what can only be a believable threat on the Vice President?
And if we can talk issues, why let the name-calling and labelling, why let the macho-shit of the pare bro punditry even frame the conversation? Why couldn’t these thoughts about these women be kept away from public discourse? I mean, if these are thoughts you cannot help but have (which is very very telling), then go get a locker room, why don’t you. And don’t flash your things for the world to see.
We want your conversations, yes, and certainly yours are valuable opinions and commentary given this polarized discursive landscape. But it would do your subscribers well to leave your macho-shit at the door before you go live. While you’re at it, rethink that bit where you laugh and cackle and giggle, mostly at your own jokes, sometimes at what seem like inside jokes. Because while your macho discourse makes you no different from Banat By and Celis, the giggling at things no one else understands? It makes y’all seem like Duterte when he cannot find the words to explain himself.
So you know, mga pare bro, basically, it’s nakakahiya at nakakairita. Medyo ew. **