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 presscons. 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.