Poster boy Suntay

Now that popular actress Anne Curtis has baptized him as misogyny’s poster boy, it’s high time Quezon City Representative Jesus “Bong” Suntay sought therapeutic treatment. Perhaps Suntay should schedule long therapy sessions with any of the seven practicing Filipino psychoanalysts, two of whom are women.

These seven experts are more than capable of examining and treating people through psychoanalysis, the mental health treatment pioneered by Sigmund Freud which works by examining the unconscious mind.

After all, it’s what went on in Suntay’s unconscious mind — which he blurted out in his infamous “vulgar, sexualized analogy” involving Ms. Curtis in a recent congressional hearing — that landed him in a quagmire of embarrassing public and private censure, including from his own wife.

Suntay, however, shouldn’t seek therapy by his lonesome or he will be the only one to face consequences, which last week took the form of a forthcoming appearance before the House ethics committee.

Following the public uproar, scores of politically motivated misogynists put up salacious deflective perimeters for Suntay. They too need therapeutic intervention since they also practically bared a deep-seated socio-political malady.

“Mr. Suntay, I won’t spend much time on you. Not because what you did was small, but because this was never really about you,” as Ms. Curtis curtly put it.

“You’ve become the poster boy of something much bigger: a culture that still thinks it’s acceptable to talk about women this way. Worse, one that tolerates it from our leaders. As they say, misogyny dressed up as a joke is still misogyny.”

In light of the defense that committing a thought crime won’t send anyone to jail, excepting death threats, unpacking what Ms. Curtis said and meant legally takes a lot of doing. But that’s for lawyers to unravel and argue.

Unpacking Ms. Curtis’ thoughts in its political sense, however, has a lot going for it, enough to hang misogynists with.

To quickly dive into that politically charged fray, generally first subscribe to the arresting idea that misogyny “be understood as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order” and sexism as the “justificatory branch” of that order.

Undoubtedly, misogynism and sexism (defined as prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination typically against women) are deeply rooted in the Philippines’ predominantly patriarchal culture, a culture that largely emphasizes male authority.

Our patriarchal culture, however, is under assault nowadays, with progressives and advocacy groups often playing the “whack-a-mole” game every time misogynists’ and sexists’ ugly heads pop out of our socio-political fabric.

But even as activists continue battling and lobbying centers of power and educating the public, patriarchy’s political bulwarks are just yet far from crumbling to their deserved ruins.

Not least because the country’s patriarchal culture gives our ne’er-do-well politicians a shared code, as well as weapons, to exploit sexist language in pushing controlling narratives about women’s roles and their limitations.

Sexist remarks, by the way, also help authoritarians consolidate their fanatical political base, as we previously saw with the Duterte regime.

With all that, emboldened politicians readily dismiss misogyny critics as either overly sensitive or, worse, of politicizing “harmless” jokes and banter like a senator recently resorted to with his wicked suggestion to a female athlete that she consider adultery with another senator to gain Filipino citizenship.

So, with the country’s patriarchal system still rewarding politicians for exploiting gender and still tolerating its weaponization at the highest political levels, patriarchy is now in need of a lasting vasectomy.