Bastos by any name

By Herman M. Lagon

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 shortcuts, 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 instincts.

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. On top of having scores of women colleagues, friends and relatives, I have two daughters. I raised them hoping they would be highly empowered and would never feel the need to shrink, laugh off disrespect or accept being treated badly just to be noticed. As a teacher and counselor, I keep telling young women the same thing: Speak clearly, take your space and never ask permission to stand up for yourself. I have told boys, too, that respect is not a decorative value to be posted on school tarpaulins every March. It is a habit of language, a discipline of imagination, a form of self-control. That is why remarks like Suntay’s hit differently. I know what it is like to sit with students after a catcall on the street, an “innocent joke” in class, or a supervisor’s comment they cannot quite report because it sounded playful enough to be dismissed. They come in confused, not dramatic. That is how these things often arrive: half-joke, half-wound. A congressman may think he was simply describing beauty. A daughter hearing that exchange learns something else: that in elite rooms, men still feel free to narrate women as scenery for their appetites.

It did not help that the apology, when it came, had the familiar smell of public relations acetone. Suntay said he was sorry “if some people were offended,” while still insisting there was no malice and that the analogy had been taken in the wrong context. That is the modern political non-apology in its natural habitat: sorrow without ownership, regret without reflection, apology with the blame outsourced to the listener’s interpretation. Gaslighting does not always arrive with a villain’s grin. Sometimes it comes in legalese. Sometimes it comes with the suggestion that only a “dirty mind” heard something dirty. But if the burden of discomfort is shifted to the offended, then the offended are being told to doubt their own reading of what was plainly said. Jasmine Curtis-Smith understood this quickly, calling out not only the statement but the larger pattern of women being reduced to bodies in spaces dominated by men in power. Even Suntay’s wife, Shiela Guevara-Suntay, publicly distanced herself and her children from the remark, apologized to Anne Curtis and her family, and said no woman should be spoken about that way. When your own household has to issue the clearer moral statement, it is usually a sign the public one failed.

The irony is striking. Suntay was not just another tito speaking out of turn. He once sat on the Quezon City Council that passed the Gender and Development Code and served as majority floor leader when the city approved the Bawal Bastos Ordinance in 2016, ahead of the national Safe Spaces Act. As Mayor Joy Belmonte pointed out, his remarks contradict those very principles. The whole logic of anti-bastos measures is simple and deeply Filipino. Dignity does not collapse only under fists. It also erodes under lewd, malicious, humiliating language that teaches women to scan rooms, measure tone and calculate risk. Republic Act No. 11313 covers gender-based sexual harassment in public spaces, educational settings, workplaces and online spaces. The Magna Carta of Women affirms women’s right to dignity and respect. RA 6713 reminds public officials that public office is a public trust and requires conduct consistent with law, good morals and public interest. These are not abstract legal ornaments. They are safeguards built precisely because too many men still confuse access to a microphone with permission to be coarse.

Some people tried to wave this away with the usual diversionary tricks. Why focus on this when corruption exists? Why be angry about words when there are missing billions, flood-control anomalies, debt, inflation and schools with broken chairs? The answer is not difficult. A country can walk and chew gum. It can criticize fiscal theft and sexist speech in the same week, even in the same hour. In fact, the two are not as unrelated as some would like. Public language reveals public character. A leader who cannot restrain himself in an official hearing tells you something about how he understands power, people and consequence. There is also a false populism in the suggestion that women’s dignity is a side issue compared with “bigger” concerns. Tell that to the ordinary employee who goes to work wary of comments from a superior. Tell that to the student who must learn calculus while dodging crude remarks on a jeepney. For many Filipino women, sexism is not a boutique concern of elites. It is Tuesday. It is office banter. It is barangay gossip. It is the reason many learn early to smile while shrinking. The issue resonates because it is recognizably lived.

And then came the supporting cast, because this was never just one man having one bad moment. Lawyer Ferdinand Topacio quickly defended Suntay and even took a swipe at Jasmine Curtis-Smith, echoing the tired script that when a woman is visible or glamorous, she somehow invites commentary. Around the same week, Sen. Jinggoy Estrada also drew criticism after asking Gilas Women prospect Elizabeth Means if she had a Filipino boyfriend and joking that a fellow senator “can apply.” He later called it “friendly banter.” But friendly to whom? Banter for whom? The woman in the room is almost always expected to absorb the awkwardness.

The pattern is familiar. A woman enters a room as an athlete, expert or professional, and someone drags the conversation back to her looks or personal life. It also reveals a deeper vocabulary problem — not grammar, but judgment. A thoughtful official could have explained legal ideas in many ways. Instead, he reached for a sexualized image. That choice says more than the excuse that follows. Friends do not merely reveal taste. They reveal thresholds.

Research helps explain why so many people reacted strongly even if defenders insisted it was “just words.” The psychological literature on objectification has long shown that reducing women to bodies or body parts is linked to diminished perceptions of agency, competence and full personhood. Szymanski et al.’s (2011) review of objectification theory laid out the emotional and social costs of normalizing such treatment, while later research has shown how objectifying judgments shape how women are perceived and treated in everyday settings. Put simply, repeated objectification is not harmless background noise; it changes environments. That is why the PCW framed the issue not as oversensitivity, but as part of the architecture of gender inequality. Congresswoman Ann Matibag was also right to say that the dignity of women should never be made the subject of humor within Congress. In schools, we already know this. The class becomes what the teacher tolerates. The office becomes what the boss laughs off. The nation, in smaller ways than we admit, becomes what its leaders normalize. If men in high office keep performing stale machismo and calling it honesty, younger men watching from the cheap seats will learn the wrong lesson very efficiently.

I do not say any of this because Anne Curtis is famous, beautiful, protected, or likely to recover better than most from this kind of public ugliness. In fact, part of the discomfort is that if this could be said so casually about someone famous in a national hearing, what happens to the teacher in a municipal office, the nurse in a provincial hospital, the saleslady in a mall, the student intern in her first week, or the mother transacting at city hall? Jasmine Curtis-Smith made that point well when she said the issue was not just one female celebrity, but all women reduced to bodies in male-dominated spaces. The women I know do not need public men to worship them. They need public men to leave them whole. They need restraint, not heat; maturity, not male theater; accountability, not semantics. That is not a radical ask. That is baseline civilization. And if the country is still debating whether such remarks are merely tasteless or plainly unacceptable, then the Bawal Bastos Law was never just about catcalls in alleys. It was always also about polished rooms, official microphones and men who still think office gives them style points for disrespect.

Yes, criticism is fair — not because people enjoy piling on, but because public office should stand for something. We do not expect saints in government. We simply expect leaders to know that women are not jokes or props. If Suntay’s remarks taught anything, it is that bastos does not become sophisticated just because it wears legal language. It remains bastos. And when bastos is followed by gaslighting, defensive banter and a blame-the-audience apology, it turns into something more corrosive: a test of whether we still recognize dignity when it is being trimmed down into spectacle. As a father of daughters, as someone who works with young people, and as a citizen tired of seeing public power used with so little imagination where it matters and too much where it does not, I hope we remember the simplest measure. A leader does not become honorable by title. He becomes honorable by what he refuses to say, even when he can get away with saying it.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a ‘student of and for life’ who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world that is grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views herewith do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed by or connected with.