Make Suntay pay

EDITORIAL: File cases against him. Make it cost something to speak about women this way from a seat of power.

Editorial

IT’S Women’s Month. And a Philippine congressman just told a formal legislative hearing about the time he saw the actor Anne Curtis at a hotel and felt his blood run hot imagining what could happen between them.

Quezon City Representative Bong Suntay actually said the words out loud: “Nakita ko si Anne Curtis… may desire sa loob ko na nag-init talaga.” He said this in Congress, during a hearing on the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte. When his colleagues voted to strike it, he complained about censorship.

When called out, Suntay said there was nothing wrong with what he said. Anne Curtis, he said, should take it as a compliment, but if anyone was offended, he was sorry — but not sorry enough to stop defending himself.

We’ve seen this before.

Flashback to 2016, when Rodrigo Duterte became president.

Duterte, of course, didn’t create misogyny in the Philippines. But he gave it a podium and six years of prime time. He made inappropriate comments about Vice President Leni Robredo’s legs, joked about raping a Miss Universe and an Australian nun who was held hostage, and equated having a second partner to keeping a spare tire in the trunk of a car. He told soldiers to shoot female rebels in the vagina, because without it, he said, they’d be useless. He casually confessed to groping a sleeping maid when he was a teenager and the crowd barely blinked.

Every time someone called it out, Malacañang said the same thing: he’s joking. Stop overreacting. You’re being OA.

But women weren’t overreacting – they paid attention. When you have a president doing that, gender experts warned, you reinforce the idea that sexual violence is acceptable — that it’s manly, even. That the “real man” acts exactly like this. Duterte didn’t just show us who he was. He gave every man watching permission to be the same.

Nothing makes this clearer than what he did to former senator and now congresswoman Leila de Lima.

De Lima had the nerve to investigate his drug war killings. So he destroyed her — not with evidence, but with her womanhood. He publicly claimed to have a sex tape of her and her driver. He called her immoral, an adulterer. His allies in the House threatened to screen the alleged tape in a congressional hearing, claiming it would prove how close she was to her supposed accomplice. She started receiving death threats. Her phone number was read aloud in a government hearing. She had to flee her own home.

She later explained his strategy plainly: he thought of “first demeaning me and destroying my womanhood so that more people would believe their accusations.” It worked. Millions believed him. She was arrested in 2017 on drug charges built almost entirely on the testimony of convicted criminals. Key witnesses later recanted, with one appearing on television in tears to apologize for lying under oath on government orders.

It took nearly seven years and the dropping of all three charges before de Lima was finally free. That is what normalized misogyny enables.

Back to Bong Suntay.

Here’s the kicker: Suntay was once a Quezon City councillor who helped pass the Bawal Bastos Ordinance — the local law that penalizes lewd and demeaning remarks in public. He helped write the rules he now refuses to follow. And he made his remarks at the start of Women’s Month. In a country that has laws on the books — the Safe Spaces Act, the Magna Carta of Women — specifically to protect women from exactly this.

The Philippine Commission on Women has made clear that his words are not just offensive but potentially actionable — they bear the hallmarks of gender-based sexual harassment under the Safe Spaces Act. Senator Risa Hontiveros, who authored that law, has already said it plainly: “Statements of sexual comments and suggestions can be penalized. As a lawmaker, he should know this.”

So file the case. Don’t just ask for an apology. Don’t accept one that begins with “if.” Take him to the House Ethics Committee. Pursue the complaint under RA 11313. Make it cost something to speak about women this way from a seat of power. Because if there are no consequences, there will be more Suntays. There have always been more Suntays. Duterte proved there is an entire bench of them, waiting their turn.

Hold Suntay accountable. File the cases. And let’s finally stop these men from abusing women with their vile words and thoughts. (Rights Report Philippines)