Lim: The next pandemic?

Misogynists in our midst — that’s the welcome I came home to after being away for a bit. It’s both sad and shameful that despite all the strides we have made in gender parity, pockets of resistance from the patriarchy still exist. Atty.

Christian “Ian” Sia, Pasig City congressional candidate, is neck-deep in fecal matter. If you’ve been living in a cave, let me bring you up to speed. In a campaign rally, Sia offered to sleep, once a year, with lonely solo parents but specified the offer was only open to menstruating women.



He then directed the interested where to sign up. He issued a public apology afterwards for cracking the “wrong” joke and promised it would not happen again. But as my mother would say, before his “saliva could dry up,” he cracked another misogynistic joke, far worse than the first.

This time, he asked a woman up on stage — a woman he identified as formerly the lone female member of his staff. How could she have known she would be “Exhibit A?” Sia then proceeded to say that the point he wanted to make in presenting this woman to the audience was to prove that he could not be a “manyak” (sex maniac) as a “manyak” would never hire staff that looked like her meaning a woman who was fat as he previously kept egging her to admit onstage that she was already this “fat” when she worked for him. It blows my mind how completely crass and offensive this man is and that his colleagues actually consider him fit to run for office.

Sia revealed that his sibling and grandmother are also solo parents implying that he could not have made these jokes with the intention to hurt anyone. But the fact that he thinks it acceptable to make these jokes despite having solo parents in his family only signifies to me how deeply ingrained misogyny is in his psyche. Alas, he is not alone.

Misamis Oriental gubernatorial reelectionist Peter Unabia joked that his administration’s nursing scholarship program was only open to “beautiful women” as “ugly” nurses would worsen a patient’s condition. Batangas gubernatorial candidate Jay Ilagan was quick to dismiss 71-year-old multi-awarded actress and former governor, Vilma Santos-Recto, as a rival. If he were running against Kathryn Bernardo or Andrea Brillantes (two young, talented and beautiful celebrities), Ilagan said he would be afraid.

But Santos was “laos” (a has-been) and many of her fans were either old or dead. It’s not just a war against the old, the fat, the ugly and the woman who dares to survive and thrive without a man. It’s a war against all women.

Because if men truly saw us as equals, they would not determine our value by the way we looked. They would not normalize jokes about our bodies and call it locker-room talk. They would not treat us like commodities and give us a shelf life.

If men truly saw us as human beings, they would support us not control us. They would not praise the submissive and condemn the spirited. They would not tell us to get along or to get going.

They would not reject, devalue or threaten us with hate, violence or exclusion if we dared to liberate ourselves from the shackles of their stereotypical expectations. Patriarchy is the parent. Misogyny is the child.

They both want us to believe they don’t exist. But they do. And even pockets of resistance must be stamped out because like a virus, they can lie dormant and reemerge with the right mixture of toxic elements in the environment.

And they can spread like wildfire and become the next pandemic..