MISOGYNY HAS no place in public office.
The national women’s alliance GABRIELA strongly condemns Vice President Sara Duterte’s remark before overseas Filipino workers in Hong Kong, where she advised Filipino women to be “good at esmiringhoy” — a Bisaya slang term for sexual intercourse — to prevent their partners from cheating or leaving them.
In a video circulated online, Duterte told women attending a community gathering that being skilled at the act would keep a man from abandoning or betraying his partner.
For GABRIELA, the remark is not merely tasteless banter but misogyny spoken from the second highest office of the land. Delivered before women who were forced to leave their families and country to earn a living, it is doubly insulting — reducing them to instruments of men’s satisfaction rather than workers whose labor and sacrifice deserve respect and protection.
Instead of holding men accountable for their cheating and abuse, the advice places the burden on women to keep their partners through sexual performance. This is the same victim-blaming logic that women confront daily — in the home, at work, and in the courts, where women are still asked what they did or failed to do to provoke the violence and betrayal committed against them.
Such advice teaches women to endure and to adjust for men, so that when a man cheats, the woman is made to carry the blame. It is this feudal-patriarchal culture that grants men impunity and punishes women for the wrongdoing of others.
GABRIELA stresses that the remark is profoundly detached from the reality of Filipino women, whose struggles are rooted in the lack of protection, livelihood, and respect for their rights — not in any supposed failure to please a man. A woman is never to blame for a man’s infidelity.
GABRIELA calls on women to reject the belief that their worth is measured by how well they serve and satisfy men, and calls on public officials to stop dressing up patriarchy as concern for women. Remarks that reduce women to instruments of men’s satisfaction reflect a government that treats women and its people as mere objects to be used and sold. GABRIELA Alliance of Filipino Women
