As we celebrate Women’s Month, Davao City recently marked its 26th Women Summit with a theme that resonates deeply with our history: “Ang Babaylan sa Modernong Panahon Nagamugna ug Makiangayong nga Kaugmaon.” It is a bold assertion that the modern woman carries the same social, political, and spiritual influence as the Babaylan of our pre-colonial past. Yet, despite the hard-won gains of the last 50 years, achieving a world that truly reflects this power remains an aspiration rather than a reality.
At the summit, Jeanette Ampog, executive director of the women’s organization Talikala, echoed the philosophy of feminist icon Gloria Steinem: “Women should not fit the world; the world should fit women.”
It is a simple sentence that demands a structural revolution. Steinem, a journalist who understood the power of the written and spoken word, famously popularized the phrase “the personal is political.” She argued that the way men view women in the “private” theater of their minds bleeds into how they govern. When a lawmaker stands in the halls of Congress and reduces a woman to an object of his “imagined” desires, he isn’t just sharing an anecdote; he is reinforcing a patriarchal hierarchy.
This was on display during the March 3 House deliberations on the impeachment complaints against Vice President Sara Duterte. Quezon City Rep. Jesus Manuel Angel “Bong” Suntay’s remarks regarding actress and TV host Anne Curtis were not only uncalled for but served as a textbook example of the “male gaze” in power. By claiming that seeing Curtis at a mall sparked a “desire” and “heat” within him, and arguing that such thoughts are “merely imagination” and thus cannot be criminal, Suntay used his platform to trivialize objectification.
The national organization of women journalists, We-Move, rightly called him out:
“Words spoken in powerful spaces such as the halls of Congress carry weight. When they perpetuate objectification, they normalize a culture that undermines equality and emboldens abuse… Women inside newsrooms, in public office, and in every sector of society deserve respect, not ridicule.”
By using Anne Curtis as a rhetorical pawn to illustrate a legal point about “imagination,” Suntay stripped her of her professional identity as one of the country’s most successful artists, reducing her to a mere physical stimulus.
In the Steinem view, this is the “Bunny-fication” of the workplace, a callback to her 1963 undercover exposé on Playboy Bunnies. Steinem revealed then what we see now: environments that prioritize female “beauty” for male consumption inherently strip women of their dignity and labor rights.
Steinem’s life work shifted the conversation, proving that “women’s issues” are not private grievances but urgent political and structural failures. Her philosophy insists that society must be redesigned to fit the diverse, complex lives of all people.
This is the point Jeanette Ampog drove home in her summary of the Summit’s inputs. Women’s issues are encompassing; they cannot be compartmentalized when women are living out multiple, vital roles in society. If we are to honor the Babaylan of today, we must stop asking them to squeeze into a world built on the “imaginations” of men like Suntay. It is the world that must finally change to fit them.
