As expected, the Gabriela’s Women’s Party has called on President Rodrigo Duterte to resign after he admitted—rather graphically—that he molested a sleeping maid when he was a teenager.
This the President did as part of a speech in Kidapawan City, Cotabato, recounting how he confessed his sin to a priest in high school.
“I went to the room of the maid. I lifted the blanket. I tried to touch what was inside the panty… I tried to insert my finger, Father. There was hair. It was wet,” he said. Perhaps to the crowd’s amusement, he then related how the priest had told him to recite one Our Father and five Hail Marys so he would not go to hell.
Gabriela correctly condemned the President’s comments as “repulsive” and said he should resign for admitting to attempted rape. “Rape does not happen only through penile insertion. If it is a finger or an object it is considered rape,” the secretary general of the group pointed out.
Just as predictably, Mr. Duterte’s spin masters in the Palace said the President’s “confession” was a mere allegory to dramatize his point, a “laughable anecdote… spliced up with vulgarity” to highlight the sexual abuse that he suffered as a boy at the hands of Catholic priests.
In a pompous, even self-righteous way, the Palace spokesman added: “The President will not discard his shocking and amusing out-of-the-box utterances that have been his political signature, which has endeared him to the masses, and which he finds effective in transmitting to the nation his political and social dogmas.”
Sadly, we have seen the same pattern played out over and over again. The President says something shocking, the women’s groups react, and the Palace says it was a joke. Nothing changes, until the President’s next outrageous statement.
In the meantime, the “maniac in Malacañang,” as Gabriela has come to call the President, goes along his merry way, seemingly enjoying the shock and disgust he provokes, until his next despicable utterance. There is no behavioral change, much less remorse.
To this extent, the women’s movement here has been a failure, because none of the denunciations and condemnations have changed Mr. Duterte one iota. He remains as lecherous and as lascivious an old man as he ever was, taking delight in the sexually inappropriate.
The only time the President and men like him will stop is when it becomes apparent that even their words will have true and serious consequences—as the #MeToo movement proved worldwide. Women’s groups and allied organizations clearly need to break the pattern, organize themselves better, down to the grass roots, and hit the President hard where it hurts the most—every time he disrespects women with his poorly chosen words.