Sarcasm or sexism? Media framing of Duterte’s misogynistic speeches

ABSTRACT

This article examines the media framing of authoritarian leaders’ misogynistic speeches from the case of former President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. Existing literature has discussed Duterte’s strategic use of misogynistic language and women’s responses to his speeches, but little research has examined how the news media framed his behavior. We conduct a qualitative media content analysis of 265 reports from seven domestic news media outlets about three incidents of Duterte’s public speeches: fantasizing about raping an Australian missionary woman, threatening to attack female rebel soldiers’ vaginas, and denying women’s eligibility for the presidency. We find that the news media tends to underreport the incidents despite variations across different media. In particular, the media tends to frame Duterte’s speeches as (1) feminist issues rather than human rights issues, (2) sarcastic jokes rather than genuine misogyny, and (3) individual deviation rather than structural problems. As the first systematic study of variations in news reports on Duterte’s misogynistic speeches, this article expands the literature on media representations of political leaders’ misogynistic behavior in consideration of local contexts from non-Western societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Media
• misogyny
• Rodrigo Duterte
• women
• Philippines

Acknowledgments

This article’s draft was presented at the “Remapping the Feminist Global: A Multi-vocal, Multi-located Conversation,” co-convened by the Asian Center for Women’s Studies at Ewha University and the International Feminist Journal of Politics in July 2022. We thank all the participants at the conference for their constructive feedback. We also extend our gratitude to the Editors and Reviewers for their incredible support that greatly contributed to enhancing the quality of our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

The authors contributed to this manuscript equally and are listed in alphabetical order.

Notes

1 We use the term ‘misogynistic’ rather than ‘misogynist’ that often associates a person, given that this study focuses mainly on Duterte’s speech as having misogynistic qualities rather than Duterte being a misogynist himself.

2 The Global Gender Gap Report 2022 ranked the Philippines #19 out of 146 countries and #2 for the region of Asia and the Pacific for gender equality (World Economic Forum, 2022, p. 8, 24).

3 Manne (2017, p. 80) argued that both sexism and misogyny aim to “maintain or restore a patriarchal social order.” However, sexism falsely rationalizes the differences between men and women, while misogyny enforces these differences in potentially direct or coercive ways (Manne, 2017, pp. 78–80).

4 In this perspective, the form of news based on “professional routines” under an objectivity norm is considered to be “the ideological basis for journalism’s discursive strategy” (Broersma, 2010, pp. 27–28). Some also argued that objective journalism is a norm rooted in particular contexts. Historicizing objective journalism, Farooq Kperogi (2013, p. 49) argued that it emerged with particular social impulses such as industrial capitalism, positivism, and the detachment between political parties and newspaper business.

5 According to Ragragio (2022, p. 1306), Bulletin (386,000-510,000 paper circulation in 2020), Inquirer (50 million monthly pageviews in 2020), Rappler (40 million monthly pageviews in 2020), and Star (the most read newspaper in the capital in 2017) are the four “leading dominant news outlets.” As the five main news outlets, Escalona (2022) selected Tribune, Inquirer, Star, Manila Times, and Manila Standard (excluded to consider other criteria further).

6 We included articles originally written by other media sources like Reuters or Agence France-Presse.

7 We referred to Danny Hayes and Matt Guardino’s (2010) content analysis that coded the American news report statements as supportive, neutral, or opposed to Bush’s administration policy on the Iraq War.

8 Online Appendix includes the entire list of news articles in our data and manuscript, their website links, and our coding examples and results.

9 One Star article did not include the video link but mentioned the video title and the username of the video uploader (Adel, 2016).

10 Among the 17 selective opinion articles searched using keywords such as “Duterte sexist” or “Duterte misogynist” on each media outlet’s website, we found that Rappler, Inquirer, and Manila Times had more articles and discussed the topic more critically than Star, ABS-CBN, Tribune, and Bulletin. Different from the general tendency in the specific news reports on each incident or event, the opinions or commentary-style articles from Inquirer, Rappler, and Manila Times in our sample framed Duterte’s misogynistic tendency to be a structural issue rather than an individual issue.

11 We coded whether a report including criticism has (1) indirect criticism when a critical label or opinion is cited from other individuals/groups or (2) direct criticism when it is stated as the author’s own view. One of 96 reports for Case 1, two of 13 for Case 2, and five of 16 for Case 3 provided the authors’ direct criticism. As objectivity is one of the professional norms in journalism (Chong, 2019; Thompson et al., 2008), it is possible that journalists may try to adhere to the standard of neutrality.

12 Shebana C. Alqaseer and Joshua Carlo T. Pile (2021) argued that Duterte’s speeches engage in heteronormativity, homophobia, and toxic masculinity. In May 2019, during his Meeting with the Filipino Community in Japan, Duterte stated that he had cured himself from being gay. After telling a brief story of how someone told him about Senator Antonio Trillanes IV’s sexuality, he said: “Mabuti’t na lang pareho kami ni Trillanes. Pero nagamot ko ang sarili ko … Noong kami na ni Zimmerman … ah sabi ko ito na … Naging lalaki ako uli (Good thing Trillanes and I are similar. But I cured myself … When I began a relationship with Zimmerman … , I said, this is it. I became a man again)” (Presidential Communications Operations Office, 2019). We collected 44 articles regarding this incident by using the main methods. Eight articles reported this incident. Two had insufficient details with criticisms. Only Rappler’s article had criticism with sufficient details but without a frame as a structural problem (Ranada, 2019d).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Minju Kwon

Minju Kwon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Chapman University, USA. She specializes in international law with a regional focus on Asia. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science with a minor in Gender Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Email: [email protected]

Kaye Valdez

Kaye Valdez is currently obtaining her juris doctor from the University of San Diego’s School of Law, USA. Her research interests include gender studies in literature, biblical studies, and international relations. She received her B.A. from the Department of Political Science at Chapman University, USA. Email: [email protected]