Tired tropes, offensive jokes

It’s been a year of bad news. Maybe there have been some highlights like a recent Miss Universe win, or heartwarming stories about men saving children from falling off buildings. But, overall, 2018 seems to have been a year of Not Very Good News.

Even if you’ve never opened a newspaper in your life and care nothing for politics, governance or inequality, all it takes is a scroll through Facebook to see the headlines. It was in January 2018 when news of Time’s Up, the movement against sexual assault and gender inequality, broke; despite all the airy-fairy words about women’s solidarity, surely the movement made some sort of impact here. Even the most nontechie tita has a “woke” millennial on their feed crying foul about injustice here and there. I’m also pretty sure anyone with a phone has heard about the media furor every time our President made an off-color jibe or yet another joke about women and rape.

So I have to ask: Why are we still tolerating rape culture and blatant sexism in our media? Are we going to allow scriptwriters and content creators to pretend not to hear all of that noise?

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me came in the form of a rape joke in an elevator scene in the Metro Manila Film Festival entry, “The Girl in the Orange Dress.” I avoided the other typical MMFF fare and was expecting a tolerable, lighthearted romantic comedy, and that was what I got, but I didn’t expect that it would come with a side of Minimizing Rape Culture. I wouldn’t call the moment a joke, but it was clearly an attempt to be funny or edgy: A young girl in a hotel elevator tells her family that Jericho Rosales’ character, a celebrity called Rye, is so attractive that she would “rape him.”

The whole scene is only a couple of minutes long, but it shouldn’t have happened at all. It’s a few days to 2019. Why are we letting this type of dialogue pass? Hasn’t there been enough context, enough stories about sexual assault, enough long essays on social media about catcalling and rape jokes, that we should know better—and that our content creators should know better? There’s even a scene where a tango instructor takes a swipe at a character’s behind because he’s “cute,” like we didn’t come from a year of increasing awareness about gender sensitivity and sexual harassment.

Scenes like this, written unironically, would have earned a lot of backlash abroad, but not so here. As of this writing, few eyebrows have been raised. Twitter is awash with praise for the attractive leads and funny supporting cast, and there’s only been one review that mentions the rape joke as something objectionable. I was surprised that even the “woke millennials” in the cast stayed silent about it, too.

It isn’t even that the movie is the only one of its kind that hurls careless and offensive jokes at what it expects will be an appreciative, tone-deaf Filipino audience. Our TV programs still feature attractive women as two-dimensional objects of pursuit by bumbling horndog characters. Gay jokes still fly—by which I mean entire scenes are deemed funny just because someone is or might be gay. We tolerate stereotypes of anti-intellectual “English only, please” Filipinos and the loud and the flamboyant two-dimensional parloristang bakla. We even saw, much to our dismay, blackface on a major TV network.

The audience and the creators should be getting better, and the last place these tired jokes and tropes should have belonged is the MMFF. Yet here we find them, as we find them year after year, except perhaps in 2016 when more sensitively-made content comprised the majority of the entries.

Many who criticize the MMFF assert that we should trust the Filipino audience more, that we should elevate the content and believe that the masses will appreciate good, quality content for what it is. I agree, but quality is more than content—it’s nuance, sensitivity, relevance and context. We have the right to expect better, more progressively written scripts, and content creators need to learn to read the room and realize they’re not creating in a vacuum.

kchuarivera@gmail.com