July’s Most Hated
If you’re keeping count and are chronically online, socialite Cat Arambulo-Antonio’s merry excursion through the floods that has recently engulfed Manila is probably the third incident that has caused much Internet pile-up this July. This is not including the usual disdain we regularly dish out for our elected officials — including the Vice President’s ill-advised and quick-as-lightning departure for Germany in the throes of Typhoon Carina, which begged the question: was the trip for a “medical emergency,” or a Taylor Swift concert? All the while, the capital drowns in another devastating flood that has not seen any reprieve in the hundred years or so we’ve been a modern republic.
And in the immediate aftermath of that flood, we get a now-deleted TikTok video where Ms. Arambulo-Antonio films herself and her family, safe in the warmth and safety of their car as the vehicle wades through the murk. They look around and witness the flood, and she makes light of it by indulging her children’s imagination of the whole thing as a kind of thrill park ride, discusses making a “floaty,” and wondering aloud: “Safe kaya mag-floaty dyan, yaya?” — in a register so tone-deaf, it enraged almost everyone who saw that TikTok.
On the one hand, you cannot fault the socialite for what is perhaps her genuine thrill and wonderment at comprehending such a flood with her children, and indulging their imaginative takes. On the other hand, what transpired is a perfect example of how the privileged can be so tone-deaf to the devastations facing a country, marking once more the inevitable truth of our vast social divides. The truism is that the elites of this country simply live in a different world compared to the rest of us — which is why they cannot be bothered to see for real the depths of the problems that face us. Many online commenters were quick to draw a parallel to the Oscar-winning Korean film Parasite, specifically noting the scene where the rich wife rides at the back of her chauffeured car and talking to a friend on the phone about how wonderfully blue the sky was because of the heavy rain that happened the night before. Unbeknownst to her, her chauffeur, who is listening in with a tired face, had just gone through hell with his family, the rain having flooded out their basement home. In that immediate parallel, Parasite was savage in its messaging about how the rich and the poor truly live worlds apart — even if they share the same patch of earth. Ms. Arambulo-Antonio’s excursion through the flood was the real life version of that Parasite scene — and the Internet bit back. But this wasn’t Ms. Arambulo-Antonio’s first time at this rodeo: right at the very start of the pandemic, in March 2020, she was roundly castigated online for calling quarantine violators “motherfuckers,” and wondering aloud why they couldn’t just stay at home. She filmed herself saying this while enjoying her lavish garden at home — and the online world hit back by saying those “quarantine violators” did not have her privilege and luxury of surviving the lockdown, and they had to go out simply because they had to find ways to live. She subsequently apologized, and vanished from our consciousness — only to be vilified once more for this new flood video.
I cannot help but wonder: maybe she should just stop filming herself?
What is this TikTok mentality that has become a disease for many of us? I know academically the answers of course — but the actual demonstration of this need to document ourselves in our panopticon of a world girded with social media is really something else. We are so inured to this predisposition to film or post everything we do online that we have lost the ability to distinguish what is right or wrong. We have become blind. Everything has been flattened to “content,” to engender likes and views, that we often post things without realizing they will show us in the most unflattering light. Do you remember that person who posted on Facebook about wanting to buy bread at a certain store, and then upon finding that it was unmanned [the staff had to take a CR break], proceeded to take what she wanted, and posted on Facebook a promise to pay the vendor? Her intention for her post was to call out the vendor for leaving the store unmanned, and probably felt the public would recognize that and sympathize with her. But the Internet clapped back by telling her that what she did was actually theft.
Do you remember that theatregoer who wanted to demonize Lea Salonga for not being gracious in her reception of their visit to her dressing room, and posted about it online — only to be widely castigated for invading her much-needed privacy, and for dropping names to gain unwarranted access to backstage?
This is what I mean by blindness to what is right or wrong — as long as we are able to post about it online. Right around the beginning of July, in the aftermath of San Juan City’s Wattah Wattah Festival of June 24, a video of a certain Boy Dila — real name Lexter Castro — surfaced. He had filmed himself pranking passersby by dousing them heavily with water, all in the name of local tradition. The prankster in the video was clearly delighted in his misdeeds — the mischief in his eyes sparkled, the devil-may-care sneer taunted. He was showing off for content — and even when all of the Internet came after him, he was defiant, absolutely glowing in his newfound notoriety. Days later, taken into police custody, he would sport a different face, of course: broken, reprimanded, lost.
But there is also another side to this: the relentless online lynch mob that happens to people like Castro, or Arambulo-Antonio. In Castro’s case, the boy and his family received a flood of death threats. The online mob also castigated him with choice punishments — including inundating his address with food orders and packages amounting to thousands of pesos his family clearly could not pay.
This has become so much a part of our contemporary reality that we know have a term for this: “online public shaming” or OPS, which political philosophers Guy Aitchison and Saladin Meckled-Garcia have described as “a form of norm enforcement that involves collectively imposing reputational costs on a person for having a certain kind of moral character.”
Which brings me to a moral quandary: in online public shaming, whose sins are bigger? The original offender, or the lynch mob that calls for their total reputational annihilation? I have no answers.
This brings me to the latest object of online public shaming: the writer and host Jude Bacalso of Cebu City. Everyone by now knows the details of the scandalous story. On July 21 around 6 PM, according to original Facebook poster John Calderon, Bacalso — who identifies as a transgendered woman — had retaliated against a waiter in a restaurant in Ayala Center Cebu, simply because the staff had called Bacalso “sir.” According to Calderon, Bacalso made the waiter stand in front of him for two hours, caused distressed among the rest of the staff, and snidely deflected all efforts by Calderon and his mother to find out what exactly happened. By the time Calderon intervened, the waiter was in tears and Bacalso had left the premises.
The optics were not good. A person of privilege terrorizing a member of the working class. What’s worse: there were photos and videos taken of the standoff, with Bacalso seated firmly while the waiter stood in front of him, the very picture of class dynamics at play. Words are one thing; incriminating images are totally another thing — and the Internet went wild with memes, some funny, some approaching gutter sensibility.
Bacalso soon after released a statement signifying that communication has been established with the restaurant owners and that the matter has been settled. She also pointed out misconceptions in Calderon’s original post, but also voiced out an apology: “I … realized that in the impassioned pursuit of my advocacy, I could have done with a little measure of kindness, sadly quite absent in the ruckus this has all unnecessarily created when it was made public without our knowledge.” She has remained silent since then. But in the hours and days that followed, the whole of the country, and not just Cebu, became an online lynch mob, even celebrities imparted their own two cents, from Ogie Diaz to MJ Lastimosa to Rosanna Roces, who called Bacalso “ugly.” Some, like KaladKaren, were more measured: “Oftentimes, people don’t mean to offend you,” KaladKaren wrote on Facebook. “Nalilito lang talaga sila. Tinawag kang ma’am or sir because they want to show respect. If you don’t agree with how you are addressed, it is up to you to correct it. If you show them respect, respeto din ang ibabalik sa iyo. Pero syempre, may iba rin naman talagang gustong mambastos at ibang usapan na iyon… Sadly, not everybody is 100% aware of how to use the right pronouns. As members of the community, I believe it is our responsibility to educate others about this. We have to let them understand the importance of using the right pronouns for every SOGIE. But educate properly. People commit mistakes; I do too.”
A dummy account was soon set up, impersonating a ravaged Bacalso calling out everyone spitefully for their attempts at her persecution. An FB events page was also set up to “schedule,” at the very restaurant the incident happened, the canonization of Bacalso as a “saint.” Videos of people singing variations of The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” sprang everywhere, the lyrics detailing their condemnation. In Paris, someone visited Disneyland and filmed themselves calling a mascot dressed as the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, “Sir Jude.” In fact, “sir” became the byword for the lynch mob. The word repeated ad infinitum became the most popular comment made on Bacalso’s Facebook page and elsewhere.
Bacalso’s reputation, of course, is the foremost target. Suddenly, all that she has worked is at stake. She is a multi-hyphenate: a molecular biologist, a teacher, a radio and TV broadcaster, a stage actress, a writer, and a very popular host. She also runs a restaurant named Executive Restobar in Lahug. Most of these occupations rest on good reputation — thus the question now becomes: will Bacalso survive this? I’ve been the object of online lynch mobs twice in recent years: once in the early years of the Duterte regime, and once in the aftermath of the 2022 elections. All that I did in my life did not matter at all for the lynch mob. So I know what it feels like to be diminished. In the eyes of the mob, everything you have achieved in life does not matter at all.
But as a gay man myself, I was also horrified by the unleashing of such virulent homophobia and transphobia online — some even coming from my own friends, and some even coming from other gay men I know. What Bacalso did felt very much like a variation of the Streisand Effect, which Wikipedia defines as “an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information.” (The effect is named for Barbra Streisand who attempted in 2003 to suppress the publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu, which was taken to document coastal erosion in California, citing privacy issues. But her desire to hide photos of her house instead made these even more popular and widely disseminated.) Here, in Bacalso’s case, we find her trying to educate people she encounters about trans issues (specifically in addressing her with what she considers as the proper gendered terms), but she has instead singlehandedly created a massive anti-trans movement among Filipinos instead. Truth, the bigotry was probably always there for sure, but hidden. But she awakened it.
On a personal level, I’ve had my own encounter with Bacalso. We share a lot of common friends. We were introduced once, and I remember her just looking me at me, down and up, and then pretending I wasn’t there. I took that like water off a duck’s back, because I thought: “You can’t expect everyone to like you” — and her not liking me did not at all affect my life in any significant way. Later on, in the aftermath of July 21, there would be more stories unleashed about how Bacalso have treated a variety of people in the most “hampas lupa” way — and that’s when I decided that what was going on, especially at the very core of it, was beyond gender issue or class issue: it was about being a good human being.
Be kind.
Try to be good.
Be self-aware.
But above all, also remember that being a good human being also entails not being a transphobe or a homophobe. Just because somebody is an asshole doesn’t give you an excuse to be an asshole yourself.
