ANG KAMANYAKAN NG ILANG PILIPINO: HOW BEL ZAMORA’S WAY OF SPEAKING BECAME SEXUALIZED

I spent nearly 20 years in the call center industry, so when Atty. Bel Zamora started questioning a witness during the September 28 impeachment hearing, the way she spoke did not sound strange to me.

Conyo? Absolutely. That R in “baril” was very conyo, and I completely understand why people noticed it. I noticed it too.

What I did not hear was a woman trying to seduce somebody.

Then I started reading the comments.

Suddenly, people were calling her “malandi.” Others said she sounded like she was trying to seduce the witness. There were jokes about erections, ovulation, a “bedroom voice,” whether she was married, whether the police officer was attracted to her, and whether Zamora knew exactly what she was doing with her voice.

Some people were basically writing sexual fan fiction around a congresswoman conducting a direct examination.

And I thought: Wait. What exactly did this woman do?

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

Police Major Joericson Sangalang of the Philippine National Police Firearms and Explosives Office testified that Vice President Sara Duterte had 22 firearms registered under her name, while her husband, lawyer Manases “Mans” Carpio, had 29.

Zamora was presenting him as a prosecution witness under Article II of the impeachment case involving allegations of unexplained wealth. Senator-judges themselves questioned the relevance of the firearms testimony, so there was plenty to argue about without discussing Zamora’s sexuality.

Did the witness advance the prosecution’s case? Was the connection to the Statement of Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth properly developed? Was Zamora effective during direct examination? Was she prepared enough?

Those are fair questions.

Even saying that you find her speaking style irritating is fair. People dislike accents, voices and mannerisms all the time.

But somewhere along the way, criticism of how she performed became commentary about what kind of woman people imagined her to be.

Before getting there, though, I want to correct something that was already being distorted online.

The joke was not that “maraming baril” itself was sexual. What caught people’s attention was how Zamora pronounced “baril,” especially that R.

Very conyo.

Some commenters later started writing versions such as “malaking… baril” and “ganito kalaking baril,” then attached penis jokes to the altered wording. The hearing transcript I checked does not contain that supposed line.

So even the sexual joke was partly created by people changing what they had heard.

That is worth remembering.

CONYO IS NOT JUST AN ACCENT

I also think we need to understand what conyo means in the Philippine setting.

We often use the word as shorthand for Taglish spoken with a particular accent. But conyo has long referred to something broader than pronunciation.

Linguistic research describes conyo as both a recognizable social persona and a recognizable speech register. It has been associated historically with urban elites, aspirational groups and private-school-educated youth, especially in Manila.

The Taglish is part of it. So are the expressions, pronunciation, cadence, code-switching and certain words associated with the group.

But from my own experience, conyo is also connected to a social world.

I had the opportunity to work closely with people who came from that world for years. The call center industry brought Filipinos from wildly different backgrounds into the same workplace, and I found myself working beside people whose upbringing, schools, barkada and family circumstances were very different from mine.

At one point, I was fully in the middle of what people around us jokingly referred to as the “war of the dudes and the pares.”

If you were around certain BPO circles during that period, you probably encountered versions of it. There were people who naturally called everyone “dude,” others who used “pare,” and all the social signals and jokes that came with those groups.

I heard the accents every day. I heard the vocabulary. I understood the social codes.

But I never assimilated the speaking style.

I grew up poor.

That life was never mine.

I could work with people from that background, become friends with them and understand how they spoke without suddenly acquiring the same speech patterns. Being surrounded by a social group does not erase where you came from or the environment that formed you.

That familiarity was not limited to people I worked with.

Four of my closest female friends over the years spoke very much like Bel Zamora.

I knew them well, spent countless hours talking with them, and their cadence never struck me as flirtation or sexual signaling. That was simply how they spoke.

So when I heard Zamora, the voice itself did not suggest anything sexual to me. It sounded familiar.

SHE HAS ALWAYS TALKED LIKE THAT

Another thing became obvious when I checked Zamora’s earlier appearances.

She did not suddenly discover this speaking voice while questioning a male police officer.

Watch her interviews. Watch the House proceedings. Watch the prosecution press conferences. The pronunciation, the English-dominant cadence, the kolehiyala quality and the tendency to speak softly while smiling were already there.

Even people in the same online discussions were pointing this out.

“Based sa previous interviews niya, ganyan na talaga siya magsalita.”

“If nanonood kayo ng presscon after trial, ganyan talaga magsalita si Cong Bel.”

Another commenter said her accent has always sounded that way and that she is normally “smiley smiley.”

So if you have been monitoring the lower House deliberations and the prosecution team instead of encountering Bel Zamora for the first time through a viral clip, you probably would not have been shocked by her voice.

You might still find it annoying.

You might still make fun of the R.

But the idea that she suddenly adopted some seductive courtroom persona becomes harder to sustain once you have actually watched her speak before.

WHEN THE COMMENTS TURNED SEXUAL

This is where I draw the line.

Calling her conyo is not misogyny.

Laughing at the pronunciation of “baril” is not misogyny.

Saying you dislike her voice is not misogyny.

Criticizing her direct examination is certainly not misogyny.

Women in government do not get immunity from criticism simply because they are women. I would never want that standard applied to any politician.

Then look at what some people actually wrote.

“Ba’t parang nang-aakit si Ma’am?”

“What’s with the bedroom voice?”

“Erection your honor!”

“Bat ang landi ng body language and intonation ni madam?”

“Ovulating ba si madam?”

There were comments about whether Zamora was married. There were claims that she was flirting to gain an advantage. One commenter compared her to educated escorts in hotel lobbies.

That is no longer criticism of a lawyer’s performance.

Nobody needs to speculate about a woman’s ovulation to evaluate direct examination.

Nobody needs an erection joke to assess evidence.

Nobody needs to compare a congresswoman with an escort to explain that they dislike her courtroom style.

And if your analysis of an impeachment prosecutor somehow ends with her sex appeal, the discussion has already gone somewhere else.

I also want to keep the scale accurate. Reddit comments are not a scientific survey of Filipinos. I cannot take two threads and declare that the entire country thinks this way.

There were also commenters telling people to stop sexualizing her. Others repeatedly explained that Zamora had always spoken that way.

What the threads give us is documented evidence of how a visible group of Filipino social-media users reacted.

That evidence is ugly enough without exaggerating it.

THEN REMEMBER BONG SUNTAY

The reaction becomes even stranger when you remember what happened in the House in March.

Quezon City Rep. Bong Suntay is also a lawyer. During a House Committee on Justice hearing on the impeachment complaints against Sara Duterte, Suntay used actress Anne Curtis while making an analogy.

He talked about seeing Curtis, finding her beautiful and experiencing desire. His words included: “may desire sa loob ko na nag-init talaga,” followed by his reference to imagining what could happen.

There was no need to interpret his accent.

There was no need to wonder whether an R sounded sexy.

A male congressman and lawyer actually introduced his sexual thoughts about a woman into an official congressional proceeding.

Bel Zamora objected.

She moved to have Suntay’s statement removed from the record and reminded the committee that Women’s Month had just begun. The committee agreed to strike the remarks.

The Philippine Commission on Women later condemned Suntay’s statement as sexual objectification.

Now compare that with what happened to Zamora.

Months after objecting to a male colleague sexualizing an actress in Congress, Zamora appeared in the impeachment court and spoke the way she has spoken before.

And people sexualized her.

The man actually talked about his sexual desire.

The woman talked about firearms.

Yet somehow, strangers managed to make her sexuality part of the discussion too.

THERE IS RESEARCH ON THIS

I am not pointing this out because I feel any need to defend Zamora. I have no personal stake in doing so. She does not even represent my district.

A 2022 peer-reviewed Philippine study examined sexist humor aimed at a Filipina politician in online discussions.

The researchers found that sexualized jokes can do more than insult a woman personally. They can also weaken how people regard her legitimacy as a political actor.

UN Women Philippines has also warned about online abuse directed at women in politics, including sexual harassment, misogynistic speech and attacks tied to gender.

That does not mean every insult directed at a female politician qualifies as misogyny.

The content tells us what kind of attack we are looking at.

Call a politician incompetent and you are criticizing competence.

Call her dishonest and you are questioning honesty.

Call her unprepared and you are criticizing preparation.

Start discussing whether she is horny, ovulating, seductive or using sex to influence men, and gender has entered the attack in a very different way.

That is exactly what happened in some of the reaction to Bel Zamora.

NOTHING WAS WRONG WITH THE WAY SHE TALKED

I went back and listened again.

I still hear conyo.

I still hear the R.

I still understand why some Filipinos find that manner of speaking funny or irritating. I spent nearly 20 years around people who spoke in similar ways, and even I never adopted it.

There is still nothing wrong with the way Bel Zamora talked.

You can dislike the accent. You can laugh at the R. You can find her cadence irritating, question her courtroom performance or criticize the way she handled the examination.

All of that is fair.

But if you listened to her and heard seduction, if you looked at her expressions and saw a sexual invitation, if your response was “malandi,” “bedroom voice,” ovulation jokes or erections, then something is wrong with the way you are looking at her.

She was speaking. You sexualized it.

And your sexualized criticism of the way Bel Zamora speaks tells me far more about you than it does about her.

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