Patriarchal economy of women’s suffering

Marjuice Destinado

It’s infuriating that a woman like Liza Soberano can expose years of abuse and the world’s first instinct is to twist her pain into a love story. She could be recounting the trauma of her childhood and yet the headlines will still scream: Is he still in the picture?

Because in a patriarchal society, her pain must first be made pretty before it is allowed to exist. It must be romantic enough to gossip about, marketable enough to sell. The wound itself is irrelevant; what matters is whether her suffering performs well on the algorithm.

This is the violence of it: to speak your trauma and watch the world turn it into clickbait. To be reduced to a headline that values your beauty over your bruise. Realizing that, in the eyes of patriarchy, the only stories worth telling are the ones that entertain, not the ones that demand care.

When Liza Soberano released a video recounting her childhood experiences, including deeply personal accounts of trauma and the disempowerment she endured, she offered her lived experience as evidence, at significant emotional cost, in the hope of healing.

Her testimony should have been received within the frame of survivor discourse: a public narrative where the speaker’s pain is validated and contextualized within structural patterns of gendered harm. Instead, the dominant public and media response was to reduce her revelation to a spectacle of romantic dissolution: “Liza confirms breakup with Enrique Gil.”

This is the patriarchy doing what it has always done: hearing a woman’s truth and translating it into a story about a man.

Women in the public eye are not permitted to exist outside the male frame. Our lives are made legible to the world through the lens of romance, desirability, and marketable femininity. If we are in love, we are worth celebrating; if we are out of love, we are worth pitying or dissecting; if we are neither, we risk being invisible.

In the Philippine context, this gendered erasure is sustained by an entrenched media logic that treats women’s bodies and relationships as raw material for profit. Women are not covered as full human beings with political and emotional complexity. 

They are packaged as muses, scandals, or cautionary tales, depending on what sells. 

This system is both patriarchal and capitalist: patriarchal because it polices women into narrowly defined roles of desirability or disgrace; capitalist because it strips their private lives for parts, repurposing intimate details into monetizable spectacle for clicks, ad revenue, and audience retention.

Liza’s case illustrates two entrenched patterns of gendered narrative control. First is the romanticization of women’s narratives, in which even accounts of abuse are reframed as love stories gone wrong, collapsing the complexity of women’s lived experiences into reductive tropes. Second is the disciplining of women who refuse to conform to these narrative expectations, where speaking outside the sanctioned frame of romance results in their testimony being mutilated into something more “marketable” for mass consumption.

This erasure is neither accidental nor benign; it is structural. Philippine entertainment media operates within a postcolonial patriarchal order that relies on misogynistic logic to render women’s truths legible only when they reinforce heteronormative, male-centered scripts. When a woman articulates pain that cannot be contained within romance, her narrative is forcibly redirected into gossip, thereby stripping it of its significance.

The harms are measurable and systemic. First, it teaches women that their credibility is contingent on their romantic value. Second, it discourages disclosure—why speak if your trauma will be sterilized into relationship gossip? And third, it reinforces the patriarchal economy of attention, where women’s worth is tethered to men’s proximity and public appetite for beauty.

Patriarchy is not subtle here. It does not even try to hide. It takes a woman’s pain, plucks out the parts that might indict its own systems, and leaves only what can be consumed without consequence. 

In a sense, women only become news when they are in love, out of love, or beautiful enough to be photographed. She bares her history of hurt, and the world circles, eager for a scrap of scandal, scavenging for romance in the wreckage, while the wound is left to rot

Let it be known: feminism is not just about “listening to women.” It is the refusal to let a patriarchal world dictate how our stories should be told. It is insisting that women’s truths exist on their own terms, without being repackaged or mutilated into entertainment.

To truly hear women, we must dismantle the patriarchal scripts that funnel their narratives into familiar, limiting tropes of romance and desirability. Turning a woman’s trauma into entertainment is violence; feminism is the refusal to let that violence decide which parts of her truth may exist.