Why Can't Emman Atienza & Friends Spend Their Money As They Want?

(SPOT.ph) The Philippine internet is a fractured place. Whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Reddit—you’ll find Heart and Pia fanatics duking it out; you’ll have clashes between Team Carlos Yulo and Team “Nanay mo pa rin ‘yan.” And I’m certain that somewhere at this hour, some celebrity is entertaining a thought about K-Pop that will launch a full-blown Pinoy fan war.

For reasons better expressed by sociologists, we are ridiculously antagonistic to each other online, almost by default. This is why it’s a kind of achievement to do what micro-influencer Emman Atienza did: to have an exceedingly rare moment where the Philippine internet was virtually unified—in hatred for her and her friends.

What sparked the Emman Atienza hate

For those who need to be caught up: Atienza filmed herself and her friends guessing their bill in Yamazato in Hotel Okura—the friend with the closest guess would pay the bill. The bill ended up being around 130,000 pesos. Later in the video, they are seen waving around a bottle of Clase Azul tequila which typically goes for more than 30,000 pesos in a bar setting. After they were “bashed” for what their critics deemed an insensitive TikTok, Emman Atienza poured fuel on the fire—releasing another video which basically said: Why me? It was a joke. I talked about my privilege in a podcast. Why aren’t you mad at Nadine Lustre, BTS, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Olivia Rodrigo? Of course, invoking the idols of some of the most terminally online fan bases only helped her make the step up—from being a national pariah into an international pariah.

Also read: The 130,000 Dinner With Emman Atienza and Krishna Gravidez

But you know what? Ill-advised as her response might have been, she did pose some striking questions. Sure, her comparisons could have used some work, but here’s an interesting one: Why single out my extravagance, and not all these politicians with Birkin bags and Patek Philippes, which are worth several million pesos? Why are you paying attention to my luxury Japanese dinner and not canceling people riding in private jets?

There are a few immediate answers—one is that, umm, people do pay attention to the Politician’s Birkin. Once in a while some Watch Guy™ pops up to identify a Politician’s Patek too. Taylor Swift gets grief for her private plane use. In Malaysia, these kinds of luxury investigations even swung a presidential race.

If you're going to flaunt, don't say the price

One might ask: But why was the crucifixion of Emman Atienza so… viral? Perhaps the difference is that the usual targets of these investigations never bandy around the cost of their various luxuries. They don’t say the price; while Emman and friends were shouting “ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND—” into the camera several times. If some tito uploaded a TikTok asking people to guess how much his Richard Mille is—maybe they will get the Emman Atienza treatment too. Am I arguing the supremacy of quiet luxury? Nope. Am I saying that unbridled extravagance is okay as long as you don’t tell people the price? Also nope. Everyone knows the Philippines is a hotbed of inequality. But some people know better than to slap people in the face with it.

But wait, why can’t Emman and her friends spend their money the way they want? It’s their money after all. At least, this is what she argued in her video response. No one’s stopping them, but it doesn’t help anyone’s bratty image to have such intense ownership of their money when it was their parents who worked for it. No one gets mad about how Manny Pacquiao spends his money. No one will care if Vice Ganda walks around in tsinelas with a letter H on them. It’s even a trope in rap music to talk about how much you spend on booze, catering, and jewelry—but guess what—it’s only cool if you worked hard for the money. What I’m saying is—It’s actually satisfying to watch people enjoy the fruits of their own labor. But on the other end of that, people tend to get irritated when they’re made to feel financially inferior by a teenager who likely hasn’t worked a day in their life.

But I must say: People tend to go overboard online, so I also feel for Emman Atienza. She did some annoying “rich teenager” things—but does that warrant thousands of venomous comments about her online? Nope. It is what would have been a teaching moment, which turned into a hall pass for misogyny and death threats. Few issues are grave enough for us to discard morals, ethics, and general human decency. This is certainly not one of them.

At the end of it all, perhaps the one thing we can do is listen to the sensible part of Emman’s riposte against her “bashers”—the fact that people in this country spend more luxuriously than her every single day, and no one bats an eye. Not enough people take a look at what our leaders are carrying, wearing, or eating. Or perhaps they do, and they feel powerless against them, and thus resort to attacking micro-influencers like Emman Atienza—who seem easier to take down than this country’s movers and shakers. But really, when we come face-to-face with St. Peter, and he asks us about the good deeds we’ve done, we can’t just tell him that we cancelled Emman Atienza.

Perhaps this is a call to grow from this social media skirmish about conspicuous consumption, and search for those whose consumption is far more conspicuous and actually immoral. Maybe spot a Birkin next time where a Birkin shouldn’t be. Maybe look at where certain people are eating, and then guess the price. Maybe then—this brouhaha will not be forgettable trivia fodder; and will have been a flashpoint for our nation’s class awareness. Until we’re able to do that, we’ll only have succeeded in bullying a teenager because she was annoying. And, well, anyone can do that.

Also read: The 50 Richest People in the Philippines, According to Forbes