BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY TO A FILIPINO / Misunderstandings Can Be ... Hilarious!

Pea delivers another installment of her popular cultural differences series, walking foreigners through the everyday Filipino behaviors, language traps, and social norms that confuse, annoy, or amuse Westerners living in or visiting the Philippines. The episode covers everything from why Filipinos don't name their pets to why two boys walking arm-in-arm at the mall doesn't mean what you think it means.

Filipinos often don't name their pets ​

• Especially common among poorer Filipinos, who treat animals more as useful tools (security systems) than family members
• Wealthier Filipinos with thoroughbred animals do tend to name them
• Poor families rarely spay or neuter, leading to unchecked breeding — some families have so many dogs and cats they can't even recognize individual animals, let alone name them
• This mentality also explains why some Filipinos don't think twice about stuffing unwanted kittens in a bag and throwing them into the road (Pea mentions an upcoming video on this)
• Instead of names, Filipinos use generic calls: "hey dog," "hey cat," or sounds like "puss puss puss" — which Pea jokes might sound like someone has developed a stutter

"Hey Joe!" — why Filipinos shout this at foreigners ​

• The nickname comes from World War II, when nearly every foreigner in the Philippines was an American GI ("G.I. Joe")
• It's also why all foreigners, regardless of nationality, are often called "Americans" — which upsets non-American foreigners, though Filipinos generally like Americans so it's not an insult
• Filipinos can't tell your nationality by looking at you as you drive past, so they default to "Hey Joe" as a friendly greeting, especially kids and teenagers testing out their English
• Pea acknowledges some foreigners get angry about it but says it's not meant as an insult — though she adds with humor, "if we knew it upset you we wouldn't do it quite as often... probably"

Filipinos make everything sweet — and it's a problem ​

• Filipinos are obsessed with sweetness: sweet spaghetti, sweet drinks, sweet ketchup, even sweet shrimp sauce
• Pea was served sweet pad Thai and found it inedible
• If you order orange juice, you'll probably get Tang — Filipinos aren't big on actual juice, but artificially flavored sugar water is on almost every table
• She worries this contributes to a national trend toward obesity, warning that "Filipinas better watch out because when we indulge in too much of the wrong food we have a tendency to look like Oompa Loompas"

Tampons vs. pads — bring your own tampons ​

• Filipinas use pads almost exclusively; store employees won't know what a tampon is, even with a hand gesture demonstration
• The reason: it's widely believed in the Philippines that using a tampon means losing your virginity — "a woman can give it up to a tube of cotton"
• Buying tampons amounts to publicly announcing you're no longer a virgin
• There's a broad cultural stigma against putting foreign objects in your body — "unless of course it's a foreigner's object in your body, then it's perfectly acceptable," Pea quips

The extreme population density ​

• The Philippines has 1/33rd the land mass of the US but nearly 1/3 of its population
• Pea's visualization: every time you see one person in your country, imagine adding nine more, all making as much noise as possible, plus about 12 million stray animals
• Roads are crowded, stores are jammed, sidewalks are choked — if you don't like crowds, this is not the place

The two most annoying sound effects in Filipino media ​

• Two specific sound effects are used relentlessly across TV shows, news broadcasts, advertisements, radio programs, and YouTube videos
• They were cute when first introduced years ago but are now so overused that Pea says people should be "voluntarily popping out their own eardrums" to avoid them
• She's convinced they're here to stay (the transcript doesn't capture what the actual sounds are since they were played as audio)

Dangerous word mix-ups in Filipino languages ​

• "Scandal" in Western usage means a morally/legally wrong action causing public outrage; in the Philippines, "scandal" specifically means a leaked sex tape — so accusing someone of scandalous behavior will send them checking Pornhub for their guest appearance
• "Madupaka" sounds like a profanity to English speakers but actually just means "be careful not to stumble" — though Pea warns mispronunciation in Bisaya-speaking areas could land you in hot water
• "Lolo" means grandfather, but "lol" (one letter short) refers to masturbation — confusing the two when meeting your Filipina's grandpa will end your invitation to future family gatherings, "which might be a blessing in disguise"

Same-sex hand-holding doesn't mean what you think ​

• Foreigners walking through malls see girls holding hands, boys walking arm-in-arm, and assume everyone is gay — then wonder how there are so many babies
• In Filipino culture, it's perfectly normal and acceptable for same-sex friends to hold hands or walk arm-in-arm
• Ironically, it's a young opposite-sex couple hanging all over each other that would be considered "scandalous" (in the Filipino sense of the word)

Pea's "lumberjacking" follow-up ​

• In her closing segment, she references a previous video where she mentioned that many Filipinas like to hold a man's genitals while he sleeps — which she's dubbed "lumberjacking"
• So many viewers confirmed this that she says the phenomenon deserves formal study
• She called every woman she knew to ask about it and found several confirmed they do the same thing
• Her best theory: it's related to security, something many Filipinas lack in their daily lives — "what could be more secure than holding the family jewels and the sack they come in"
• She delivers a string of tree-related innuendos: "how long it takes her to search for the birch," "does the oak get a stroke," "is there juice from the spruce"

📺 Watch the full video on YouTube

🔔 Subscribe to The Filipina Pea