By Jerry Roker
for Bahamas Press
Many of our current social issues are inseparable from gender and human-sexuality concerns. When boys continue to see speaking proper English as being for sissies, you know we are losing big time from the false gender-specific assumptions plaguing our society.
It is now effeminate for a boy to be smartly dressed. Instead, the crude display of underwear is a declaration of manhood. Yes. Now we know that you are indeed a man. It is also sissy behaviour to hold the door for someone while you exit a room. Let the door slam behind you. Never mind if it hits the person who was about to enter. After all, you are a real man.
It is now common practice for boy toddlers to be greeted with a fist bump, since that is supposedly manly. Bullying in our schools should come as no surprise. It would not be surprising if many of the bullies are also males.
Do we see the connection between many of our social ills and the gender-identity confusion?
Our boys need more capacity with literacy and thinking skills.
The gender-identity confusion in the society is at alarming proportions! While boys are increasingly under pressure to prove and parade ‘maleness’, girls are increasingly paying for this unfolding process. They must be objectified, catcalled, demanded, held in subjection, demeaned, and anything that will show the supremacy of masculinity and the inferiority of femininity.
The Bahamas needs a massive education campaign! But this will take leadership that is able to move beyond political expediency and religious bigotry.
In the political arena, people want roads, light and water. On the religious landscape, many are preoccupied with who is going to Heaven and who is going to Hell.
There is no escaping this difficult road of gender identity at the crossroads with the patriarchal one-way. It cannot be built for us, by the Chinese or any other nationality. This is a highway of hearts and minds and will; a uniquely Bahamian highway that only we can build for ourselves.
