Where are the eligible men?

Carolyn Cooper, Contributor

No, I don't mean eligible for marriage; for going around (in circles) with; or just for the occasional date. It's the missing men who ought to be eligible for tertiary education that I wonder about. On a visit last May to the University of Freiburg in Germany, I was vividly reminded that the business of 'male marginality' in universities is not just a local issue.

I gave a lecture on language and cultural identity in the Caribbean to a class of 24 students. There were 21 women and three men. I felt completely at home, if not at ease. In fact, the gender ratio in that linguistics class, 87.5 per cent female to 12.5 per cent male, was even more skewed than at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona.

The social implications of male underrepresentation in the tertiary education sector are quite unsettling. Educated women who have expectations of marrying conventionally 'eligible' men are increasingly finding that they have to adjust their desires to accommodate the realities of the market.

A few months ago, I spoke at a forum on Caribbean women writers hosted by the all-female hall of residence at the UWI, Mona. The hall is named in honour of that irrepressible 19th-century Jamaican adventuress, Mary Seacole.

Seacole was quite a character. She studied nursing with her mother who was a famous 'doctoress' specialising in the art and science of herbal medicine. Mary applied to the British Government to be sent to the Crimean War. She was repeatedly rejected and decided that racism was the issue.

Mary Seacole promptly made her own way to the war and set up shop as a sutler. The Oxford English Dictionary defines that old-fashioned word as "one who follows an army or lives in a garrison town and sells provisions to the soldiers".

By the time she got to Crimea, the enterprising Mrs Seacole had mistressed more skills than nursing. She had become a successful hotelier. She first ran her mother's boarding house in Kingston, then established her own hotel in Panama.

Wining and dining

In the spirit of the formidable Mrs Seacole, a young woman at the forum asked with some disbelief if she would really have to settle for the available men who simply did not measure up to her exacting standards.

In attendance was a large contingent of Chancellorites, the Seacolites' 'brothers', with whom many unbrotherly relationships are quite often formed. To much applause from the young men, I asked the outspoken young woman to consider the possibility that her expectations might be unreasonable.

If, for example, she wanted a suitor who could wine and dine her at an expensive restaurant - or even at a fast-food joint - she would wait in vain. Most university students can barely manage to feed themselves, much more somebody else. All she was likely to get was much wining - in the Trinidadian sense of the word.

A foolhardy young man stepped up to the mike and confirmed the fact that the disappointed young woman had every reason to be worried about her prospects of finding a suitable suitor. He provocatively announced that Eve was created by God to serve Adam so the woman's role today should be basically the same.

He thoroughly enjoyed the outrage of the women. But nobody really took him seriously. We knew he was just winding us up. Fun and joke aside, I wonder if some men resent the fact that women are outperforming them academically. If so, how does this resentment affect the way they treat women socially?

The most troubling response to the gender issues raised at the forum came from two young men who spoke with me in private. They were worried about the disdainful responses of some young women to their attempts at being courteous.

Outdated chivalry

One of them reported a most unpleasant incident. He had held the door open for a young woman who promptly stepped on his feet without a word of apology. He felt that if he continued to try to be chivalrous - an increasingly outdated concept - he would run the risk of being dismissed by women who would think that he was 'soft' or, worse, homosexual.

The young men had every reason to be fearful. Romantic novels for women are full of brooding male heroes whose primary attribute is their hardness - both sexual and emotional. 'Sensitivity' is not a virtue. Even feminist women who, in theory, advocate the loosening of rigid gender roles and identities can be quite ambivalent about completely sensitive men. We want our men to be both hard and soft, depending on the matter at hand.

These days, as tertiary education becomes increasingly feminised, highly educated men will soon come to be seen as undesirably 'soft'. A related problem is the popular perception that 'real man doan chat English'.

Lloyd Lovindeer mischievously illustrated this new reality in a talk on 'Women in Dancehall', published two decades ago in Jamaica Journal: "So if you go to a girl in the dancehall and say, 'Ah may I have the pleasure of this dance?' she know right away that she don't really want to dance wid you. Because if you talk like that, more likely yu cya[a]n wine."

Men who can both speak English and wine - not necessarily at the same time - appear to be a dying breed. We need to do all we can to save the species. Not just for the pleasure of educated women.

Carolyn Cooper, PhD, is a teacher of English and an advocate of Jamaican language rights. Visit her bilingual blog, Jamaica Woman Tongue, at carolynjoycooper.wordpress.com Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.