Badass gyal

by Keith Noel

WHEN WE were young, we were determined to break down the walls of racism. We rejected specious arguments that blacks were intellectually inferior and the use of the story of Ham in the Bible to claim that God himself had declared that black people were meant for menial labour, they should be 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'.

Alas! We soon found ourselves giving ear to similar arguments when women started to challenge a number of firmly held beliefs. While we finally agreed with gender equality at the workplace and grew to accept that the idea that women's sport should be taken seriously, some of us began to hesitate at the other implications of this gender equality. It meant that in the family the man was no longer automatically the 'king' who decided whether his wife worked and, as she was often as educated as he was, she could demand an equal say in decisions about general family matters. When she emerged from the kitchen and spoke of the sharing of duties at home men found themselves changing diapers when she was late coming in from work!

Some men resisted the idea vigorously. They, too, reached for the Bible. To them, "The man is the head of the woman" obviously meant that no woman should argue with her husband, once he had made a decision. And, they argued, throughout the Bible, women were praised for 'virtuousness', not leadership qualities or creativity!

The argument was also drawn that women were created to be the 'keepers of the hearth'. They were responsible for the moral and spiritual upbringing of our children. Being virtuous, a woman controlled her sexuality. A good woman was not sexually aggressive, that was the man's perogative. They argued that there was a reason that we all warned our daughters about predatory males and taught them how to resist their wiles.

Man's downfall

We never even permitted our young girls to think that they should be sexually demanding, far less adventurous. In a relationship, if her man satisfied her sexually, she basked in her good luck. If he did not, it was inconceivable that she should demand his improvement, or seek this satisfaction elsewhere.

The Bible was again thumped. Female sexuality was a dangerous thing, it was argued. When the devil wanted a foothold, he got Eve on his side and she used her sexuality to urge Adam into original sin. Then again, God's fearless warrior, Samson, was brought to his knees by a woman's wiles. Then, it is claimed, God redeemed the gender through choosing Mary the Madonna, a spotless virgin, to be the vessel through which he would manifest himself on earth. Through Mary, we could pattern perfect female behaviour, virginal, obedient and caring. This 'virtuous woman' ideal is extolled throughout the Bible.

I had a colleague once who firmly believed that female sexuality was a tool the devil had used more than once to bring man down and that it was society's job to keep this 'devil's tool' in check. He argued that even pagan societies all recognised this reality. He quoted examples from the Sirens to Medusa to other pagan myths to substantiate this argument. We all marvelled at how this vastly intelligent man used the Bible to cover what we thought were his own sexual insecurities!

Now the bubble has burst. One of the fears of those who opposed female liberation has been realised. Those who thought, like my (now deceased) colleague, that if women were 'given their heads', the sexual revolution would become a revolution in sexuality, are now saying "seet deh!"

They point, dismayed, to the fact that no longer is it 'what is fame fi a man is shame fi a oman'; to Lady Saw; to some women overtly experimenting in 'kinky' sex; and to the sexual aggressiveness displayed by some. They even claim that the alarming growth in aggressive lesbian recruitment of teenage girls indicates that the marginalisation of men has now inevitably included the bedroom.

But then, I suspect that the extreme response of these men is similar to that of those racist whites who still cannot accept the fact of Barack Obama, or of Usain Bolt!

Keith Noel is an educator. Send comments to columns@ gleanerjm.com