MASCULINITY IN MY GENES/JEANS
Just like our jeans, our maleness can be thrown away and re-worked when they don't fit.
By Amílcar Sanatan, Promundo Writing Fellow: a writer and activist invested in political work to engage Caribbean men and boys in gender justice.
Content warning from Promundo: This piece contains descriptions of violence.
“Be a man!”, said the police officer to my friend when he felt he didn’t speak clearly and loudly as he questioned him. The officer inquired about a fight that was going to take place on a Friday afternoon near my school. Higher up, boys occupied the sidewalks, stood in silent anticipation, in their uniforms, prepared for combat with iron bars, planks of wood, dog chains, bottles from the village parlor, and knives. Those boys were busy “being men” at fifteen and sixteen years old, promising to tear the flesh of their sworn enemies.
Language is a funny thing. Formal education encouraged us to have a command of Standard English. In Literature and English classes, through correction and the recitation of prose, we were encouraged to “Be a middle-class, educated, post-colonial man!” The boys who were versed in the national language had no time for the ones who spoke Standard English alone, they demanded, “Be a man of this culture and this soil!” There was cultural purchase for each language in different contexts but those who could only speak one were made to suffer either ridicule or contempt.
I didn’t know there was the word “masculinity”; a word that summed up and explained the arbitrary definitions and meanings of manhood that switched from person to person, time, and context.
Switching registers depended on the social situation as much as the person you were speaking to. Two police officers lined up a group of boys on the street to “search them” because they were “suspicious.” They gave instructions for the boys to put their hands on their heads and kneel, as they pointed a gun to their adolescent faces. One of the boys communicated his every action in Standard English to show that he followed his orders diligently and respectfully. One of the officers remarked, “Why do you talk like that? You like boys or what?” The Standard English which was taught to distinguish them from the poor, the uneducated, those who are more likely targets of state violence did not make a young man on his knees any safer.
I thought to “be a man” meant that I was able to spit at least three meters away from my chin; that I would stand in a urinal in the bathroom, at all times, because I had nothing to hide; that I played sports, invited sunlight onto my bare chest on fields, climbed trees thinking that broken bones counted for as much as broken branches; that I would be sure enough to procure my own barber, keep my arms inside the chair to avoid contact with his penis and keep a straight and shaven face when they sprayed alcohol on my cheeks.
There was never a time that I sat down and wrote exactly what it meant for me to be a man. I heard the three words, over and over, all my years, when I failed or other boys failed to “be men.” It appeared that there was no age when a child or adult was exempt from that imperative meant to correct a public display of failure in manhood. Men, close friends, and strangers, as well as women, those I’ve dated or others who thought I should be able to solve mechanical problems with my car ‘naturally’ each Saturday, made and continue to make this demand of me. It was as if I was doomed to stare at the permanent dawn of manhood, a total experience of sunlight that never came.
I didn’t know there was the word “masculinity”; a word that summed up and explained the arbitrary definitions and meanings of manhood that switched from person to person, time, and context. The cry summoning us to “be men” assumed there was a DNA of maleness already living in us, sometimes waiting to be activated — being a man meant that we were tough, certain, in control and dominant. But masculinity was an idea of manhood that they tried to fit to our bodies like a pair of jeans. The jeans sometimes looked like the ones on the roadside on the Eastern main road in Tunapuna, sometimes designer made and imported from Italy and France, rugged Levi jeans that you received as a gift on Father’s Day. These jeans of masculinity were handed out to me over the years.
The concept of time, especially the fear of ‘lost time’, is important to manhood. Culture in a patriarchy drives boys to be men as early as possible. Boys, from early on, seek out the validation from peers and older men to affirm their manhood and sense of “maleness” continually. This in part drives the animus in public discourse against single-parent female-headed households. Boys grow up learning to blame their mothers for not walking them along the measurements of manhood at what is perceived as an appropriate time. Some of the “mama’s boys” who long identified with the nurturing care and example of a woman may, later on, repudiate this tutelage. This is another form of ‘woman-blame’ in our society. Mothers may also have some investments in patriarchy that are harmful to themselves and their sons. However, women ultimately do not bring up patriarchal sons as effectively as the dominant male culture does — male-led violence and conflict, sexual violence against women and girls, and violent regulation of heterosexual male culture in social and institutional spaces is not carried out by women. At the core of this dilemma is that men may enjoy social spaces and experiences that run contrary to the dominant patriarchal culture but hold the deep fear that they are more vulnerable for participating in these environments and ultimately they feel less equipped to deal with patriarchal ones.
There were over five hundred homicides in the last two years in Trinidad and Tobago. Of course, no government wishes to have a crime problem “on their hands” but the responses of the state are always too ready to throw this responsibility to the public for their lack of morals and a culture of negligent parenting that almost single-handedly engineered transnational trafficking of guns and drugs, entrepreneurial corruption in the procurement of contracts, gang formation in under-resourced urban communities and the increasing development of ‘gated communities’ to draw lines of the social distance of classes, social outcomes, and opportunity. As a sign of the political dysfunction and the weak capacity of the state to create public safety, homicides, rapes, police brutality and societal “wickedness” generally go undetected and unpunished. The least we can do as a people is memorialize our dead to re-center the value of human life and expose the unfinished work of governance.
The miserable men who murdered their partners are too many to mention. In January, after a woman attempted to free herself from a toxic union, her ex-partner followed her to her place of work, after months of online stalking, shot her twice with a gun and then killed himself around 8 am on the Southern Main Road in Couva. Around 8 am some have their first cup of coffee, some have already made their way to work, and some schoolgirls scan the faces of men on the taxi stand, “Who is the least threatening?” “I’ve seen him before” “Just because he is very old doesn’t mean he is not my rapist.” Around 8am, I would drive to class. I would blow one horn if I saw a woman walking by who was attractive, I would blow two horns if she was so impressive and “bess”, I felt the need to bombard her eardrums and peace with the noise of harassment. If you cannot see how these everyday practices of harassment and violence lead to dead women then you have chosen to ignore what “being a man” contains and conceals.
This is why when women march for their rights to be recognized and guaranteed by the state and ordinary members of the society, they ask “Where are the men?” The marchers, public displays of solidarity, and comrades are too few for us to really believe the compensatory cry, “not all men are bad.” Some men point to their lives on the ‘right path’, extraordinary love for daughters, and ‘presence’ in the home. And yes, “all men are not bad” but too many are silent, and too few are reliable in the struggle for gender justice. Maybe the men who need to speak up and act are to busy being careful, trying to zip up the wrong jeans to the waist and or stay quiet with the knowledge of permanent scars in this wardrobe ritual. Thinking that manhood was an inheritance that moved through the ages, as an unchanging and inevitable truth of the universe is a mortuary for humanity. Thinking that we have choices — personal and political — that our jeans can be thrown away at any time, especially, when they don’t fit and re-worked, just like our maleness, is our responsibility and freedom.
