Hartley Neita, ContributorIn recent months, I have had to drive on Hope Road, Marescaux Road, the Constant Spring and Half-Way Tree roads, Barbican Road, North Street, South Camp Road, and Mountain View Avenue in the mid-afternoons on week-days.
These are the roads on which several of our secondary boys' and girls' schools are situated, and, between 2.00 and 3.00 o'clock, the students leave their schools and walk to bus stops or to their homes - if they do not live too far away.
These roads are full of colour at this time of the day. The uniforms of the girls are of all shades of blue and green, brown, rust-red, purple, green, yellow and the other colours of the rainbow, and are a joy to behold.
In the main, too, the girls walk with discipline on the sidewalks and when they cross the road they obey the safety rules and walk briskly.
Sadly, I cannot say the same for the boys.
During the last two weeks, I have been looking more closely at these students. I have got the impression that, before the girls leave their schools, they brush their hair, dust their shoes, fluff out their dresses, and tuck their blouses neatly inside their skirts.
Perhaps they ask other girls to give their approval on how they look, or as girls do have combs and brushes inside their schoolbags which they use before going on the streets. Call it vanity, if you will, but they certainly look smart.
And they walk with a purpose and a confidence.
Scruffy boys
The boys, on the other hand, have a shabby, scruffy and untidy look. Their pants hang low, just above their hips, and so the cuffs bundle over their shoes. Their shirts are half-in and half-out of their pants, and their shoes are invariably caked with dust.
And they drag and shuffle their feet and slouch when they walk. It is as if they have nowhere to go and all their lives to get there.
The same shabbiness among males can be seen in other areas of endeavour.
Except for cricket, which despite its current weaknesses is still a gentleman's game and in which the players always seem neat and tidy, most other male sports do not have the same bearing.
Footballers, for example, invariably have their shirts half-in and half-out. Their stockings are always pulled up, but that is perhaps because of the shin-guards underneath.
And their response to shooting a goal is to strip their shirts off. Soon, they will probably take off their pants!
Take our entertainers, too.
Singers like Karen Smith, Della Manley, Carlene Davis, Judy Mowatt, Gem Myers, Myrna Hague, Cindy Lewis and the many others, never appear on stage looking less than the ladies they are.
But, except for the Fab Five Band, Byron Lee's Dragonaires and the All-Star Big Band, and Freddie McGregor, and Shaggy, most of our male entertainers are not who any self-respecting parent would want to sit at table in their homes in the company of their daughters.
Call it snobbery if you like, but it seems as if our younger males have lost the standards of their elders.
There is an increasing concern that our males are being marginalised, that more of them than females are becoming social dropouts. It is almost as if the young male generation does not care about appearance.
Clothes do not make the man a man, but clothes do make our women attractive and beautiful and exciting and positive.
And they know it.
On the other hand, our young men believe they must look like gully courses before they are cleaned by Metropolitan Parks and Markets. Or like the potholes which scour my road.
And that may well be why the girls are doing so much better in school. That's why, too, so many of them are doing evening courses or training at the institutions of higher learning.
And that is why they are crowding the corporate world, waiting for the inevitable day when our young men are unemployable as their secretaries, as while they know words such as "Irie" and "ysow", they cannot spell them.
