Claude Mills, Staff Reporter
LAST WEEK, I was stuck in traffic on Lyndhurst Road when I saw what looked like a young khaki-clad school boy waiting at a bus stop. I was forced to do a quick double take as I snailed by in traffic as the 'male' looked quite suspect.
In fact, I think he needed a reclassification of his gender.
This gender-bender had in two pairs of earrings, his hair was braided back in cane rows, and he had bleached his face to a dirty pinkish hue, like a side of pork gone rancid. But the coup de grace was his eyebrows; he had shaved his original eyebrows and then pencilled them in a sharp upside down V (a decidedly female practice) over his eyes.
I wondered aloud what his mother would think if she saw her daugh... - sorry son like that. Maybe she would just smile, a mother's love, after all, is unconditional.
Maybe I've been in cold storage or something, but when did our men get so effeminate?
Did it begin in the 1980s when men began wearing earrings, always justifying the practice by saying it made them look cuter? Or maybe you've heard the gem about how our African ancestors sported them, or that the pirates had scuttled numerous ships and slashed throats with gold loop earrings dangling from their lobes?
Whatever the reason, the earring thing took off but there was a trick to it. If it were in the right ear, you were a homosexual, so most men pierced the left earlobe and that was it. But now, the fig leaves have fallen, both ears do the trick.
In 1996, I remember going to a stage show, and cringing in mortal horror as Elephant Man and the Scare Dem crew called themselves 'dainty men' as the females in the crowd roared their approval. After a while, I figured it out, what women really wanted were tight-pants wearing 'sensitive thugs'.
The outward sissification of men is the ultimate triumph of women who have been imploring men to get in touch with their feminine side for years: the earrings, the ponytails, the long fingernails, the anklets, and the bangles.
Some men are really 'woman-hounds' and will do anything to make themselves more attractive to the opposite sex. And if you listen to them talk, they do all this stuff in the hope of getting more women in the sack. But while women might say they find men attractive when they look more like them, inside, they are laughing their heads off at these guys.
Earlier this year, a young lady I know pierced both earlobes of her 18-month-old son because 'it made him look cuter'. While I hesitate to call her evil, she is a bit conflicted.
As much as women have needed to tap into their masculine side to raise and financially support families without the help of males for the past couple of decades, men need to get in touch with their more sensitive, 'feminine' side. But I believe some men are carrying it a little too far, especially the males who hail from the ugly ghettos of the Corporate Area.
A lot of today's thug males look kinda effeminate, but they still do the alpha male stuff like penis-grabbing, bad-word-cussing, female objectification, gun-toting and general bad behaviour. It's all very confusing. Hence, when I go to a dance today, I don't stare or snicker at the questionable looking males, that could be hazardous to my health. I just pretend I don't see them.
I am loathe to use the words "masculine" and "feminine," because really, what do those words really mean? What is the measure of a man in today's world? The size of his penis? The number of his concubines? Musculature? His ability to afford a gas-guzzling SUV? Is he someone who stands up to his responsibilities? What is a man?
There is a seething self-contempt that runs like a fault line through the minds of the men and women of this island, that's why they bleach their skins.
They hate themselves so much they would rather become 'freakshows', or monsters because it is a more palatable alternative to what they are now nothing.
According to psychologists, in young men, a false self begins to emerge to counteract such intense emotions as fear of physical disintegration or the dread of psychological humiliation.
The false self is reinforced in many cultures such as ours by positive approval and social value assigned to emotional detachment in men in favour of their pursuit of power and wealth. They grew up in an era where women have made steady advances in all active arenas, and been told by the mass media that women like 'sensitive men'.
Entertainment and movies drive home the point with baby-faced male leads, and the popularity of musicians like Lenny Kravitz who has so many body piercings, he'd never dare go outside in a bad electrical storm.
But while today's young men may look more effeminate, they are still emotionally detached, ruthless, and psychologically crippled young men.
They have achieved the trappings but not the substance of the argument of the 'sensitive man'. The problem, according to Colin Channer, is lack of balance. He has an article in the May 2002 issue of Essence which reads:
"The failure of men is our failure to acknowledge and engage our female self. Male and female are incomplete without the other. Between us are degrees of life and death: the healer and the killer, the nurse and the warrior, the forgiver and the punisher mom and dad. To live an authentic life is to explore the range of possibilities between each opposing self and to create a way of being, an original life narrative authored from a place of self-knowledge and truth. The problem with women will not be solved until men imagine their way into wholeness."
Just last week, one of my friends told me: "Mi a look a woman whe can support me, preferably one whe mi can drive up har car." "Mi want a sugar mommy." Alrighty then. That's one more friend to strike of my Xmas list.
You can e-mail me at cmillsy@yahoo.com
