Carolyn Cooper, Contributor

Cooper

Young men in Jamaica these days are under a lot of pressure to be straight. Sexually speaking, that is. Any hint of a leaning towards homosexuality will bring down immediate judgement on their heads. So they are running scared. Even more alarming, any use of language that could even vaguely suggest homosexuality must be deleted from their vocabulary. Perfectly respectable words have taken on new meanings and now signify sexual scandal.

Take, for example, a word like 'pilot'. In the good old days of sexual innocence, many young men aspired to be pilots. There was a lot of glamour associated with flying high. Whether as Air Force captains or commercial airline crew, pilots used to be potent symbols of male achievement. Young men who were socialised to identify masculinity with mechanical toys - trains and boats and planes - saw themselves as heroes, conquering space and gravity.

A DIFFERENT STORY

A pilot in a cockpit is not an appealing image for many young men.

These days, it's a different story, at least here at home: "Me don't want to be no pilot." Decoding this puzzling declaration is easy once you understand the way in which Jamaicans think in symbols. Our language is full of vivid images, as we see in many of our proverbs: 'Two pot cover cyaan shut'. This everyday, domestic image can be interpreted as a seemingly common-sense statement about the 'unnaturalness' of homosexuality.

The pot (female) and its cover (male) naturally go together. Heterosexual intercourse - the shutting of pot with cover - is idealised as normal. The proverb is a clear warning against the attempt to shut two covers (or, by implication, two pots).

So why don't our young men want to be pilots? A pilot works in a cockpit. No self-respecting Jamaican man - young or old - would admit to wanting to work there, especially bearing in mind the colloquial meaning of work as sexual intercourse. Worky-worky.

This symbolic meaning of cockpit is reinforced by the primary definition of the word given in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: 'a pit or enclosed area constructed for cock-fighting.' The popular meaning of 'cockpit' as the control centre of an aeroplane or automobile does not appear in that dictionary.

Furthermore, among all the quite respectable definitions of the word cock in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary there appears penis, which the dictionary pointedly defines as 'vulgar'. Incidentally, one of the dictionary's non-vulgar definitions of cock as 'spout' seems to be the source of the common Jamaican name for penis as 'teapot.'

This image, of course, is usually used to describe a child's penis rather than an adult male's. The spout of a teapot does not, after all, accurately represent the rather grand proportions of the average adult male's conception of his penis.

PRESUMED VULGARITY

The presumed vulgarity of the cock as penis is intriguing. It seems as if once you start talking about sex, you enter a dark and dangerous underworld of shameful silence. Consider, for example, the Latin word pudendum meaning the 'private parts' or 'the external genital organs,' as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary puts it.

Pudendum literally means 'that of which one ought to be ashamed.' But why should you be ashamed of your 'private parts'? Is it because they are used for sex? And sex, by definition, is a shameful act? And is this essentially a European hang up? Or is it universal?

In our Jamaican language, there is a well-known compound word from the Twi language of Ghana that is used to define the female sexual organ. There is nothing shameful about this word, though I'm careful not to use it here since I don't want to offend the sensibilities of prim and proper readers. Let's just say it starts, but doesn't end, with 'p'. The Dictionary of Jamaican English describes its meaning in this way: 'something large and round, seeming swollen'.

The dictionary discreetly makes no reference to female body parts. Instead, the word is shamelessly applied to yam: one that 'grows as a round, lumpish tuber rather than the usual elongated one.' So there are male yams and female yams, both of which 'eat' just as well, I presume. But, that is an entirely different story.

DEEP-ROOTED ANXIETIES

You may think it's all just a joke: these young men's fears about being a pilot. But I think so-called jokes can reveal deep-rooted anxieties. They verbalise male vulnerability about sexual identity. The seemingly foolish fears about working in a cockpit are manifestations of a profound panic in Jamaican culture about masculinity.

And there are other expressions for this anxiety. Young men have deleted the number two from their vocabulary because of its infantile faecal associations. Like the cockpit, the number two metaphorically signifies anal sex and thus homosexuality. If you can't use the number two, it makes studying maths a rather challenging business.

Similarly, the word 'succeed' is now loaded with negative meanings: suck seed. The rejection of the word 'succeed' is particularly unsettling, given the fact that many young men are not succeeding academically these days. Young women are outperforming young men in high school and at university. So if the very notion of succeeding is now tainted by negative sexual allusion, how are we going to motivate young men to move past their fears and claim power?

A related issue is the way in which supposedly despised oral sex now provides a startling new metaphor for patronage: "Mi just suck off a ting offa a man" - meaning, approximately, I've just got a handout. Presumably from a hand.

Incidentally, the dancehall term for performing oral sex is itself a quite vivid, ironic image: to bow.

With all the dancehall warnings against 'bowing,' this sucking off metaphor for patronage seems quite incomprehensible. But could it be that the sexualisation of language here signifies the actual politics of disempowerment in which young men, reduced to dependency on dons, are attempting to come to terms with their vulnerability by speaking it out of existence?

I've coined the term 'heterophobia' as a politically neutral label for a whole range of anxieties that plague all peoples in all cultures: phobias which are reducible to the singular fear of difference. Differences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, age, sexual orientation and religion all generate phobias. Infidels are those wicked people who don't share our faith.

'Heterophobia' is not the straight 'opposite' of homophobia; it is an inclusive, generic term with multiple applications. It does include the current definition of homophobia as a rejection of same-sex unions. But heterophobia is more than that. It goes straight to the heart of the problem of cultural difference. We fear whatever is seen as different from the 'norm.'

Given the long-established rejection of homosexuality in Jamaican culture; and taking into account the equally potent imperative to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery and systemic psychological brutalisation, we simply cannot afford to continue with business as usual. It is true that Jamaican society is slowly transforming itself into a less repressive place for homosexuals. But the tradition of sexual conservatism is deep-rooted.

Is it time for us to decriminalise homosexuality and so diminish its power to terrify? It's a basic law of nature: what we fear imprisons us. As long as the threat of homosexuality is used as a battering ram, young men will continue to be victims of their own worst fears. Vulnerable youth who are afraid to succeed and who don't want to end up in a cockpit are crying out for help. We can no longer turn a deaf ear. Or two.

Carolyn Cooper is a professor of literary and cultural studies at UWI, Mona. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.