THE CULTURE OF MALE-NESS – CONTENTIONS OF A SPECIES

In Guyana, we dwell in the archetypical worlds of matriarchal and patriarchal impulses, as well as tribal versus caste tendencies.MalenessIn all this fusion of modernisation, from the evidence before us, our sons are losing the social battle. Though there is the conclusion that the ratio is five females to one male, the percentage of males in prison, sleeping on the streets as drug addicts, walking around with mental problems are basically 75% male to 25% female.
These are my observations, which can be adjusted by the corrections of professionals whose vocations place them in a better position; and I doubt that they can reverse my lay man’s statistics.
For the past 5, 000 years, the role of the male was defined as Hunter, Warrior, and Defender of the Tribe with the definite role as father and protector with laws that dealt harshly with those who fell short of tribal decrees.
Today much of this is subliminal, with added abstract coatings implied, like the notion of “The female side of the male’ (which has nothing to do with homosexuality) that applies to a nondescript behaviour formula of expectations that cannot be justified scientifically outside of the speculations and the agendas of specific interest groups.
For example, a generation grew up to the music of the Mighty Sparrow’s ‘Every now and then cuff dem down, deh love yuh long and deh love yuh strong.” Then we have all heard politicians use the term ”Yuh gon still get to beat yuh wife.” This term was used in 1992 with the change of government. Every young man with sisters has had his fights in defence of his female clan, most times on promptings from his mother. In the early 70s at Leno’s Shop at the corners of Cooper and James Streets, in defence of a cantankerous sister, a brother lost his life horribly. He was gutted and lighted afire by the two offending biological brothers his sister had identified.
After work at GRB during the late 70s, a group us went into the Globe cinema. The late ‘Bully’ Reid hinted to me that a couple further down in the seat was looking at me. Bully spoke hard enough for them to hear; I couldn’t make out their faces and forgot about them until intermission when I recognised the female to be someone whom I had attended school with and had no problem with.
But before I could approach her, they vanished. I later learnt that she and my problematic little sister had a fight. The fellow she was with got involve vocally, and I was supposed to kick him up – on a promise made by my sister. I could have been stabbed in the back, died without any notion in my final moments as to the why. Male abuse is a cultural problem reaching beyond so called modernised precept, and is currently handled as a Crusade rather than the issue it is.
I grew up in the Matriarchal group, so the nature of this article is based on that experience. A distraught friend visited me a few years ago to ask my opinion on a family matter, wherein his unemployed sisters who lived not too far had cultivated a habit of daily sending their children to have lunch at his home.
After a while his wife, recognising the weight on their resources, told them to come only on Saturday. His sisters and Mom were up in arms against him for not putting her in her place. No one questioned the wisdom of his wife’s actions.
He couldn’t rationalise that no explanation would have sufficed, that this was a misplaced right of entitlement that had outlived itself and was partly responsible for the chronic mythology that many fathers were delinquent and had inadequately provided for their children and even themselves while being economically connected to siblings in a domino effect as their surrogate father-elder brother.
I can remember going to pay for a loan my late mother had taken on her home for repairs at the Mortgage and Finance Bank in the 80s and was told by a friend at the Bank, ”You don’t own a house, but yuh paying loan on your Mother’s own.”
I had long moved on on my own, renting, but it never occurred to me to do otherwise from what I perceived as a duty. This is what a female colleague described as the feminine side. I disagreed, because I don’t know too many sisters in my family who would do that, and not take the house. So I had replied to my friend from the Bank: “Where would they live (meaning my mother and siblings) if I don’t do it?”
The male ego always thinks he has the time to look after self. The tribal mechanisms for harnessing individual pitfalls through group interception no longer exist in functioning terms. Today, the tribal hierarchy has become the state. Where did the isolation of the celebration of “Male-ness” begin? Does it lie in the declaration that males are not passing academic subjects with the equivalent numbers as females? Do the media imply that passes at the Industrial arts are not as flamboyant? I don’t see them splashed across the front pages of the papers or on the TV News.
Because we don’t have local popular culture imagery that celebrates Industrial arts, the male drop-out is gravitated towards the Cul-de-sac hustle of small time vending or crime. I know mothers who took their sons out of school early, to help support investing in their sisters. This is prevalent in large families; it happened in my family, in two generations that I can account for.
My mother once told me boys could always find something to do; and many others can relate to the sacrifice of the male.
The mythical first builder of cities was Nimrod, grandson of Ham, son of Kush. The masonry symbols of his trade are today engraved in the logo of the order of the FREEMASONS.
We must project the dignity of the builder, the scientific arts that envelope the majority of Male-ness as an honest stimulant for male self-esteem.

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