The Tribune

By DR IAN BETHELL-BENNETT

Let’s talk about the culture of homes with no income, only an unemployed mother, no father but many baby daddies

We are quick to criticise people for their efforts to combat social and economic problems because we see their strategies as being unacceptable, yet we come up with no alternative strategies.

We simply stand back through mud and then wait for someone else to provide alternatives. When it comes to women-headed households where there are no fathers actively involved, this has become a common factor in the Bahamian socio-cultural landscape for centuries. However, culturally, the country has shifted towards a more misogynistic structure where women and men are defined in very narrow, usually sexual and reproductive terms.

Defining gendered

roles

We define men by their ability to breed. As has been repeatedly underscored here, men can sire offspring, but are never taught to be responsible for life.

They are, in fact, taught that they need not do anything other than reproduce themselves; it is a woman’s responsibility to take care of children. This cultural trend has deepened.

We teach men that they are not responsible for their actions nor do they need to be actively involved with family. They are simply donors of semen then they are gone.

Women are told that they are only women once they have children. They are encouraged to have children with popular guys.

This popularity means that these men have more than one or two or three other women already, and the other woman who is interested in them understands that she is simply just another number.

We do not create young women with real sense of self-worth. Their self-worth is tied to their reproductive capacity and being used for cash or a thigh snack. They are but children and are too involved in being young to care about raising babies.

This has become more commonplace nowadays than in the past. Girls, as much as boys, are assigned sexualised roles from young. Levels of sexual abuse are high as is sexual exploitation; they must use their bodies to bring in money, according to mother.

Some girls are encouraged to have children by different men because that way they can receive money from each baby daddy. However, many of those baby daddies don’t work. Some of them are dealers, and these are the more popular ones because they are cash rich and outgoing, they dress well too and have a nice car. These are qualities we say make a successful man. It does not matter how he gets the money. What happens when baby daddy dies in a shootout?

We have young women with a bunch of children with different men. The understanding is that this is a lucrative form of income generation. We have young men who cannot make money legally, but are supposed to pay baby mudders for they chiren. This trend has worsened and it is following the US popular/bling culture model of defining women as hoes and men as thugs. Public figures build on this image.

Violence and

exploitation

We have moved away from public figures who carry themselves with self-respect and dignity to persons who must meet the public where they are. They get down in the gutter, but are apparently unable to raise the level of conversation after that.

Their behaviour is like the irresponsible men they openly condemn in public, but who they promote because of their public display of irresponsible hypermasculinity. Many of these public figures may be able to ascend form the gutter, but they have encouraged an entire subgroup of youth to understand that this is the only kind of behaviour that is necessary: I call you sissy, I tell you bout your %$#@ and I look better than you. If push comes to shove, I jook you, you die; I is more man dan you. But I know de rule a de jungle/road, and I will die as soon as one a your boys get to me.

The cycle of violence continues. Public figures encourage this thug life. The young men who see this as their way to riches do not see that there is some serious play acting, and that there are other sides to the story. Dey gat three or four gyals, and dey gat babies wid dese gyals, just like the public figures who go into their neighbourhoods and form liaisons wid young gyals dere.

The public figures only make short visits to what they call the ghetto, because it’s spicy, these dudes live there and they always cuttin’ movie, and then they die. You disrespec me, I kill you. Respec!

The levels of exposure to violet crime, violent popular culture, games and music were unknown prior to the proliferation of cable and satellite. The internet has also fed into an already troubled tough, cash-rich identity that has little future, but lives in the now. As the models of irresponsible hypermasculine behaviour go for men, so too they go for women. The fight to bring integrity and respect back into daily life is very real.

National development

We so often sling mud at those who make suggestions. Sometimes their suggestions may not be the best, but they bring us to a place where we can begin to grapple with some of our serious social problems that ultimately impact the socio-economic and political stability of the nation.

Historically, there have always been women-headed homes where men had disappeared from the scene. There were homes with 15 or 20 children. There were homes where a woman had children with different men. But for the most part, those families had integrity and children were taught self-respect and self-regard, they were taught to work, bring in whatever honest money they could, and not to beg on the side of the road.

Life was not about exposing all one’s dirty laundry in the most public and vulgar way possible and rubbing everyone’s nose in it. Today, teenage pregnancy may be on the decline, but the number of female-headed households where multiple males lay their heads from time to time or leave their stain is growing. The country needs to do something about the culture of which we wish not to speak.

We must begin to face the facts and not hide behind the mud. Violence against women, sexualised violence, prostitution and irresponsible behaviour much like the young men who stand by and decide to rape tourist girls because they can, are serious developmental challenges that are not government’s problem, but everyone’s responsibility.

• bethellbennett@gmail.com