The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

The island seemed to stop on Sunday to celebrate Father’s Day. But what are we really celebrating? Are we celebrating the kind of fatherhood that is taught in society where young men are encouraged to reproduce themselves without thought of maintaining or supporting woman, child or brood?

They are encouraged by their mothers to show ‘dey is man and bring dem some pretty babies’, but not to be concerned about keeping children.

Ironically, daughters are strongly discouraged from having babies outside of marriage until they can look after them. Education first, babies later. Again, interestingly enough, it benefits women more to have children when they are unmarried because they do not have to be burdened by an unproductive male depending on them to produce for him as well as for the children.

Socially our gender constructs are very interesting. We talk about men running the public sphere, yet many men are never taught how to be responsible or productive.

Masculinity means that they should smoke weed all day and if they can’t function at work, well too bad, they ain’t getting paid enough anyhow!

The social development of our country has fallen into chaos. We encourage our men not to function. It shows strength to be able to drink all day and still stand and on the job. If you drink and function, that’s even better. So by noon, many male employees are already smelling like rum, their eyes bloodshot or glassy, and they can hardly carry on a sensible conversation in a normal tone. To be a man is to be hard drinking, even if you can’t afford it.

It’s cool to be a womaniser who cannot afford to support any of the women or children. Society celebrates this kind of character. We also value the kind of man who fights easily and violently with any other man who seemingly challenges his masculinity; that challenge can come in as simple a form as stepping on someone’s shoe.

That can cause such offence that someone can lose their life for it. ‘Stealing’ a man’s woman, because you know, we tell these young fellows that they own women once they go out with them once. Your woman is your property! We create the expectation that no woman can ever deny a man’s advances nor can she ever break up with him. She is his. When they do break up, he can threaten her, and he can even shoot or kill the man she is has taken up with after their relationship ends. So society condones a certain understanding that promotes this code of behaviour. Of course, music and other forms of popular culture also idolise this kind of masculine and feminine ethos.

In Dr Ian Strachan’s recently staged play, “Gun Boys Rhapsody”, many of the young men live by these cultural understandings. They fear nothing because they have nothing to lose.

The bad boy is celebrated, loved and feared. He has no-good father and his mother does all she can to make him into a man who is respected by society. That respect only comes from being a thug.

The role models in the community are all the same – tough, hard-drinking, drug-pushing, gun-toting, cussing, womanising misogynists who have no time for the softness of education.

Once these young men are born into a single mother-headed household in a particular part town with a certain earning power, the outcome is all but guaranteed.

They are going to fall in line with the patterns of masculinity in their neighbourhood and before they are 12. They will be co-opted by that structure that is seen in the streets. These are the same boys the government argues are destabilising the country. Yet they provide those young boys with no other options. They send them serious lip service, but no allowance is made for their social and economic limitations. As far as many politicians argue publicly, they are worth nothing. However, the politicians’ behaviour is what they are often duplicating. Whose sons are these?

We talk about fatherhood, yet many of the fathers we are told to admire are empty of any kind of commitment to family.

They may visit form time to time, or tell their sons that they will be there to pick them up on their birthdays, so their young sons get dressed and wait, expectation dissipating into hurt which then grows into anger and eventually forms disaffection and social disassociation.

They can cut themselves off from humanity because they have become weapons of destruction through all the hurt and rejection they have faced in their lives. And much of this is due to those very same fathers of whom we speak of so highly.

Dr Strachan’s play made us look at our social chaos and our misogynistic structure, but what next? What can we do to change this? One thing we can do is to demand more of fathers. These damaged young boys are brought up in single mother-headed households where men are hated except for what they can provide, and women are abusive because they are so angry and tired. They have no time to be mothers to children because they are at work all day and night, but then they value the same kind of masculine behaviour they claim they detest.

The system is broken; the structures are only replicating the same kind of behaviour and social chaos the politicians blame the people for. Many of those same politicians serve as fathers and role models to many of those same thugs and murderers they claim to despise, but they do nothing to change the roles they play in their lives. Real fathers are becoming an endangered species. The reality of Father’s Day is that a great deal of it is celebrating empty and destructive behaviour, and tough damaged masculinity that passes for engaged fatherhood.

• bethellbennett@gmail.com