The Tribune

By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett

We do not often discuss the male body or the gaze on the male body. Men are to be physically chiselled with endless abs, long muscles and large endowments. But what happens if this is not who or what we are?

We build up so many young people to think this is normal and masculine. This is problematic, especially today with the power of social media to shame and to embarrass, particularly through oversharing nudity that is often not meant to be consumed by the masses but is so commodified and apparently thought so little of that people send it out without contemplating the its potential damages. We are creating seriously damaged young men who are not able to speak about or identify with their bodies because we have made them spaces of silence and violence.

We tend more often to talk about men and violence or underperforming males, and we usually discuss a particular socio-economic group when we do this, yet we miss the class of it.

We also do not think about the ways in which violence is visited on male bodies on a daily basis. This column picks up from where the last one left off, discussing an exhibition at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (NAGB), but also how art can be a tool to work against violence and to re-wire young people who are traumatised by a history of violence, disempowerment, dispossession and social exclusion.

In the Double Dutch "Of Skin and Sand" by Edrin Symonette and Leasho Johnson viewers are presented a varied yet open imagery of sexuality, masculinity and nudity/the body. The artists use their artistic practice to bring to light images and ideas of masculinity that seek to work against the common paternalist, patriarchal image of man as violent head of household who is obeyed without question, even when he is wrong, and who uses coercion and physical force to assert his domination because this is what he has been taught, the lessons have been internalised. Men can do nothing other than behave physically, or with anger and sexual innuendo. This exposes many men to a life of social exclusion and disenfranchisement, not to mention physical, mental and emotional disassociation.

As a part of colonisation we tend to think of and focus on women and the female object, but we ignore the power deployed to control men and their masculinity. We ignore how the postcolonial state resends the message that young, working class men who are minimally educated are gigolos, or 'jineteros' in Cuba, and 'sanky pankys' in Santo Domingo.

The power inequality visited on Caribbean youth and the violent reassertion of popular images of female and/or male sexuality as being the fullest extent of personal achievement, is damning. At the same time, given the lack of attention paid to really empowering images of youth or the work needing to be done of unpacking the violent, sexualised, savage image of black masculinity, they are never able to talk. Young men are only empowered by their penis, which, according to myth, must be 12 inches or so and is the only thing they have going for them. Working with these images, we must show young men that they are more than violent sexual predators. The media can help with this, too. The above mentioned exhibition provides a springboard to be able to talk about masculinity and male sexuality. However, we are working against a powerful silence from history and religion.

It is a well-known thought that once the colonised countries received independence from the colonial power, they were free and able to chart a course of their own design. Yet we say nothing of the reality that this has proven to be false. As soon as colonisation ended there may have been a brief period where there seemed to be black empowerment, but that soon shifted drastically. The space has remained colonised because it continues to serve as a place where sexual adventures are consumed or where gangsters run wild. The images of men and boys deployed by the administration is as damaging as those deployed by the tourist agenda. The ideology of male sexuality as the end all and be all is not only destructive, as discussed in my last article, but destabalising of a nation attempting to create an empowered population where most, if not all, men can participate in the democracy. Ironically, democracy has also sought to categorically sideline many young boys through its rendering of them as violent, troublesome boys who can do nothing. When we teach boys they can do more than smoke dope, behave violently, dominate women, and other younger or smaller males, we improve our future.

When direct colonialism ended indirect or neocolonialism began

Neil Lazarus discusses this thoroughly in "The Postcolonial Unconscious". What this piece focuses on is the commodification and consumption of the male body through tourism and its language and imaging, as well as the Bahamian obsession with ignoring male psyche except as it is deeply sexualised and so deeply problematised because the language we use refuses to engage with the reality that men are consumed by tourism, that there exist seriously complex issues around agency and empowerment or better said disempowerment through supposed agency.

Tourism creates a market based on 19th century stereotypes that render the male as a mere phallus. If a man is black, as is typified of the postcolonial space, he is rendered silent and the image deployed is one of a penis waiting to be used. Of course, this images retains its power today. In fact, because we are so loathe to discuss male sexuality, expect to say that man does breed plenty woman, we are creating generations of young men who fall victim to this stereotype and are becoming consumed by the dilemma of disempowerment. We are going to find, given the proliferation of sexual tourism, the consumption of young men and women through tourism and the reduction of human to their sexual organs, that sexual transmitted infections are going to increase, as they did in earlier periods.

Space is always created according to the overarching ideology of the time. In the work of David Harvey and Edward Soja they show how spaces are produced and the importance of spacial justice. How does this work with gender and understanding masculinity?

We teach young boys that it is good to be violent and to use violence against young women; this is the only way you can be. We also produce them to understand that they are in charge without ever equipping them with any empowering tools, not even as much as an education. Then we refuse to speak to them about their bodies, about sex and about sexually transmitted infections. We are then surprised when we have serious problems with the resurgence of powerful STIs such as syphilis and gonorrhea, for example.

The use of Caribbean bodies for pleasure results in the large-scale increase of STIs. Although the black body gets blamed for being diseased, and this is especially true for the male body, the reality is that tourism is one of the most active and powerful vectors of disease and infection transfer. And that usually flows from West to us, not the other way around. So we are really facing two serious national problems, violence in the form of gangs and male disaffection and disassociation through failure and social exclusion, and disease through 'sexploitation' that is "pleasurable".

When we force people into unhealthy and unsupported spaces where their bodies become occupied territory reduced to a space of sexual interaction and nothing more, we refuse to allow them to become full citizens. We also create a serious national health problem. It is not only commendable, though only a small start, that these young men discuss masculinity in such a way and that they demonstrate that we do not own our bodies, much like Harvey Soja and others point out, we inhabit spaces that are controlled or predetermined by the old colonial mores that function in this neocolonial framework because we are silenced by conservatism and reaction to and against real empowering progress.

Ignorance, and sexual and human ignorance, can only serve to make the country less able to grow and prosper nationally. We like to say that we empower young men, but in reality the silence around victimisation, sexuality, sex and masculinity and violence really only renders them serious victims to elite power structures that function from without. We must talk about what young people really are doing, the problems they really have, their real bodies, and not the silly things we think of them as being and doing. We are burying our heads in the sand, and much like with the sea levels rising, the power and the impact of the denial is going to be devastating. Our silence creates a national health emergency waiting to explode.

• For questions and comments e-mail bennettbethell@gmail.com