The Tribune

By DR IAN BETHELL-BENNETT

In class recently, I was asked why, in my last piece on Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan’s work, “The Red Thread Cycle”, I had not offered solutions to the problem of rape, other than to say that policing did not provide the solution. So I have agreed to show how we encourage young men to become misogynists through the way we insist they build a themselves up against a flawed image of what masculinity can or should be.

Recipe for making a good misogynist:

• 15 bitter parts telling him he is king, no matter what

• 10 sour parts telling a young man he can do whatever he wants

• 10 sweet parts telling a young man he can take whatever he wants

• 10 salty parts telling a young man he is better than anyone else

• 10 peppery parts telling him he needs learn nothing or learn to do nothing to survive

• 20 spicy parts telling him that women do not count

• 30 fatty parts insisting that he need do nothing in the home and that any woman who sleeps with should be happy to have him

• A large scoop of insisting that he has the power over every other being

• An oversized measure of irresponsibility

• A shovel full of ‘man is the head of woman’ and no questioning can be accepted

• A tablespoon or pot spoon of we tell him that children belong to their mother and that he need not deal with them

• A cup of we tell him that he is superior to all women

• One gallon of we insist that his mother is like Mary, the Virgin Mother, even though she beats him to within an inch of his life and then tells him to man up or he will be no good at anything

These ingredients create blind beasts.

When we create young men who cannot read, write, think critically, add or subtract, work for themselves or anyone else, because we tell them they too good for that, we create angry misogynists.

We build failure, and failure has no place within the construct of hypermasculinity we culturally insist on. We set them up and we then say “you jus like ya no good pa”; bam! And dey angry and want to fight.

Who will they take this violence out on?

We create rapists and women beaters when we tell men dey is king.

King don’ be rule by no body

King is king and dat is dat.

Yet he can do nothing to be king. Failure!

We then tell these men that they cannot let women earn more, do more, be more than they are. Bam! Dey vex and blows flyin.

Where does this fit in with my last on anti-rape article?

Simply put, we create men who cannot function in the world, and we make them believe that everyone, every woman must bow and scrape to them. Only, no one will.

This creates a toxic or hypermasculinity because the foundation on which they base their identity is false. They have nothing to offer anyone. And worse, they can express nothing other than anger.

Patriarchy and hypermasculinity harm men and women but is often encouraged by women. These are the same women who blame their daughters when their sons in law beat them.

We add to all of this by insisting that a woman is property and owned by this man who has been set up for failure and so reacts with violence whenever his ‘masculinity’ is challenged. Now we have a perfect five gallons of overflowing toxic masculinity. Policing does not solve endemic psycho-social, emotional, socio-economic problems, it only aggravates the anger.