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UWI TODAY
– SUNDAY 22 JANUARY, 2017
Ending rape culture is our issue
because men are
responsible for freeing men from gender ideals of
dominance and control through violence.
This was the central theme of a workshop held in
commemoration of International Men’s Day (IMD),
observed worldwide on November 19, and at the
IGDS/Canada Hall workshop, Red Card Rape Culture.
The workshop brought young men from 10
CARICOM countries, all living on the St Augustine
Campus, into a conversationmeant to cross the region.
This was just one of more needed in the de-patriarchal
movement to break systems of male domination over
women.
For all of us in the room with the Canada Hall
men, eager to reason and engage as young men do,
it was important to build commitment to the ideal
man. Participants were asked to produce messages
that defined their own sense of men’s responsibility.
The posters read:
A man is like a taxi driver,
he knows when to stop
Women should not live in fear,
how she’s dressed does not mean yes
If she says no, get up and go
No doesn’t mean yes
These messages were distributed across social
media and in posters around the campus as part of the
goal of transforming masculinities and campus life.
As a university, we house the minds of emerging
Caribbean leaders, especially young men who will
assume critical leadership roles and status in the
future. In our thrust, we must offer an education that
can also advance a pedagogy of unlearning, especially
in relation to toxic masculinity, as part of masculine
transformation in order to redefine the terms in new
ways.
REFLECTION
The Ideal Man
B Y A M Í L C A R S A N A T A N
Amílcar Sanatan is a Research Assistant at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, St Augustine Campus
In an earlier phase of our independence, we
turned to the larger than life male figures of elite
Caribbean leadership for self-definition; the “best
and the brightest” among us to steer the direction of
our societies. The fact is that ‘one-manism,’ messianic
and authoritarian leadership that bear striking
resemblances to the colonial ruling style we hoped to
have banished away, still plague us.
Among populations, there is a persistent feeling
that political leadership has failed us. There is
greater push-back against the notion of a strong-
man leader, hammering through weak institutions
undemocratically.
With social media, there is even a greater push-
back against misogynist utterances and language that
blame women for rape. Gender has been at the heart
of the political and cultural debates of our time and
Caribbean voices have been speaking out.Women have
always been at the forefront of these movements but
male centred writings of history have ways of keeping
them in the backroom.
The growing visibility of women in middle
management, university undergraduate enrolment and
career advances in some traditionallymale-dominated
sectors may give us the sense of arrival at the point
of gender equality. While these structural changes
have led to more women accessing social status and
economic power in formations, they are the direct
result of women and activists’ advocacy for over three
decades.
A number of men’s rights movements and
male action groups have sprung up in response to
the increasing visibility of women and articulate a
counterproductive anti-feminist politics. The battle of
the sexes is war often created on the terms of men who
believe that human dignity, justice and the economy
are made up of scarce resources. It is for precisely this
reason thatThe UWI must engage in public debates on
culture and the economy to interrogate the ideological
underpinnings in policy and popular discourses.
How can we reimagine and redefine masculinity
away from ideals of dominance, violence and
control and closer to care, commitment and critical
confidence? The ideal man is a leader committed to
social and gender justice. He exercises leadership in
his life and the decisions he makes to improve the
well-being of others, not only himself. A key attribute
of this man is his ability to determine his definition
of masculinity and the man he wants to be. When
concerned citizens sit in a room and think about the
future of the region, onemight ask, “Whowill make the
Caribbean a better place?” “That man is one of them.”
That is what it means to be the ideal man.
As a feminist, I maintain that addressing men’s
needs and gender equality work are not oppositional
projects. IMD provides an optimal moment each year
formen to reflect and raise their political consciousness
about their duty to rebel against oppressions that
imprison men and women and transform these
inequalities to promote a more just society.
Our destiny will not be determined by our
economic situation, GDP growth rates or the ability
to attract currency from geographies far away. It is our
intellectual and cultural independence that will build
our Caribbean civilization.
