COUNTRYMAN: Boys will be boys – hopefully!

Oct 18, 2015 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

This land, my Guyana El Dorado, has produced several outstanding citizens over the years – men and women of great substance. Men looked and acted like men; women like women. The distinction seemed clear, and men in particular generally took a great deal of pride in tastefully expressing their manliness. Now, a number of numbing questions are arising as to our understanding and appreciation of gender and human sexuality.

Is the male population dwindling in Guyana; and in the world? Are male-female gender distinctions becoming more blurred by the day? What does it mean to be truly one or the other, and is that even a valid question? The answer to the first one is a simple ‘No’ although many people may be inclined to disagree; however the answers to the others are not so unambiguous, and may help determine the truth of the first.

Decades ago, the Mighty Sparrow observed in calypso, “20 woman to one man in New York; a man like a piece ‘o’ gold anywhere he walk” Not so, then or now, in New York or anywhere else. According to official internet stats, by the middle of 2015 there were roughly 3.7 billion human beings on our planet (give or take a million or two) and of that number there are about 50,000,000 more men than women.

So the male population isn’t dwindling (as many women seem to think) but that creature called the traditional male may be. I now have to wonder as to what criteria are being used to categorize someone as male or female, the only two labels used by the world population statisticians I checked out. The answer may not be as obvious as the figures suggest.

They used to say a good man is hard to find, but women are now substituting ‘good’ with ‘real’, as in heterosexual, virile, chivalrous and maybe committed to a monogamous relationship. But again what does that mean in today’s world of the transgender, transsexual, pansexual and androgynous ‘man’? These are individuals who appear to have an issue with gender identity and gender expression that do not seem to conform to the given sex at birth.

My generation in the nineteen sixties and seventies grew up with the phenomenon of the Auntie Man (or is it anti-man) who was more an object of bemused curiosity than anything else. As children, we heard whispered conversations among adults about ‘mafredites’ (hermaphrodites) and occasionally about men who liked to dress up as women. Through my eyes, these were little more than quaint notions about the diversity of the human population and the colourful expression of local culture.

As I swept into adulthood these notions took on a more disturbing tone. The idea of abnormality, as well as feelings of revulsion, began to replace earlier innocent thoughts, as the black-and-white of gender and sexuality spread to numerous shades of grey. Men were not always men, and the hackneyed ‘boys will be boys’ didn’t seem so straightforward anymore. It looked like a boy could actually be a girl! And the other way round.

A hilarious episode involving a friend of mine in the late early seventies actually got me thinking and acting in a much more circumspect manner about this idea.

My friend and I partied almost every Saturday night. Whizzing around on his P50 motorcycle, invited or not, we frequented numerous bottle fetes, wedding receptions and birthday parties, at which our primary concern was ‘sharking’ for dances with attractive girls. One Saturday night we tried ‘pope’ a party in Albouystown; well my friend did. He went in to check things out while I waited on the motorcycle.

He stayed for about ten minutes before he came rushing out, flustered and angry. It seemed he was dancing with a particularly attractive young woman, ‘fine-wining’ in glorious ecstasy, when he felt something prodding a part of his lower anatomy – something the ‘girl’ possessed that was hard, not soft and desirable. He stammered out a couple of expletives before jumping on the P50 and scooting away from the scene of his embarrassment. I was choking with laughter.

As I grew older however, I started experiencing greater understanding, and some degree of sympathy, for people, especially young men and women, who struggled with their gender, and their sexuality. In doing so I swam against the tide of what I guess was the then conventional wisdom that men were indeed men, but acted like women when the fancy took them, or did so for attention and some kind of perverse popularity.

I know many people disagree with this idea, but I understand and accept that a relatively large number of persons are born with bodies and external genitalia that do not seem to match the hormonal activity which defines later gender/sexual behaviour; in other words boys acting like girls and vice versa. To what extent this anomaly influences such behaviour is a subject for the experts. However it is generally agreed that nurture and certain life experiences may also have a powerful influence.

Interestingly, the determination of the sex of a foetus in the womb is not as straightforward as one may think. Both male and female organs start out as identical tubercles which show how remarkably similar the genesis of both is. They only begin to differentiate with the help of male and female hormones. So what happens if something goes wrong at that point? You may end up with ‘guevedoces’ – girls, in the Dominican Republic, who become boys at puberty; the word literally translates as ‘penis at age 12’.

According to medical research it is a rare genetic disorder caused by a missing enzyme which prevents a specific male sex hormone from triggering the development of the male organ. It reportedly only affects girls in a particular village in that nation, which may point to a cultural factor such as inbreeding. The point though is that sex determination and gender expression are not to be necessarily taken for granted, or at face value.

The culture aspect also relates to a troubling phenomenon I have observed here, and in The Bahamas. In the latter, it was the ubiquitous boy-to-boy taunt of ‘You like man!’ which was meant to suggest a same-sex proclivity. That island nation supposedly has a relatively high percentage of gay and bisexual men. But what I’ve observed here in Guyana is even more troubling.

Today I see and hear young boys on the streets saying things to one another that would have cost them a fine cut-tail two short generations ago. I’m talking about boys between the ages of four and ten throwing around the ‘B’ word (Bu***r) in the most casual manner, and alternately with the most vulgar connotation. Now it seems to me that, not knowing any better, hundreds of boys with little family stability, adult supervision, male authority figure, and education, will grow up assuming the ‘B’ thing is no big deal; maybe fashionable or even macho, in a country where it is still illegal.

Adults choose their lifestyles. Gender identification and sexual preference are theirs, and the law increasingly respects and protects those choices within the legal ambit. Young boys and girls, vulnerable and impressionable, have always been targets of adult lust covering the entire range of sexual behaviour.

Children are inclined to fool around and to naturally explore their sexuality with each other in a muddle of curiosity. It is a part of growing up. But when adult and ‘perverse’ notions of sexual and gender expression creep into this ‘child’s play’ things get more confusing; sometimes traumatic. They don’t need the added confusion of social permissiveness that allows and often forces them into seemingly limitless sexual options. That’s for us adults.

Let children enjoy and explore their childhood under responsible adult supervision, but with minimal adult ‘interference’. And to reiterate a main point of this article, for God’s sake, let boys be boys!

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