Female facts

I don’t much care for travelling, but I’ve gotten around the world a bit. This is only because most of my trips were paid for by other people. As a youth, I went to Canada and Grenada sponsored by my parents. As an adult, thanks mostly to my being a writer, I’ve had the opportunity to travel freeco to India, Ghana, Germany, America and, within the Caribbean, Jamaica and Barbados. But it was when I went to Canada at 18 years of age that I made the observation that has since been repeated in every country I’ve visited: no place has as high a proportion of attractive women as Trinidad. Of course, I’ve not been to Thailand.

Canada surprised me, because I’d gone up there young and brainwashed by all the TV images of gorgeous white women: and here was the real world of fat, pasty-faced girls walking through the malls in shorts. The best-looking females I saw in the whole month I was there were my own three cousins. But, nine years later, Germany was the worst: I was there for two weeks and went to four cities, and in all that time and space I saw not one female rear that wasn’t as flat as a pancake. On the way back, the plane stopped off in Antigua and I went into the airport and there was this red girl with great legs holding up a sign: just the sight of her made me feel like I’d taken a long cool drink in the middle of the desert. So, thanks to my travels, I have a deepened appreciation of the beauty of Trinidadian women. Mind you, I doubt that our high proportion of nice women has any admirable root. The usual explanation is our racial mixtures, but I think this is a secondary factor: the mixed population is only about 20 percent and the proportion of good-looking Indo and Afro females is also very high. If anything, the attractiveness of Trini women is probably rooted in the sharp inequities of our jagged history, which first of all culled unhealthy stock from the populace and which then allowed a few powerful men to monopolise many women of above-average physical attributes, who then produced more attractive daughters who repeated the cycle.

If this is so, then it may be that as our society becomes more egalitarian, our women will become plainer. But it seems to me that the kind of women we have in Trinidad must affect our social mores in significant ways. Because I don’t like Trini women just because of their physical attributes: I also like them because a lot of our women are what I call “femaleists” — ie independent in spirit but not edgy about it and, unlike a certain brand of feminist, preserving a genuine affection for men (undeserving though we might be). Indeed, I wasn’t at all surprised when I read that women with strong feminist views are less likely to be satisfied with their relationships, both in general and with respect to their sex lives. According to psychologist Glen D. Wilson, author of The Science of Love, “They tended to have sex less frequently than more traditional women and were more likely to use confrontation than accommodation when there was conflict with a partner. Interestingly, however, the most highly traditional, ‘domestic’ women, who used emotional manipulation in conflict situations, were also more likely to say they were unhappy in marriage.” It would be an interesting project for any budding anthropologist to examine how Trini women affect our society. (A related digression: the phenomenon known as “mate-guarding” in humans was investigated and documented right here in Trinidad by an American anthropologist named Mark Flinn - my thanks to Stephen Smith for providing me with this titbit.) But a few female facts I’ve come across in my readings on the topic may provide some useful guidelines for related projects.

Let’s start with basic biology: psychologist Devendra Singh discovered that in all cultures women with a low waist-to hip ratio, of 0.7 of less (e.g. 24-inch waist, 36-inch hips) are considered more attractive. Women with this ratio, and women with more symmetric breasts, tend to be more fertile. So wouldn’t it be interesting to measure Trini women and see if my subjective perception of their above-average looks can be objectively confirmed? And, since psychologists have noted that narcissistic or self-absorbed women are more likely to be unfaithful, is there a correlation between Trini women’s looks and that perennially fascinating topic of horn? Concomitantly, surveys show that in all cultures women place a higher value on the earning power, ambition and status of prospective mates than men do on women. So, contrary to popular belief, women are not the more romantic sex. Many studies show that they are, in fact, more practical in their approach to relationships. Women are more likely than men to take the initiative when it comes to ending a relationship. Below the age of 20, women fall in love earlier and more often than men; past this age, men fall in love more easily and women fall out of love sooner. The higher the income and education of the woman, the higher her standards for a mate. So does this impact on the number of professional women in the country who are single and/or the availability of outside women?

Extending the thought, the anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan found that women who perceive men in general as pursuing no-obligation sex are more likely to wear provocative clothes and have sex more often than women who see men as generally willing to invest in offspring. Psychologist Anthony Walsh also found that women who perceive themselves as less attractive (whether they are in fact so or not) tend to have more sex partners. So is this one explanation of the differences in marriage rates between the two main ethnic groups in our society? And what is the relationship between poverty and culture in this regard? But here’s a twist: if we’re going to examine family structure and breakdown, then it may be more important to look at grandmothers rather than fathers. Human beings are one of only two species which have grandparents (the other is killer whales), so it appears that grandmothers are a distinct evolutionary category. Here’s the interesting fact: surveys among Gambians, Bengalis and Japanese show that having a grandmother significantly improves a child’s chances of survival, sometimes even more so than the presence of a father. So, if the family is experiencing a breakdown in Laventille, is it because of the absence of fathers or the absence of grandmothers? If any or all of these questions can be answered, we would gain some fundamental insights into our society. In the meantime, I will continue to do my own informal investigations into Trini women. After all, that’s my obligation as a writer, and it is the answer I most often give when people ask me why, being a writer, I have stayed in this small place.

E-mail:kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh