Cat calls and locker room talk

We should all be pleased that her challenge made the conventional and the social media, and put this ongoing ugly issue in front of us—where it belongs. Her video should be used by the police to track and arrest the perpetrators, for there are laws against this sort of harassment.

“Sooting”, cat calling, insulting, humiliating and degrading our women have long been at epidemic levels in our country. There is no redeeming feature to this appalling humiliation of our mostly young women. And it gets worse when the nasty epithets are laced with racist diatribe. We have pretended for too long that this humiliation is something our young women must continue to endure.

But thanks to one young lady and her “fight back” against these louts, there is a rising wave of objection, and a willingness to punish the perpetrators.

Because she had the courage to stand and record them she has struck a chord which is resonating among most of our women and a few of our men.

The deeper tragedy of this disgusting behaviour to which too many of our young men are addicted is that the women eventually recover, but the young men do not. They grow old to become nasty, hapless disgusting old men, just like Donald Trump. I mean, how can young men who do nothing but humiliate and insult women they could never hope to impress, far less “acquire”, ever grow up to a position where they could bond with a woman and raise a family? Well, they cannot, and certainly they do not. Oh, they may impregnate some underage girl, or force themselves on some others (and the word for that is Rape!) never staying around to find out if they too are “making baby” for them.

But what do they mature into? They become adults with the inability to respect others, to share empathy, to leave any sort of legacy at all. Their abuse is their mantra to hide from themselves.

Even among the most primitive of peoples, the concept of “manhood” is known and accepted by all. All men work, whether at hunting, farming, building shelters and taking responsibility, like raising and educating the young. Here in our land, those primitive concepts—actually they are the foundations of Civilization—have been cast aside by our young men.

They have regressed into a specie which probably could not survive without their abused women feeding and clothing them. They cannot work, farm or hunt.

Can you even begin to truly understand the hopelessness of these young men? A hopelessness that they will never understand, even as it envelopes them like a poisoned cloud, leaving them to writhe on street corners abusing the women they hate. They hate the women, even the women of their own communities, because the women are moving on, moving up, rising above the tirades of insults hurled their way by those who will get nowhere.

And this nastiness was given some credence recently by a candidate for the presidency of the United States.

Donald Trump has the support of millions of Americans, and he carries this verbal abuse to its physical state, boasting that because he is well-known he just walks up to young women and “grabs them by their .........”! (his words, not mine).

To those whom he offended he said it was just “locker room talk”. But he boasted that he actually grabbed them as stated above, and kissed them—popping mints into his mouth to diminish his halitosis. And that is “lock-up talk”, not locker room talk. A surprising number of Trinis posted on facebook that they did not find Trump’s behaviour offensive, it was just “locker room talk”. But they find that the equally ugly talk of our local street louts to be highly offensive.

As would the millions of Americans, including women, if our street louts even suggested a grab at private parts. Different strokes? I include this just to show how easily we can sanitize disgusting behaviour.

Is it OK for Trump and his kind to behave thus, but our louts are disgusting? Well, let America deal with their own garbage if they can, we must never allow that sort of talk or action to become acceptable here.

If it is disgusting when directed at your wife, sister or daughter, then it is disgusting wherever it is directed.

It is time to excise this sort of behaviour in our land. We must expose, shame, arrest and prosecute the perpetrators wherever the abuse occurs. And it requires the commitment of all of us to attack and remove this degrading curse from our lives.