Carnival women

It may be just a subjective perception, but I always find that, around December, Trini women start to look better than usual. This phenomenon lasts into March, after which I find that women revert to their normal levels of attractiveness (which, for our women, is of course always above average). Since, like most Trini men, I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at women and since, unlike most Trini men, I try to be self-aware, I don’t think my perception is subjective. This is not a case of finding an observation to fit a theory: I made the observation first, and then started wondering why. At first I thought that it was just a matter of numbers: more women are out in public during the Xmas season, so the chances of seeing unusually attractive ones are simply greater. And that may be part of it, but I didn’t find this explanation adequate.

It seems to me that the proportion of attractive women increases around December and, if it was just numbers at Xmas time, I should have observed the opposite: after all, it is the older women out shopping whose numbers should increase most. So then I thought it might just be a matter of fashion: that women around Xmas naturally tend to dress more fashionably and wear more make-up. Except that, like most men, I don’t give two figs what a woman wears, once it looks sexy on her. (This is a point that women don’t grasp: they will wear whatever is in fashion, even if that fashion does not flatter them. Many women seem not to understand that, if they have thin-foot, they should not wear short skirts or, more contemporaneously, if their stomach spills hairily over their jeans waist, they should not wear navel-breakers.)

The more cosmetics explanation was even less likely. While make-up does deceive most men, I have always found women who wear little or no make-up to be more attractive than those who wear even skillfully applied masks. So I see right through the mascara — the only thing that “fools” me is eye-liner. My third idea — and the one which I think most likely — is that by December women are ready for Carnival. This has two effects: first, since going to the gym is now de rigueur for playing mas, the women look and feel better. The “feel” part is important. Picky as I am, there are times when I find that even ugly Trini women look good. I had no explanation for this observation till I read Survival of the Prettiest by cognitive psychologist Nancy Etcoff.

“Human seduction involves a subtle body language of invitations and rejections,” Etcoff writes. “Psychologist Monica Moore has catalogued the many signals that women use to convey their interest to men, signals that predict who will be approached ninety percent of the time. She says that the frequency and intensity of these gestures are better predictors of which women will be approached by men than their physical beauty. Women give darting glances, toss their heads, lick their lips, flip their hair, give coy smiles, and engage in solitary dances. They parade around a room with shoulders thrown back and hips swaying.” That is Trini women all over. Our middle-class women tend to be what I call “femaleists” (to distinguish them from feminists): they are independent without being aggressive, strong-willed without diminishing their femininity, intelligent without embracing a set of pseudo-intellectual shibboleths.

Our working-class women can be strong and feminine, too, but their vulnerable economic position necessarily distorts these traits. So the Carnival has this good effect on our women; but it is part of our culture that the effect should be seasonal. Being fit is a good in itself: but the motivation to get fit is, for our Carnival women, really a matter of status. A point Etcoff makes about high fashion struck me as being exactly applicable to the pretty mas: “Fashion is of the moment. The most expensive clothing makes its debut in a setting of live theatre: months of work culminate in a brief, dazzling display before an invited audience. Great clothes are all about making a drop-dead entrance. Contemporary fashions may allude to the far away, but they are always about the here and now, about seizing the moment and searing it into memory.”

So the beads-and-bikinis aspect of the pretty mas is not primarily a reflection of diminished creative capacity: it is an essential aspect of a mas band designed for status. The popularity of the original pretty mas band, Harts, lay in the fact that it was formed and patronised mainly by a traditional elite: so-called French Creoles. The main offshoot, Poison, refined and extended this, because Harts was a white people band whereas Poison was mixed-race: Afro hair but still fair-skinned. So playing in Poison became a sign of status: and the absurdly high prices, like the skimpy costumes, were a necessary part of what made the band such a huge success. But that very success diminished, at least a little, the status of playing in Poison: and fashion, by definition, is ephemeral.

The successor to Poison, Big Mike and Ian McKenzie’s now-defunct Legends, was predicated on another aspect of status: the fit body. “With the designers courting the masses, how can clothing reflect elite status, which should reflect rarity? What signifies status in a world of counterfeits?” asks Etcoff. “To figure out the answer, you have to realise that all the money in the world won’t make the high-fashion clothes fit most bodies…You may not be able to tell the rich person from the poor with their copy black dresses and imitation watches and handbags, but chances are the rich person will be a lot thinner. Chances are that the rich person will have a body sculpted through gym workouts, advice from personal trainers, liposuction, and possibly implants.” I realise that all this seems a lot of thought to put into the simple activity of scoping out women: but my greatest pleasures are thinking and sex — not necessarily in that order — so I thoroughly enjoy putting the two together.

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