A Wray of Light into Ideas of Male Entitlement
By Corey Gilkes
May 15, 2014
How nobody eh pick up on this one, jred? Or maybe someone did and I jes eh see it. So much things going on eh, I almost forget this gem of an article that came out in the Jamaican Gleaner on March 30th. I had to read it several times just to make sure the writer, one Milton Wray, wasn't using irony – a dying skill in vocabulary of late I gather.
The good Mr Wray, in an article titled "Are Women Natural Leaders?" was commenting on the vexing issue of gender equality. Now for those who believe subjects like history has no importance, this article is proof that for Caribbean people seeking to create what some call a Caribbean civilisation, history, structured to focus on the advancement of humanity, should be compulsory if even only up to secondary level – so articles like this one will not be written again because in 2014 we can really do without such ignorance.
Essentially, according to the article, society is in the decadent mess that it's in because women want gender equality. Reading through the article, one gets the impression that in the mind of Mr Wray, once women are sent back to their rightful place in the home to rear children and defer to men's authority and acknowledge the legitimacy of men's (read public) spaces, all will be well with the world. Throughout, one detects an air of entitlement affected by challenges by women. One will be forgiven for wondering if the many advances in human and women's rights, if the many, many developments and discoveries in biblical scholarship and archaeology occurred in a different universe in which the Caribbean simply does not exist or have access to.
Of course, that's not totally fair since the level of chauvinism, misogyny and flat out stupidity seen in this article is very much present in fundamentalist Muslim and Hindu regions and all across the bible belt of the US – where most Caribbean evangelical Christians orient their religious ideas. Ironically, as I read the article, even though the writer made some references to biblical authority, almost every single thing he said seemed to mirror the words of the misogynist philosophers of ancient pagan Greece and Rome who influenced the writers of that Old and New Testament – yet they pontificate with bible in hand that the world is becoming decadent because people turned away from the "living god" and participating in pagan, hedonism and carnality.
Full article:
http://www.trinicenter.com/Gilkes/2014/1505.htm
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