#WeToo? It will not work with TT males

THE EDITOR: Whatever is sensational and life-changing in the First World is not easily replicated in a Third World setting.

I sensed the excitement of a prominent legal lady being interviewed about sexual harassment in TT. She was happily, so it would seem, anticipating leading the feminists to bring our local male sexual abusers to pay with their reputations.

It cannot be done. Not on the same scale as is happening in the First World where prominent men are dropping like flies. Not without destroying family life as we know it in TT.

I am all for sexual abuse being curtailed. But we have to acknowledge that with just over one million citizens in our intellectual pool, we will be spinning top in some very dirty local mud.

This is a society of descendants of slaves and indentured labourers.

A society in which men have been allowed to be serial harassers from childhood. Indulged at every stage of their lives because boys/men were/are the much desired commodity, regardless of their flaws.

Like it or not, we have paedophiles, rapists and men who practise incest in surprising places in TT. Some are allegedly aware and some are allegedly unaware, that they are totally wrong. On any Carnival day, young, old and in-between men can be seen rubbing up themselves on the prancing, dancing women. The women are laughing and I am yet to see anyone slapping off this unwelcome attention. The newspapers’ Carnival magazines could provide evidence, in living colour, that could send men from both prominent and ordinary families to jail for sexual harassment.

Our economy could collapse just because we excitedly think that #We Too can be #Me Too. This is not the same as logging on to the internet to see what is the trendiest shoes and clothes being worn in the First World. This could be societal murder because we want to be like #Me Too.

Think about it, women, we do not even have enough jails to hold the men. Serial abusers are everywhere.

We have to start small. We can start with the schools.

We cannot shut down TT because we feel exalted and empowered by #Me Too making it to the cover of Time magazine. It is we women in TT who have nurtured our many “mammy nice little boy chile” boys who are our morally confused men of today.

“Hell hath no fury like the woman scorned” does not play out as well in a Third World small-island economy as it does in New York, Paris or London.

Yes, image remains everything in TT. And I am also merely saying, be careful what you ask for.

LYNETTE JOSEPH. Diego Martin

Comments

"#WeToo? It will not work with TT males"

More in this section