The Tribune

By Simon

AT the beginning of yet another new year, we are no further toward making spousal rape illegal. Successive governments have cowered on the matter despite grand talk about gender equality and the contributions of women to Bahamian history.

To understand why two referendums on gender equality failed, is to appreciate how entrenched is sexism and misogyny in the Bahamian psyche, especially that of a large number of men as well as women who have internalised a paralysing sense of the inferiority of women.

And to better understand the idea of male supremacy and privilege, and the roots and branches of sexism, is to appreciate by analogy the nature and depth of white supremacy and privilege.

Imagine the reaction of many Bahamian men, including religious leaders, to a white American issuing this racist declaration: “As a white person, God made me superior to black people. Black people should not have all the same rights that I have because of the colour of my skin. History has shown that black people are inferior to whites.”

Yet, shockingly, this is the quintessential mindset of many Bahamian men when it comes to women. They may couch their words and even speak glowingly of loving women. However, in the end, questions ranging from full citizenship to spousal rape reveal a continuum of male supremacy and privilege.

In their hearts and in various actions and inaction, they believe that they are superior to women. God made it this way and history bears this out, is the misogynist conceit.

To extend the analogy, in an imagined mimic of then-Tall Pines MP Leslie Miller’s abusive rage about beating a former girlfriend, imagine a white member of the US Congress saying during the days of Jim Crow how much some slaves enjoyed getting beaten, a sign of how much attention their slave master paid to them.

Race is a social construct rather than a biological reality. Though there are biological anomalies, we are physically born male or female. The analogy between race and gender is highly compelling and demonstrative if not necessarily exact.

The diabolical nature of racism and sexism is the pernicious belief that a class of individuals is superior because the complexion of their skin is white or because they were born with a penis.

The lie continues: One is born inferior because one has a darker complexion or is born with female genitalia. Racism and sexism are that absurd, and it is an absurdity that has fuelled holocausts and genocide, as well as the subjugation of women for millennia.

The lie and the absurdity are purposeful – the domination of one group by another, insistent on their interests and privileges. The absurdity of sexism is captured in this nugget of male supremacy by former Member of Parliament, Leslie Miller: “If my sister marries a foreigner, I expect for that foreigner to take her home to his country and support her.

“What they bringing him here for? Don’t come to my country and take a job from one of my Bahamian brothers.”

By Miller’s absurd logic, Arnold Pindling should have taken his Bahamian wife back to Jamaica with the result that Lynden Pindling, whom Miller and others adore, would likely never have become leader of the PLP nor prime minister.

Imagine how difficult it may have been for Sir Lynden’s mother to get her Jamaican son citizenship after 1973.

The responses of many Bahamian women to the outmoded thinking of men like Miller ranges from the complicit to the baffling. Recall the words of a union leader some years ago during one of the gender equality referendums: “I cannot trust my daughter and granddaughter to do the right thing ... I am not going to put that kind of pressure on them, not with these clowns out there; these lacklustre, shiftless, trifling negroes out there. Are you crazy?”

Here we have racism married to xenophobia! Would it be okay if these women married Latino, Asian, Indian or white men?

Bahamian women need not marry a foreigner to get hitched to “lacklustre”, “shiftless” and “trifling” men. There are plenty highly irresponsible men here at home, many who often abandon or fail to take care of their children, polygamous to their heart’s content, while failing to live up to many of their responsibilities as men.

There are of course many good Bahamian men struggling to be good spouses, partners, fathers and sons, as well as good citizens.

The mindset of the union leader and so many other Bahamian men is that women are not as smart or as discerning or as cunning as are men. Or to put it in the language of male supremacy, “Women are too and can’t think like a man.”

This is a curious mindset in light of the fact that the vast majority of the students at the University of The Bahamas are women.

It is overwhelmingly women who pursue tertiary studies overseas, with most of them not returning to The Bahamas after graduation. Many do not return because of perceived greater opportunities overseas, because of the rank sexism in Bahamian society, and because they find it difficult to find spouses at their educational level.

Are we supposed to believe that those many Bahamian men who found brides of convenience are somehow smarter than Bahamian women in choosing a spouse?

Judgment in choosing a spouse has little to do with gender and more to do with the ability of an individual, male or female, to decide for themselves whether they choose wisely or not.

Equality means that women and men are on a level playing field in making decisions, however they may turn out. The definition of this is freedom, equality’s guardian. Equality means that there should be no superior class when it comes to democratic rights as guaranteed by the Constitution.

There are two propositions, one religious and one civil, often voiced about the equality of women, but not fully observed by those expressing the propositions.

Many people of faith and church leaders note the radical dignity of women made in the image and likeness of God. Yet religion, including Christianity, is a great bastion of patriarchal dominance and sexism.

For millennia, male religious leaders have with condescension and contempt controlled and characterised women’s intellects, ambitions and especially their bodies. Female sexuality and natural body functions were often classified as impure.

A female religion writer once famously observed that she was less concerned about what her church said about women and more disturbed about what her church suggests that God supposedly ordains about the equality or inequality of women.

Scriptures and religious doctrines and dogma, as well as various traditions, all controlled by men, are collectively used to justify male dominance and the inequality of women.

In the interest of power men continue to defend all manner of theological gobbledygook and tortured arguments that women cannot become church leaders.

There is an entrenched view in many religions and denominations that the superiority of men is ordained by God as is the inferior position of women. This is typically dressed up in the conceit that the supposed roles of women and men in church and society make for a necessary inequality.

While there is progress in women’s rights in The Bahamas, sexism and misogyny remain deep-seated in the church, in the upper echelons of political life, in the sexual harassment many women endure, in domestic violence, in career advancement and in other areas of society.

The struggle for gender equality continues a quarter century into the 21st century.