The sudden transformations in societies – email, cell phones – are often the result of an equipment revolution, and we spot them quickly; the slower transformations occur so slowly that we don’t even notice the shift until some sudden circumstance makes us aware. Growing up in Guyana, for instance, it was acceptable that adults, even the ones strange to you, were perfectly in order correcting wayward behaviour in young people, whatever the circumstance. Indeed, if the adult chiding you was known to your circle that person would actually be thanked by your family for the intervention. Move on in time 20 years or so; I’m living in Toronto, walking through the shopping centre in my neighbourhood and I come upon a small crowd gathered around some incident.
As I get closer I see the focus is on two youngsters in a fight. The older and bigger boy is raining punches on his younger opponent pinned to the ground. As I get to the scene, an adult steps out of the crowd clearly intending to halt the one-sided fight, but as he approaches, the bigger boy looks up, stops punching and says, “If you touch me you’ll be charged for assault”.
The adult pauses, backs off and walks away, and the blows resume. In that one short lesson, I had learned how behaviours in society differ and how dramatic the changes within cultures can be.
Across societies in general, one of the more gradual changes has been the slide in morality and in the attitudes to women and in the way they are degraded, almost daily, in our various advertising media, and in public entertainments of one form or another. In a current example, there has been a huge uproar this week over the popular Jamaican cricketer Chris Gayle “putting a move”, as we say in the Caribbean, on a female interviewer on Australian television during the WI-Australia Test series. Gayle has subsequently said the interaction was “a joke” and has apologized for it, but the story is evolving with other references of similar behaviour by the T20 star towards other females, and there is now a separate clip circulating showing Dwayne Bravo making overtures to a female in the course of an interview. To use a media term, the story “has legs” and we will be hearing earlier episodes being regurgitated as the repercussions (Australian cricket legend Ian Chappell is calling for a world-wide cricket ban on Gayle) continue to emerge; you can read a lot of the fine-fine online at the King Cricket website.
To step back from the furore, however, is to see that a dominant factor operating here is the changes that have gradually come to societies in the way we allow women to be treated in the media. A day doesn’t pass without some obviously sexist slant being seen either in promoting some product or service. Whether it’s a calendar, or the newest handyman tool, there is the inevitable presence of the female form, scantily clad, adorning the layout.
The latest new car model is introduced with photos of females, in various languid positions, draped over the bonnet or hugging the bumper. At the weigh-in for the MMA octagon bouts, the fighters are standing in front of three curvaceous young ladies with their attributes barely contained in the skimpiest of bikinis. It should be noted that the ladies perform no function whatever; they don’t even mop the fighters’ brows, or operate the scale. They don’t sing the anthem. They just stand there and project pulchritude.
It has become the norm to insert women into professional sports coverage, and often this is done in a way that trivializes both the woman and the subject. It has become the norm to see women as adornment (as one caller to the Sportsmax TV programme The Zone put it, “Why else are they there?”) and it is only one short step from there to treat them, in the course of some professional work, as a sex object target. Let it not go unsaid, however, that the women have gone along happily with the process (particularly on North American TV, the money must be significant), but let’s not throw out the baby with the bath-water.
The reality here is that, whatever we think of Chris Gayle, we created him. The lesson for Mr Gayle in the circumstances, the attitudes, the advertising, the perks, in the world he inhabits – our world – told him it was acceptable to speak as he did to a professional interviewer, on international television, in a professional interview; she was just another piece to chase, and the TV interview was just another of those modern-day platforms he has seen where we treat women as toys.
It’s a societal attitude and we are full of it in the Caribbean – just listen to our dance-hall music, watch our videos, go to a soca show and turn your camera-phone to what’s happening on stage.
We have allowed this to happen. When Chris committed his first infraction by his crude comment to the Jamaican lady interviewer – about “feeling her pitch” – our cricket establishment should have jumped all over him as the Aussies did with his recent gaffe in their country. The big talkers in the WICB should have taken him to task publicly; instead we let it pass.
I don’t know Chris’ background, but the moment the behaviours and attitudes he has been displaying began to appear our cricket administrators, starting with his coach, should have immediately raised the ‘stop’ sign.
If he wasn’t aware he was transgressing before, he should have been made wiser then.
Instead, in our modern dispensation, we let it pass. Chris Gayle may have been guilty of poor judgement, but to take the wider view he is actually a product of our time.
