Just a while ago I sat reading An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory in Juici Patties on campus and managed to overhear two children arguing in the booth opposite.

The little girl was debating hotly for some reason or the other, trying to trace off the boy but he was having none of it, replying to her remarks in standard English and invoking the good old ‘sticks and stones’ adage.

When an adult approached to tell them to settle down now and behave the girl, frustrated, burst out with “But him jus a gwaan like some gyal!”

Fellow Jamaicans can well imagine her tone of voice when I say that she made our patois version of “girl” sound like a bad word. Like it was the most horrible thing a man or boy could ever, ever be. So of course my socio-cultural/quasi-feminist antenna popped right up. 

Gender norms aside – yes, yes masculinity is a Big Deal in Jamaica; boys must be tough (whatever that means) – the equality (or rather equity, as Kat so painstakingly continues to remind me) of our sexes is at stake. When a girl uses her gender as an insult that’s the worst kind of bigotry. She’s saying “How dare you be a girl, how dare you descend to such an undesirable state”. Never mind that that is the state she herself is in.

I suppose she could also have been saying “How dare you trespass on my gender norms; only girls are allowed to speak Standard English and not get upset when we’re insulted”. But I think this interpretation is far less likely (and still not very fair to the genders).

It’s been pointed out to me that I like to seek out these points of debate, these underdog causes to champion, that I deliberately read too much into things. Everyone needs something to complain about I guess. When it’s not the lack of strong female leads in movies, it’s our lack of awareness of gender-based power struggles. 

The situation I described is a common one. Everybody’s heard a variation and you’ve probably even agreed that yes, this man really is behaving too much like a girl. Whatever that means. Our ideas of what men and women should and shouldn’t do are inextricably bound up in our social navigation, we don’t even notice them. But they are archaic at best and irreversibly damaging at worst.

The most important point of discussion is how do we fix them? How do we rid women and girls and men and boys of the notion that one gender is intrinsically superior to the other and, to take this a step further, how do we eliminate the notion that behaviour is gender-limited? 

The subtlety of socialization precludes mere academic intervention. Members of a society are taught how to behave by the society itself, not by books or Powerpoint presentations. We learn from our parents and other adults, from our friends. But how do we effect a change across these expansive  institutions of socialization?

In a recent post, Petchary quoted Marian Wright Edelman who said “You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.”

Maybe that’s all we need. More fleas.