‘Bubby’ must be cherished, penis must be schooled

When I heard recently that a small gang of youth had beaten and raped a schoolgirl, I enquired: How old is the girl? One man explained simply: “She ha bubby”. That “explanation” is almost as criminal as the crime itself.{{more}}

As a girl’s breasts blossom and a boy’s penis lengthens, there is a biology lesson to be taught and learned in the CXC curriculum, but that is not all there is to it. Onto the masculine and the feminine body systems, we submit to another chemistry and another physics, we come to admire, to respect, to desire, to cherish and worship and even seek to grab hold of and overpower and colonise/terrorise what draws us towards the sexual other.

Can we make “Learning, and Loving”, become the major courses in our school system? Is Earl ‘Ole George’ Daniel, along with other personal consultants, a source of guidance? Can political economy and cultural history open our eyes to new ways of becoming male and female? It is time to redeem the time, to give the justice system and the rehab system new modes of handling cases, make high and low face the same security and account. It is time to for us to retreat from one of the deadly sins of Caribbean colonial history. The gender curriculum must no longer be informal and informally manipulated.

Bubby must be cherished, penis must be schooled.