Sidney McGill - HEALTHY SEX 101Grace is deceitful and beauty is vain, but the woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised. Proverbs. 31:31
A DISCUSSION ON cultural/religious sexual beliefs, grooming and personal sexual responsibility is vital to a nation understanding that its 'key site of oppression' is in its
sexuality. We will look at three aforementioned components of sexual attitudes that are key ingredients to exalting the nation.
CULTURAL/RELIGIOUS SEXUAL BELIEFS
There is documentary evidence to substantiate the notion that a woman's worth is based on her physical beauty, whereas a man's worth is based on his success. Physical attractiveness is more important to males evaluating females than it is to females evaluating males or males evaluating themselves.
The power differential between the skimpily dressed woman (where her mode of dress seems to border on obscenity in a religious setting) and a successful pastor is great, hence a public shaming instead of a private correction. The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures however set a standard of inner virtue and faith to be more priceless than vain outer beauty. Christian modesty is an inner virtue that virtuous women display in thought, behaviour and apparel.
Wearing long, dowdy looking dresses however, is not modesty but adherence to a dress code defined by someone else. A modestly dressed woman can be as vicious and deceitful as a skimpily dressed one.
GROOMING
Grooming is a learned behaviour for both boys and girls. However, the continuous training that encourages girls to take grooming more seriously than boys while the society confers superior status on boys, makes it difficult for men and women to relate as friends and equals. Especially if the woman's grooming is in question, she becomes a prime target for sexual harassment.
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
What you wear should be informed by where you are going, what is the required dress code and how do you want to be perceived. How you dress does not absolve the inerrant man from being responsible for what he thinks and does but there is no sense in being dead right (literally).
In a society where there is a deficit in self-discipline and moral restraint especially among younger Jamaican men, a skimpily dressed woman attracts unwanted sexual advances. A skimpily dressed man could easily attract unwanted homosexual advances if it were not for the dense network of homophobia that bars many Jamaican men from homosexual activity.
DRESS CODE
The discussion on dress code has to be more than a power game of man oppressing woman, or how sexually obsessed we have become as a nation. The focus must be on ways of developing moral and spiritual character in Jamaican men and women who are losing respect for self and authority.
The Jamaican Church seems overwhelmed and impotent to counter the effects of the revolving, world-wide massive media blitz on unrestrained sexual expressions which has found root in very fertile Jamaican soil.
If the Jamaican Church could only pull its head out of its domestic and political sand it would realise that the fields are overripe and the harvest is overdue. It must infuse every system with spiritual and moral fortitude with members who live virtuously. It must develop an effective spiritual crash programme where social institutions, including businesses develop the moral/spiritual side of its people as another way of increasing productivity (if only to increase loyalty and reduce theft). It must persistently resist structural evil within its camp and in public institutions in order to check the speed of moral disintegration.
Dr. Sidney McGill is a marriage and family therapist and executive director of the Family Counselling Centre of Jamaica, St. Ann; email: yourhealth@gleanerjm.com.
