Melville Cooke
'If yu naa go run de ....
No was' me time
Man a wicked man
Me a mek yu know dat straight up
No was' me time' Cobra, 'No Was' Me Time'
COBRA'S ATTITUDE towards sex, as stated in the song quoted, is not uncommon. Not only on the masculine side of the male-female equation, I strongly suspect, but also on the supposedly softer side.
For do not women want the great 'it', too, with many an enforced waiting
period simply for the sake of not wanting to appear loose and wanton?
There is time-wasting and there is time-wasting, though, and of all the casual
cruelties which women are exposed to by men and other women (and we are not talking the 'L' word here) the waste of their best productive and reproductive years is especially cruel.
For, make no mistake about it: all men do the 'settling down' thing, even if it is just before they head off to the eternal watering hole to settle their bills with the Great Bartender.
However, while they are busy sowing their wild oats, the fallow ground that the seed falls on finds it more and more difficult to burst forth with new life as time passes, until it becomes totally barren.
And, even if children are involved in the union, when the woman is disposed of when she gets older to make way for a newer, undented (and maybe 'undentured') model, with not so many miles on the clock, it is no less cruel or maybe even more so.
GIVE NO THOUGHT
Many men give not a thought to the time a woman has spent with them when they decide to move on. In fact, I have heard the view that "a she fool fe stay" expressed more than once when a man decides to end a long-term relationship, leaving the woman with nothing but that sinking, abandoned feeling.
She was not stupid, though, when she was there for him through the struggles. And if she was such a terrible person, he was the fool to have stayed so long.
No. Whether spoken or unspoken, married or no ring, women in a long-term relationship naturally have expectations that they will be together until one or the other passes on.
They do not expect to go into old age alone, but it is a situation that many women face as the supposedly permanent partner moves on.
Sex is sex and sex is very pleasurable, but if sex is the intention when a man checks a woman, why stay around for the next four, five, 10 years? Why not be a genuine nyam an' lef stray, instead of pretending to be a faithful hound (thanks Tony Robinson, for that piece on dogs in The Observer).
It is much less painful, I believe, for a woman to be the victim of a 'screw-by' than to be stabbed repeatedly (pun intended) and her life force allowed to seep out in public for all to see and laughingly examine.
NO COMPENSATION
While money cannot compensate for the time she has spent, the woman who finds herself tossed aside after years with a man should be able to at least chuckle all the way to the bank, which is one of the reasons why I believe that a woman should not allow herself to be in a position where she has no legal rights.
If a year passes and there is no move to permanence, as in mutual property, if not a proposal, she should be thinking of
cutting her losses and cutting out of that union. That is unless they have an agreement to the contrary, of course.
And the women who eagerly replace the discarded women are just as cruel. But things that go around do tend to come around.
QUIT WHILE AHEAD
One small thing: Speaking of going and coming around, the young lady who shared third place in Sunday's Miss Jamaica Universe 2005 contest, Carolyn Yapp, said some very disparaging things about Miss Jamaica World 2004, Tonoya Toyloy, to whom she placed second.
Cock moth does kill cock and hen bile choke hen. Yapp had yapped about Toyloy winning the public vote, saying that it should be scrapped. And lo and behold, what did Ms. Yapp win on Sunday? You guessed it the call-in vote.
I would advise her to quit while she is not too far behind, though, having fallen from second to joint third. It would be a shame to not make the top five in a Dancehall Queen contest, wouldn't it?
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
