Ian Boyne, ContributorTHE FACT that HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections are the second leading cause of death for both men and women in the 30-34 age group in Jamaica, and that HIV/AIDS was the leading cause of death for children ages 1-4 in 2002, as well as the third leading cause of death in the 10-19 age group is cause for deep concern.
The Gleaner Company on Wednesday organised a very useful and engaging Editors' Forum in association with the UWI Medical Faculty to explore how gender, culture and attitudes impact the spread of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. It is a discourse, which must continue and, indeed, broaden to include large numbers of Jamaicans of all social classes. AIDS is not just a health issue or a moral issue. It is a matter, which concerns the very survival of the nation. Already we are one of the eight countries in the Caribbean, which are expected to experience a decline in life expectancy as a result of the prevalence of the pandemic in the island. That must get our attention.
The panel on Wednesday expertly and grippingly discussed many of the causal factors to our high infection rate in Jamaica, pointing to a number of our specific cultural and gender issues, which influence the spread of HIV/AIDS. As a panellist, I pointed to the fact that our high levels of inequality, unacceptably high levels of poverty - despite commendable reductions - are major contributors to the spread of HIV/AIDS.
SUGAR DADDY SYNDROME
Religious people are prone to just moralise on the issue and push abstinence and chastity, but we cannot ignore the enormous and overbearing pressures, which poverty imposes upon its victims, who have as much of the instinct of self-preservation as we in the middle class have. The fact that females in the 10-19 age groups have three times higher the risk of infection than boys in the same cohort speaks volumes. On average, 50 per cent of young women reported that their sexual partner was 5-10 years older than they were.
A lot of young girls are having sex with older men not because these men are more attractive, more sexually appealing and more 'sweet mouth' than younger men. It is because they have the financial wherewithal to provide the lunch money, the school fees or extra lessons money and hairdresser money. It is sheer economics. These older men's power over these girls' bodies is reinforced not only by a deeply sexist Jamaican culture in which 'man control woman', but it is deepened by the strength of cash.
Jamaican men like to 'ride bareback' (sex without condoms), and a girl dependent on an older man's money is in no bargaining position to negotiate how safely the man 'rides'. Besides, a lot of young girls are exposed to early sexual activity simply because of the overcrowded conditions in which they live. They are frequently molested by their mothers' boyfriends, usually in succession. Many times because of poverty, the mothers are reluctant to throw out the men who are usually paying the bills.
THE ECONOMICS OF HIV/AIDS
The high levels of incest in Jamaica also relate to poverty and the fact that women are greater victims of poverty and therefore more powerless to protect against the predators. We minimise the economic factors fuelling the AIDS crisis in Jamaica to our own peril. It is not just a moral issue. There are many ambitious, trying and fighting young girls who are desperate to escape poverty and who, despite a firm will and moral resolve, cave under the pressure and make a strategic decision to accept economic assistance from the older man for a few years just to escape the bondage of debilitating, enslaving poverty.
Unless our economic model is able to produce enough jobs for these young women; unless our educational system fits them for skilled, liveable employment and unless we find an economic model, which is inclusive rather than one which creates enclaves of excellence and large pockets of underdevelopment, we will continue to throw well-meaning, morally ambitious young women into the arms of lecherous, ravenous wolves.
Also, the fact that respect, honour and self-esteem are denied so many of our young men because they don't have the education and the jobs, which would confer that in this status-mad and materialistic society, their conquest of women and sexual exploits provide the rite of passage to manhood and self-esteem is the
vehicle for the exercise of their masculinity. A lot of men derive their self-esteem and sense of meaning from how well they can wreck a vagina and 'mash it up' how much 'wicked slam' they can deliver. This provides the bragging rights on the corner, on the football field and in the factories.
We need respect and validation the way we need food and air, and if we don't get it legitimately, we will get it through anti-social means. So our machismo image, our need to dominate women, to conquer and subdue-as many as possible-is the result of the marginalisation of our working class and lumpen proletariat men.
PHILOSPHY AND AIDS
But the matter is more than a social-economic or a socio-cultural one. There are some major philosophical and moral issues which relate to the fight against HIV/AIDS and there is a decided reluctance to acknowledge and put these issues squarely onto the agenda. I am all for factoring in the economic variables in the HIV/AIDS war, as the factors having to do with gender, cultural myths (such as virgins' curing STIs) etc.
And I am all for pointing to the peculiarly Jamaican and Caribbean factors, which are influencing our high incidence of AIDS. But there is a problem, which is larger than our shores and which is compounded by our peculiar cultural features.
We don't have a culture in the Western world today which exalts restraint, the postponement of gratification, discipline and the deliberate channelling of what the philosophers call our 'passional nature'. Western hedonistic, pleasure-oriented culture does not glorify self-control, self-mastery, and self-discipline. We have devalued the Will. We have promoted the concept of the sovereignty of the self, the sovereignty of the subjective. And we are reaping the whirlwind today. And this is occurring at all levels.
DECADENT DANCEHALL CULTURE
This matter of growing HIV/AIDS infection is not just a working class issue. It is not just matter of a decadent dancehall culture, which promotes promiscuity and the objectification and commodification of women. Oh, there is a lot of that in the dancehall. But the decadence is not limited to the dancehall. The middle and upper classes in Western society and in Jamaica have lost their moorings; have lost any sense of meaning to life beyond self-gratification. There is no overarching goal, no Grand Story, no invigorating ideology worth dying for and giving up all in pursuit of. Nothing more than acquiring as much material possessions as possible, accumulating as many materialistic toys, boosting our status, power and coveted position as Sensual Homo Sapiens.
We are philosophically rudderless. We have largely abandoned notions of any grand purpose or meaning outside of our subjective feelings and emotions. The young who used to be idealistic and who used to dream of and fight for a better world are now just atomistic selves, burying themselves in materialistic and hedonistic pursuits, living breathlessly and recklessly today for, in their view, tomorrow is not guaranteed.
You believe this nihilism and lack of a sense of transcendent meaning has no implications for risky sexual behaviour and promiscuity? In a brilliantly argued essay in the December 2000 issue of the philosophical journal Animus, Professor FL Jackson shows how the idea of freedom as absolute personal autonomy and lack of external restraint has produced shattering consequences for social order and personal relationships.
In the essay titled Freedom and the Tie that Binds: Marriage as An Ethical Institution, he says, "The freedom of the individual is the modernity's absolute - the limit of morality is thus to be found in the want of an objective context for freedom, a want that becomes increasingly evident as subjective freedom, rendered absolute, eventually degenerates into a principle of moral chaos and decay, producing a melt-down of substantial human relations, customs and institutions. Where freedom is equated with the sanctity of whatever one chooses so far as the sense of inner autonomy remains unconscious of its own limit - then it is indistinguishable from any number of contingent impulses and passions."
HEDONISTIC OBSESSIONS
There was a time when even secular philosophers saw the civilised human being as the one who controlled his impulses, his so-called lower, animal nature. The kind of debauchery and hedonistic obsessions, which we afford ourselves today, and which are glorified as the epitome of capitalist well-being would be scorned by philosophers and ordinary people centuries ago. The way wealth, power and pleasure dominate the elite's worldview and life today would be thought of as shameful-a worthless, animalistic life.
This Western nihilistic, materialistic way of life is an aberration as far as a civilisation views are concerned. (We have always had pockets of this thinking and living in the world, of course. But it was associated with decline, not progress. Even the Epicureans have been misunderstood as teaching only bodily pleasures. Far from it.)
Why shouldn't the big man uptown have five women looking after - in more ways than one - in five different apartment complexes, plus the women he is sexually harassing in his office and the young girls whom he is taking his sexual fantasies out on? There are prominent corporate and business executives we know of in Jamaica who are promiscuous, philandering creatures and we make jokes about it. There are known sexual harassers who give well-quoted speeches in high society.
We have had promiscuous, whoring politicians whom we have idolised and glamorised while decrying the promiscuity at the grassroots. As a culture, we are very tolerant of sexual exploitation and promiscuity and that is why I am so happy that the U.S. is applying pressure upon us to take human trafficking and the sexual exploitation of the young seriously. Whether the U.S. has ulterior motives for the pressure or not is quite irrelevant. The pressure will result in some innocent victims being rescued from sexual exploitation and degradation.
We have to take a multi-pronged approach to stemming the HIV/AIDS pandemic. But we leave out the moral and philosophical to our peril. We must make character and self-restraint noble things again.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com or infocus@gleanerjm.com
