She’s got bed with mirror

Pillow with spices

Invite you to make the wrong choices

Don’t give in to her entices

Cause that’s where the price is

—Delilah on D Loose, Prophet Benjamin

Two songs ruling the airwaves now, blaring their mixed messages into our already confused minds.

One is Chuck Fender’s disturbingly violent “Gash them and light them,” which speaks about what moral and upstanding citizens should do to deal with the more depraved elements of our society.

Yes, of course this makes a lot of sense. What violent societies need is more violence.

But this Delilah song by our local reggae star Prophet Benjamin sinks me into further despair about how women continue to be treated in a subhuman way.

I’ve heard men on the streets falling for the folly. Describing women they barely know as “a real Delilah.”

Men who have absorbed these bizarre and archaic notions of women from a book that most of them haven’t bothered to read.

A man calling himself a prophet should know better. The word suggests a certain level of understanding of the word, of Rasta, of the role of women in transforming societies from this basest level of existence.

Prophet should mean that a man has reached a certain level of spiritual and ideological development. That he can see things that other people can’t see and articulate them in a way that clarifies, not confuffles.

And perhaps I am being one of these overbearing and way too demanding sorts of women, but I expect better of an artist who calls himself conscious.

What is consciousness if it does not uplift? Surely, as the bigger more enlightened person, Prophet Benjamin should be empowering women to get out of situations where they believe that their bodies are their only worth.

Why do we always have to be in a state of confrontation?

The Delilah song tells the story of a woman who has Aids and goes about infecting men, apparently for kicks.

However, just this week at a UN conference on HIV/Aids in New York, Keesha Effs, Jamaica’s National Youth Ambassador for Positive Living, said that the Aids epidemic has revealed an endangered species in the form of young women who’ve become a high-risk population “due to socio-economic disempowerment, culturally-manufactured stigma and discrimination, and extensive exposure to non-consensual sex.”

Which in layman terms means that women are being pressured into sexual relationships at younger and younger ages—the whole “after 12 is lunch” phenomenon going beyond just kicks.

Prophet Benjamin has further distorted things, I hear, by singing a male version of the song, in which he claims that homosexuals are responsible for the spread of Aids. That is an indication to me that heterosexual men are still unwilling to own their actions.

He asks what is your position at the end of the song, but has not given his own.

I mean, is he a strictly one-woman man? Or is he one of these men who believes that they must spread their seed as much as possible? Does his girlfriend have to negotiate condom use with him too, since condoms remain very much taboo? Does he practice the ABC policy—Abstinence, Be faithful, use Condoms?

Or does he, like the Prime Minister, advocate watching television as the cure for having too many children?

My granny used to say one hand can’t clap. I look forward to Prophet Benjamin using his platform to encourage his bredrins to respect women a little more.

I won’t go down the all-man-bad alley. I’d just like for once that we recognise that adults need to take responsibility for their own actions. I’m no longer willing to accept the whole spiel about men being weak and simple. That they are incapable of resisting feminine wiles.

Perhaps the problem is not with the Delilahs but with the indiscipline of the men who fall under the spell of every smooth-skin and sweet-perfume woman that walks past.

I mean to say, in a society where horning is a natural predisposition for men, who is Prophet Benjamin to be passing judgment on women? As if soca music wasn’t enough of a sexist disappointment to us.

Now that we have a local reggae movement I hope that it does not go the way of all flesh and serve to divide us and distract us from the bigger issues. We have a terrible reality of HIV/Aids in this country. It’s not going to help the cause if we spend our time pointing fingers and sharing blame.