writedenzil@yahoo.com

Whose pants are you wearing?

Calling all heteros: stand up for yourselves! Stand erect! It’s time for your voices to be heard! There’s a strange wind blowing over this land. A wind of change, but not of the good, righteous, religious kind.

Can you see it? It’s glittering all around us. Can you smell it? Smells like Versace cologne. Can you sense it? It makes you want to skip the Old Spice and buy skinny pants.

Last month’s Copyright Organisation of T&T Awards was arguably the most glamorous event this country had ever witnessed.

There were glittering gowns and skinny pants everywhere—real skinny pants, so much so that the mannish soca stars even had to pull out wedgies on stage.

And when he graced the stage to collect his lifetime achievement prize, The Mighty Sparrow, well, he did his usual walk and wine.

But then he proceeded to tell a joke as an acceptance speech for an award that acknowledged such a significant body of work that it has transcended generations and geography and even prompted an honorary PhD.

“A man stood up on a crowded train and announced a hold-up. He said, ‘Everybody, this is a hold-up,’ waving his big gun at the frightened passengers. ‘I’m going to rob all the women and rape all the men!’

Tight pants

“Upon hearing that last part, a woman put up her hand and said, ‘Um, excuse me, but don’t you have that backwards?

Aren’t you supposed to rape all the women and rob all the men?’

“Suddenly a pantyman walks up to the woman,” said Sparrow, hands on hips, demonstrating.

“‘Aye, wait nah.

Who holding up this train, you or he?’”

Audience members erupted in riotous laughter and thunderous applause.

I nearly swallowed my gum, fuss I was in stitches.

But it was an audience full of men in tight pants—real tight pants (thought not Sparrow’s; he would have been bursting at the seams).

This is how insidious that “wind” is.

The bastion of masculinity, men who like singing and dancing and dressing up, had been conquered and they didn’t even know it.

They were wearing the pantyman’s pants.

Even the youth of today don’t realise how they’ve been coaxed and cajoled into submission of “the other side.”

I was in Trincity Mall on Saturday, and if it’s one place you can go to get a good idea of what’s going on with the youth today, it’s there.

The place was packing and the fashion was lashing, overrun wit pickney, nearly all of them boys, all of them gallerying, none actually shopping.

Why? Because they were already all shopped out. Here were men, presumably scoping out the opposite sex, sporting more glitter and glam than the gaudiest girls.

Their “tops” were taking flight with rhinestones and “wings,” they had skinny jeans skinnier than the skinny pants, and their shoes were personalised with airbrushed designs. (Only them on “the other side” would think of sprucing up a washikong.)

But I had to do a backtrack, double-take and rub-me-eye all in one when I saw the latest fad: there were boys in scarves. Scarves!

Now I know is December and the mall does get cold, but scarves?

It was like Will and Grace without the grace.

These boys were willing to parade their ignorance of what they were actually doing, which was slowly but surely going over.

Add some music and there would have been a parade.

Where are the days of Polo shirts and Brut?

Heteros need to stand up and protect themselves from this insidious homo scourge. It’s finding its way into our lives, into our fashion, and even into our news media.

You might have noticed in the past few years a more discernable presence of homo stuff in the papers. Up-and-coming homos, homo movers-and-shakers, homo news and homo views.

Symbolically annihilated

When I was researching my undergraduate thesis on print media representation of ethnicity three years ago, I came across a term: symbolic annihilation. A hyperbole, it seemed to me—overdramatic.

What it means is when a section of the population is underrepresented in the media or absent in media coverage, when, according to the papers and TV they don’t exist, they’re symbolically annihilated.

There was a time when this was so, and rightfully so, when all those little subcultures that actually do comprise the general population were silenced in favour of what a few editors and producers deemed as the majority desires: when Shouter Baptists were silenced; artists were made pale; certain devotees, disabled people and sport enthusiasts had to beg for coverage; when even Indians and Hindus were called “Asiatics,” “fanatics of an effete superstition and a most corrupt form of ethics (and) must, as a matter of self-preservation, be kept in subjugation of our laws” (Editorial, Port-of-Spain Gazette, 1884).

Whatever happened to those days? Now we into all this “every creed and race (has) an equal place” and all-inclusiveness and capturing niche markets and thing. Does the bottom line now go against everything we’ve come to know as right and true?

We need to establish firmly what is negative, inappropriate and in poor taste, and keep them out. We need to think about the children, about the people, about humanity.

Freedom comes with its limits; democracy comes with a price.

Wake up people. Whose pants are you wearing?