The Nation Newspaper and the Sex Workers

Post date: Dec 10, 2008 1:45:33 AM

A person, who is born with certain respectability, does not expect to meet cunning people.

I could not stand to see my friend, who had a well-to-do family in Belgium, prostitute the soul and déjà vu, it is happening again a generation later.

“You are whoring.”

It is about cultivating the art of hiding ones feeling. It is called intermittent reinforcement, where a person does not give a true answer but a vague one that leaves the substantive matter hanging. This postpones the issue and the other party has to come back.

The vague response is bait. Someone says something and you say yes but know something else. “Look I fooling people all the time and they are swallowing it.” It is natural reflexes, a reaction, instinct, which some learn how to avoid but to those comfortable with being a whore there is no stigma attached.

“I am a whore but I got a car and a house but what you got? You got your dignity? You feel so? Who does tell you good morning? But when they see me park my big car they run and open my door for me. Because they think I look good.”

In another scenario, women play that game all the time and men are willing victims. They make the man go along believing that he is going to get tomorrow. The ancient Greeks had a saying the small head eats the big head. It works because women realize that the men that they are dealing with are foolish. They have always done so. Delilah said to Sampson that he was not getting any unless he told her from where he got his strength.

It is reinforcing behaviour and entrapment: the woman will give him to keep him but he knows that if he does something that she does not like she will not do it. Women figure they have to get by and believe that it is the only way.

It is cataclysmic but it is the situation with which those people are more comfortable. Why bring morals into play? This is truth that they do not want to face and it makes no sense to complain for they will never have a conformation with reality.

Now that a female executive editor and a female publisher have taken over The Nation newspaper these women think they have to behave like that. The newspaper is publishing highly insulting articles with no value or merit just to keep the public on its toes. This kind of journalism is irresponsible, a very feminine ploy and sees the public as a lot of clients. The motivation is self-satisfaction. How am I going to pay my mortgage if people do not buy my newspaper?

The reading public is being exposed to the bait and trap psychology. Poke the reader for a reaction. B. S. Skinner an American psychologist has a whole theory on this kind of reinforcement. Theirs is a lack of morals that is why so many injustices exist and prevail but it is too much hard work trying to convince them.

Days gone by people like O.S. Coppin and Joe Broome had their vices but theirs were the natural ones: drink your rum and get a little bit on the side. Now there is not even a press club like years ago, where the fellows would pull up one another.

Imagine the things that these females have seen at the Nation over the years. To work in grime for years when the top is achieved there will be no integrity. It is impossible to work with integrity when the journey to the top did not include veracity. Those honest enough to admit drown in contemptible self-pity, and a phony self-esteem feed by ambitions for a few more thousand dollars.

One such article is that half of sex workers are Guyanese. The female executive editor is Guyanese and no decent and sensible editor would allow such a small sampling that is manifestly wrong and very faulty data gathering in the public domain. Those statistics should be cast aside.

“Sex workers” the words are polished up. There is a commodity someone wants it and is prepared to pay for it. It may be couched but then again they may not have a business card. The society has never been open about sex and as long as it is not we will never know, who is doing what to whom.

There are two categories, two side to whoring. The Nation used the one but the other side is not looked at:-

There are a hundred and one pressures to influence a woman to have sex and when the right device is used at the right time too many women hand up. There is a woman with needs or wants and to obtain them for sexual services some, even the woman, consider it as fair exchange and no robbery. This attitude is spread through the society. A woman needs a favour and help and a man steps in. The behaviour is no mystery so many women have done so for thousands of years since the time of ancient Egypt.

The woman, who does not believe in work at all will find a man to provide for her. She will get him to work and if she has a job it is only as a stand-by. Since it comes naturally for a man to provide it takes him years to work out that the woman with whom he is exploits him. He waits until he meets another woman for whom to provide and to exploit him and then he will see that the woman with whom he is currently exploits him more than the new one.

This society should be a nurturing one for a large and sufficient number of females are in high places:- the publisher and editor of the Nation are women, the governor of the Central Bank, judges, leading journalists, government ministers, the leader of the opposition, head of the stock exchange, prominent lawyers, magistrates, judges, managers, permanent secretaries, civil servants, accountants, all kinds yet it is not and these women seem to have very little influence outside the boudoir.

At the university of the West Indies, Mona Campus, it used to be called the Politics of the Pooh. In Carla Freeman from the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life in her Working Paper No.40 April 2005, she calls it Neo-Liberalism, Respectability, and the Romance of Flexibility in Barbados. That wants translating.

Romance, an English word, the term means a story in a sense a depiction like to write a novel. It cannot be to do with love and courtship. It has not been used nowadays. The 16^th and 17^th Century magazines were described as that; they were not described as novels – she explains it as “romance: is used to describe any number of idealized representations or popular tropes (figurative used of the word) in relation to Caribbean society.

“For increasing numbers of Barbadians today, the pursuit of middle class respectability and the desire for new paths of creative self-invention and economic “success” are being sought through entrepreneurship. .. The romance of flexibility, then, is stimulatingly about sex, love, kinship/household formation….In each of these senses, the role of flexibilities at the heart of the entrepreneurial romance I wish to explore.”

The example she uses to demonstrate this flexible romance of entrapment is Sheila, a 25-year-old owner of Platinum Services, a small company Sheila started in 1999:

“Sheila is an attractive and vivacious Afro-Barbadian woman. … She admits that she uses her good looks and flirting acumen to her advantage. Saying, “you know… it got me through the door and they’d be like well you know, lets discuss this, let's, you know, have dinner and alright I’ll have dinner and they’ll sign the contract and they wouldn’t see me again...

“Having gained success in her business, and many of the material markers of respectably (her own home, a nanny, a nice car, cell phone etc. ..) she sought in her marriage an unfulfilled partnership whose demise led her instead to opt for a less respectable but more flexible “friending” relationship with an older well-established man, who can help her with her business, and who asks little of her time in return. In so doing, however, she is in the process, along with others like her, of re-charting the very definition of respectability and reputation and the nature of their dialectical engagement. The very act that this entrepreneurial path is being sought over and above other more stable paths … Afro-Barbadian and women in Barbados are increasingly able to maneuver in ways that were formerly off limits to them.”

Old men with young women is about reinstatement of youth; what he used to do when he used to do it. That attitude is seen in sports.

All that tells me is that Freeman is a snob. There is a rule that says those, who come before the court must come with clean hands. Sheila is not the first woman that has exploited her sexuality so why single her out? Because she is black; so Freeman is only insulting black women, for white women have done this from the beginning of time. One white woman married a man, who would became a black premier.

It is a waste of time to use language to dispute her gooble-goo. The point is that they are all doing it. The other underlining thing that comes through is, that Freeman is envious of Sheila’s privilege.

For this writer whoring has nothing to do with sex it is as George Bernard Shaw said and I paraphrase:

The base woman, and I say whore, is one that takes more than she gives, the common woman is one that gives only as she gets and the lady, he writes, “is one by over-earning her income leaves the world a better place. It is by these ladies and their sons that the world is saved.”

“He who is convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”

It is very difficult to stir the human conscious. The public as a jury is not large enough to form an opinion of guilt probably because they are fed by the same ambitions and wishful thinking. Unless a vast amount of people, a majority, are threatened nobody will take action. There will be danger to the entire island and then it may be too late.

These women in high place are comfortable and know what they do. And when the crash comes as it is certain to happen; they have their money stashed away.

There are some people with whom one cannot associate. They do not understand: their behaviour is irrational, cannot be justified and they cannot be told. They are just a hopeless spot on the society and to try to help is a waste of time. It is not a matter of giving up on the human race, but a matter of not enough time.

The End