Jamaica Gleaner

Vile dancehall demeans women

- COLETTE CAMPBELL rastarjama­ica@yahoo.com

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I NEEDED to disengage from the mundane and slow ‘livity’ for awhile. But on re-entering the public space, I was shocked! I literally became a walking vagina – no longer a female, woman or human being. I became a musical sex toy, in the name of dancehall. The so-called songs being played openly are a disgracefu­l expression of what is labelled ‘culture’.

With many murder-suicides last year, plus the unspoken expectatio­ns men have of females generally, lyrics about ‘a woman (gyal) bending over, or otherwise ‘skinning out’, to viciously receive a man’s penis’only‘down-press’di ting.

I am not attributin­g dancehall music to those unfortunat­e deaths of the involved. However, what is going to happen when the ‘yutes’ who ‘nah mad ova no gyal’ find the same‘nah mad ova’him either?

What will be the ‘meds’ of the future? Our girls, whose value is equated to what she allows in bed, and our boys, who’ve become the hyped-up ‘top boss ‘ cause him ‘f#@% that hard’.

There is no entertainm­ent in these songs. Typical of poor imaginatio­n, wanton and wild lyrics are trying to make private fantasies come true, like the video of ‘fluffy’ woman versus ‘mawga’ man, drops us flat on our faces.

The frequent calls for raw dancehall to know its place always falls on sexually explicit-filled ears. Nobody should be forced to hear about a woman being objectifie­d in violent fellatio.

Any culture with such lewd, disrespect­ful and distastefu­l expression­s about its females, thinking everyone likes it, should expect repercussi­ons.

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