By Spokesman Newsroom
BASSETERRE, St. Kitts (Wednesday 11th January 2023)- “What you saw on the streets of Basseterre just over a week ago was evidence of all of that. Women, many of them mothers, parading the streets in a state of near nakedness.” Such is the view of well-known social commentator Dwyer Astaphan, aged in his 70sas expressed during his latest commentary aired on Wednesday 11th January 2022, calling on women to stop degrading themselves wearing skimpy costumes and simulating sex through dance based on his observation of street parade during Sugar Mas 51 (St.
Kitts-Nevis National Carnival). “Now, don’t tell me that this is our culture, because it is not. It is imported crudeness from Brazil and Trinidad. Indeed, there’s nothing cultural about it. It is just vulgar and unbecoming and we are such copycats, even when we are copying behaviors that diminish us, we copy still” Astaphan remarked.
He questioned the response by a woman who took part saying: “One of them later told me she had done it to relieve stress. Now I can see jumping up and having a good time being a stress reliever. But how do these public displays of vulgar near nakedness bending over twerking, exposing your nether tenderness and having men ‘wuk up’ on you relieve stress?
How does objectifying yourself with any number of men taking turns on your behind in front of the world relieve your stress? How can you do that and face your children? Is there perhaps a hidden devil in you which needs that sort of degradation to validate itself?
Or are you unaware of the fact that you are indeed degrading yourself?” Astaphan also stated: “Are you going to tell me that there are so many of our women in this country who are suffering from such a low level of self-esteem that they would make themselves a public spectacle like this? Having said that, though, a lot of people watching on are not seeing anything wrong with it, which suggests that their minds, too, have been compromised and corrupted.
They say that this is what people do nowadays. Go with the flow. This is young people thing and people are freer than they used to be, free to express themselves. What is wrong with this is that if people are free to express themselves and to choose to do so in ways that degrade them and degrade the human condition in our country, then we are all on the way to hell in a handbasket.” Astaphan said such is not a good direction for families.“This is not a good direction for us as women, as men, as families, which to a large extent incent kids.
Unfortunately, the word families is more a word than an institution, and this is where the breakdown begins. Things are bad and getting worse. What will our children be seeing and doing ten, 20, 30 years from now?
What we are doing now is triggering things to the next step of degradation and defilement, of the dignity of our. Women and our people generally. Whatever happened to dignity and elegance? No, I’m not saying that there’s no room for little naughtiness, even in public.
And I’m not a prude by any stretch of the imagination but we are contaminating our values and those of our children and our – LOCAL NEWS5society. The direction in which we are headed will destroy the psychological, social and cultural fabric of this country.
What is worse is that the degradation is being perpetrated by and against women.” He described women as the heart and soul of the human race.“The woman is the heart and soul of the human race. She is the carrier and the nurturer of the human race.
She is more often than not the backbone of the home and the family, which we know in more than enough instances, the home and the family are broken. In our country, she is our mother, and her body is the tabernacle of humanity.
She is a person, yes, very attractive to us. Males are to most of us males. But she’s not just a body. She’s a human being with a soul and a mind. And she needs to respect herself. And she needs to be respected by us. She has to insist on that respect.
And the behavior that you see being displayed does not represent insistence on being respected. If you are offended by what I say, I’m sorry but I have to say it. What went on at the carnival was disrespectful,” he told. He questioned: “Tell me, would it be less fun for the revelers if our women dressed less skimpily and danced and the men took less crudely and vulgarly?
Nothing is wrong with swaying your hips. Nothing is wrong with some gyration. But the crude and vulgar and simulating sex all over the street with the nation’s children looking on, that’s not good enough. And it must stop.
And the men who engage in this practice. How would they like it if someone did what they do to these women, to their daughters? Is our culture now defined by woke up and crude vulgarity? If so, we have to change it.” He expressed the view that following the death of the nation’s first Premier Robert Bradshaw in 1978, “this country started to fall from a state of morality to immorality then to amorality.
Amorality is where in people’s minds, there is no difference between right and wrong. Conscience doesn’t play a part. It’s a dangerous condition. We change from values based living to prudishness, superficiality, selfishness, insensitivity, crudeness and vulgarity.” For Astaphan such is “very troubling.”
