Like many other black men, I grew up with only women around. Now I'm worried the experience has ‘feminised’ me

 

I am a 20-year-old black man who was raised by women: my mother, my sister, my aunties and my female cousins. I never thought this was abnormal.  Then one day a close friend said something that really took me aback. She suggested that growing up without men in my life had “feminised" me.

My friend’s words stayed with me.  I began to think she was right and realised I was uncomfortable with the idea of being a feminised man. For God sake, I’m a man and men are masculine! But inside, I knew that’s what I wanted to be and wasn’t.
My mannerisms, my compulsive tidiness and cleanliness, my approach to sensitive issues – they don’t quite fit with the stereotypes associated with being a “real man.”
Maybe for some men, being feminised is not much of a problem but for me, it was. I became uncomfortable in my own skin. I questioned my entire identity. I looked deeper into myself, my upbringing, my whole life.
I began with my family, the foundations to my existence. In her book, My Mother Who Fathered Me, the Caribbean author Edith Clarke acknowledges that Caribbean families tend to be “matrifocal.” Mine proved no exception.
My father was not there when I was growing up. I don’t feel anger towards him, nor do I hate him, but I do wish he had been there and that he understood how his absence affected me.
He lives in the Caribbean. It has been two years since we last spoke. That hurts. My parents separated amicably, but there is a space in me that can never be filled.
A Caribbean British friend of mine admitted irritation that he had also inherited so many of his mother’s characteristics. Our circumstances are very similar. He has never known his father and was not really supported by uncles and male cousins. However, unlike me, he was fortunate to have an older brother. Surely this would have made a difference? To my surprise, he disagreed. He said his brother was “anti-social and no role model at all.” I wondered if his brother’s problem was that he also grew up without a male role model.

I talked to a family psychotherapist who wanted to remain anonymous.  This psychotherapist, a black woman, also had to raise her son alone. It’s hard to say this but absent fatherhood is more prevalent in black communities than in other communities. I was starting to understand that feminisation was a result of this neglect and cultural expectations.

I sometimes wonder if we are still suffering from the consequences of slavery which forced families to be separated and never promoted a marriage culture. In fact, it was deliberate policy. For example, an 18th Century slave owner, Willie Lynch, wrote in his letter, The Making of a Slave, that in order to control slaves, black families should be separated. More shockingly still, he was of the view that the son had to be removed from his father so that when the child became a man, he would “mentally be dependent and weak, but physically strong; in other words, body over mind.”
If my family could not provide a male role model – maybe school could have filled that gap. Sadly, in nursery and primary school, there were few black male teachers. In fact, I remember only two males in the entire workforce, both school keepers.  There, too, I was in another female-dominated environment during my formative years and so did not have access to gender-balanced, rounded experiences.
Mrs Appah, the Head Teacher of my former Primary School, English Martyrs RC, agreed with this view. “The image is that primary school teaching is for women who have got children,” she admitted. “However the government has put incentives in to encourage men into the profession. We have got some men coming through.” But not enough nor fast enough.
The most recent statistics released by the Department for Education showed that “70 per cent of all full-time teachers are female.” I wanted to see whether Mrs Appah felt that the young men who grew up without a father and were restricted to a female dominated environment in their primary school are feminised. “Yes they are feminised,” she told me “but there are two outcomes – sometimes their anger is so much against their father that they hate the woman. It becomes like an anti-woman kind of thing. They believe that the father left because the mother is guilty of something.”
One of the songs I often listen to is Luther Vandross, Dance With My Father. It makes me feel sad and strangely jealous; at least he knew his father before he died. My father doesn’t know the child I was or the man I’ve become.
I have lived my life as an incomplete man and I didn’t even understand that until now. Black families need to think about what children are going through without any male role models in their life. But those who have been feminised like myself need to understand it, and then embrace it. For certain, being in touch with your feminine side has its advantages.