Some years ago, I interviewed a 15-year-old girl from a Whitehall Avenue community immediately after she had been freed by her captors, this following her being snatched, blindfolded, taken to an unknown location and repeatedly raped for two days.

Based on what she described to me, with another girl on a nearby bed also being raped, I classified the place to which she was taken as a rape factory. At one stage, during a break from the brutal and repeated acts, she felt thirsty and asked one of the men for some water. From where she lay, she saw him open a bathroom door and fill a glass of water from the toilet tank. She had to drink it.

At all stages during the interview the young girl had been crying, and so were many of her relatives. At no time did it occur to anyone that the mood was conducive to cracking a joke about rape.

Senator A J Nicholson is in many ways acting out being the victim of his advanced age; probably his memory has failed him on certain matters having to do with women, and all that entails. This indicates that he has to get out more and rediscover that which will allow him to close the gap between his faded memory and reality.

The first reality is that in a Senate discussion with a female senator once the subject of rape was mooted it was incumbent on him to drop the elder statesman routine and listen more than make comment. When he made his “flexi-rape” comment, I didn’t get the sense that Nicholson was encouraging young men to disrespect our women. But certainly the minister must know that too high a percentage of Jamaican men believe that rape and joking about it can exist in the same package.

Did the senior citizen that AJ Nicholson is, and also as PNP senator and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, feel any special responsibility in not being seen to be promoting that rape, even as a mere word, can be used to elicit laughter as he claimed he was trying to do?

There is always a time in politics that a word or two misspoken takes on a life much bigger than originally meant to convey. Again, being a victim of advanced age, Senator Nicholson must have felt that his many years on this Earth had given him the right to say just about anything, and he had also earned to right to get away with it.

I believe that the minister’s “flexi-rape” comment was a genuine attempt at a joke, but because the minister has been living in an alternate reality, where his recall factor on many matters may be suspect, he failed to see and latch on to the insensitivity of his comment. Worse, he missed that golden opportunity to immediately apologise.

Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I was being hounded by a schoolgirl with a very audible lisp. My friends were making life hell for me as they would make jokes about my “lis’ tongue” girl. I decided that I would simply not respond to her, even as we sat on a bus where she had earlier paid my fare. After a few weeks — in which she had become most confounded — she approached me one day at a downtown bus stop and said: “I would like to apologise, and please tell me what ah do wrong.” With all the lisps attached to it. I felt terrible, and told her that she had done nothing wrong. We became friends again.

Even if Senator Nicholson felt that he had done nothing wrong, he should have immediately apologised. A J must know that he is a public man and he is not in the back room of a bar with his buddies cracking all sorts of unholy jokes about women.

The public man that he is imposes on him certain strictures. The first of which is, as a leader, his examples are public — in similar fashion to his foolish utterances. I am certain that the minister didn’t want us to believe that he was being flippant on words involving rape and that it can simply be buried under the carpet as a joke.

I am expecting that pretty soon his full apology to the nation will follow.

KC old boys don’t need to be lectured to about women

In the decision of the Kingtson College Old Boys’ Association (KCOBA) to have a men-only format at its annual dinner the critics invented a ‘sky is falling’ moment and immediately every KC old boy became a male chauvinist pig.

To the critics, many of whom were themselves KC old boys who mounted atop their steeds to joust at windmills, the matter was not so much that the KCOBA simply elected to have one event in a male-only format, it was much more than that. We were setting back the cause of women for 100 years!

And, of course, the guest speaker, Earl Jarrett, would not allow such a moment to go by and let KC go unpunished. Beginning on a false premise that the KCOBA is somehow stuck in an anti-inclusive groove, he dared to lecture us and talk down to us as if we were mere adolescents.

Even when I parodied the matter in an Observer article, many could not see the joke. So they invented an enemy to be fought against: the unchanging nature of the KCOBA and its relationship with women.

I am not the KCOBA, but as a proud old boy of KC, let me remind the naysayers that many of them are jealous because it is KC boys and old boys who invented the throne upon which we have placed our women.

We took the word chivalry and brought life to it. But as the ladies saw that our stars shone the brightest, and we were constantly showering them in the glow of the sun, lesser men would not have it that way. So they whined and asked their wives: “Honey, what is my view on the KCOBA male-only dinner format?”

If I am any example, KC old boys have always elevated their women, and we have never felt the need to be lectured to and told how much higher up the ladder we should place our women.

This matter of the KCOBA being anti-woman and anti-all-inclusive was all a storm in a teacup. It’s all an invention of those who thought they needed something earth-shattering to say.

In all of this, the wives and women of KC old boys are simply saying: “What was that all about? Come over here. I want to whisper something in your ear.”

observemark@gmail.com