» TOKEN MALE

Token Male on Campus

It was a singularly eerie experience for me to be the sole male in a university classroom in BC.

As an African, I had never been a member of the minority in any classroom situation before. In African schools, the men or boys are always in the majority except for what are known as 'girls' schools; the reverse seems to be the case in Canada, the girls seem to be in the majority in many of the schools.

In the university I attended here in the Lower Mainland, women are in the majority. Somebody recently did a study and came out with the not-surprising revelation that there are more women in the country's universities than men. This is not funny. I think we men have to work extra hard; we seem to be lagging behind.

And the curious thing I have discovered is that the Canadian women I talked to about it are not even aware of their superiority in education or simply don't care. One even said to me: "I know you are happy that there are so many women around you". Really! So I asked her: 'How do you know I'm happy about that, you hardly know me." 'Oh, I know,' she said with a smile. Just then the instructor entered the classroom and we stopped talking.

I kept thinking of that statement, even today. Women have a way of looking into the soul of a man and 'reading' him with frightening accuracy. To be frank, I loved the feminine atmosphere and environment in which I found myself.

Nigel Farmer mentioned menstrual cycles in his place of work in an earlier article in this publication. I would say I felt the same in that class. You could feel the influence of the cycles in the sudden moods and inexplicable tantrums and anger. But I cannot say with certainty that menstruation was the cause of the incidents I'm going to narrate. Nobody can easily make such a claim without scientific proof.

I am not going to talk about how women are leading in education in Canada today, nor am I going to talk about menstrual cycles (oh, no!). I am rather going to talk about how it feels to be the sole male in a classroom full of women (about 30 of them!).

Two other guys who started the class with me escaped before it was too late. One bowed out after he got into a hot argument with one of the women during the first week of class. The other quit when one of the ladies passionately spoke out, in the second week, about the evils of cigarette smoking. We were discussing advertising when this woman in her twenties suddenly launched into a passionate condemnation of smoking. My friend, who was a chain-smoker and smelled of cigarettes all the time, was terribly offended, telling me later, 'She was talking about me, it was me she was talking about, the b.....' (I could not, at the time, believe what he was saying but I have discovered, over the years, that Canadians, especially Canadian women, have the ability to criticize you strongly without speaking to you directly).

The Communication course involved concepts from sociology, philosophy, political science, literature and other disciplines. One of the concepts or theories we discussed in that class was Feminism. I got into lot of trouble at the time of this discussion. Feminism theory states that men and women should be equal politically, economically and socially. My female classmates asked me whether I agreed with that and I said yes. They seemed not to believe me although they were smart enough not to bring up Africa and the nasty things going on there; I could see they were itching to do that but decency seemed to be stopping them. So I said,"Women in Africa still have a long way to go as they are discriminated against socially, economically and politically, but things are slowly improving". I could feel a collective sigh of relief flowing around the room. But what I did not tell them was that it will take many, many years for women to be treated equally to men in Africa; Africa being a continent where the male has been at the top for centuries, a mostly patriarchal continent where to be a woman is to be submissive, obedient and respectful towards the male, who is the protector and the provider, a little god. Why did I not tell them that? I guess I was scared. Those women can be really vicious in their criticism. I did not want to be a punching bag to pay for the crimes of Africa's men.

We also discussed the Amazons, those tough women in Greek mythology who could beat a man to the ground and reduce him to tears. Those strong athletic women with the rippling muscles who had no time to make babies or submit to the whims and caprices of any man. I could feel admiration for the Amazons in my classmates and from the discussions, it was clear that many of them would like to be married to somebody but not have children. Many of them considered children an annoyance or an unfair and unreasonable check on their future careers. When I forgot where I was and said (thinking of my wife) that motherhood was one of the greatest pleasures for a woman, one of the women in the class (let's call her Jane), looked at me and said: "Would you like to give birth to a child, like a woman?" I was shocked. I said the question was irrelevant since being a man, there was no way I could give birth to a child and she quipped: "then you should not expect women to give birth, since you don't know how it feels".

Wow. I had no answer to that; just as I had no answer to the argument that women are kinder, softer and more responsible. That if given the chance, women can become the best presidents or prime ministers in the world. Listening to my classmates, you would think women were a special species, altogether different from men. But even though I knew of some vicious and cruel women in world history, I could not bring them up. No, I was not being a coward, just preserving myself, getting out of harm's way.

One thing I can say though is that I have noticed that women are kinder to animals and are more likely to have pets than men. I don't think that is due to loneliness alone, there must be some genes in women to make them respond to animals in that way. In Africa, animals are horribly treated and most of the maltreatment comes from men or boys. Do the women recognize the lower animals as their allies, their comrades in the struggle against Man? I really don't know.

I saw a lot of radicalism in my classmates although there were some who were the stereotypical ideal woman for the male chauvinist: soft, charming, harmless and submissive. But this latter are in the minority. In all the three years I spent at that university, I seldom saw ladies in skirts. Jeans and T-shirts were the norm. Sometimes you could hardly tell the gender until you saw the breasts (ha!). In those three years I had grown to adore Canadian university women although they make me uneasy (I heard one telling a guy to shut up in another class). Yes, they make me uneasy, but they also excite me. I like a woman who can tell me to shut up without looking for the exit.

My wife never does, but I like her too.

Gibril Koroma is a writer and journalist originally from Sierra Leone, a tiny former British enclave in West Africa. He is a member of the following organizations: the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Canadian Association of Black Journalists and the Federation of BC Writers. He has lived and worked as a journalist in Guinea and Ghana. He also spent some time in France and Switzerland.