Gender in bds!

This blog took a while for me to think about...The hardest thing was for me to take myself out of the situation and look at gender relations from a macro perspective. At work i wouldn't say that gender played that huge of a actor in our specific roles and responsibilities and for the most part there was an equal share of roles and responsibilities for both gender.

One thing that i did notice though is there is a huge TBLG community in Barbados. It is in fact so big that the first question a guy asks when he meets a girl is if she is straight or not. From my observation this community is really well accepted and well recognized in the country. It was a change from Toronto in the sense that the community is so well accepted and respected that, from my observation, there isn't really a need for a visible activist group amongst the community.

For the most part men in Barbados are very forward in their approach. I found myself being forced to be more docile then Ive ever been just to avoid being approached. Some friends came down for a week to visit and when we spoke about the gender role difference in Barbados we wondered if the attitude of the guys down here might have been a result of living in a tourism driven country. It was a long stretch but it made so much sense to us. Think about it like this: For a guy who is always used to meeting women who are only around for 10 days at a time, they would have to move quickly to establish any sort of relationship. Long shot, I'm sure, but that's the feeling i got while i was there. Its really interesting the way tourism affects the culture of a country and changes the social fabric of its people.