I want to take you back to a dance in Jamaica. Not the polished ones. A real yard dance. The kind where the music is loud enough to feel in your chest and the night goes on longer than it should and everyone in the community is there in one form or another. There was always a videoman. A man with a camera and a floodlight that turned everything around him into daylight while the rest of the space stayed dark. And something interesting happened every time that light swept through the crowd.
The Men Who Stepped Back
The women moved toward the light. That was natural. That was celebration. That was women doing what women have always done at a dance, which is be seen and be present and own the space.
The men stepped back. Not because they were told to. Not because there was a rule. But because there was an unspoken understanding about what a man of standing did when the camera came around. You did not chase the light. The light found you if it needed to. And if it did not find you, that was fine too. Your presence was not measured by who saw you. It was felt by the people around you.
That quality of restraint, of quiet confidence that had nothing to prove to a lens, was a particular kind of masculine dignity. It was not arrogance. It was not indifference. It was the settled knowledge of a man who knew who he was without needing it confirmed by a recording.
That man is becoming rare. And I think we need to talk about why.
What Changed and When
The internet did not create the hunger for attention. But it gave that hunger a delivery system more powerful than anything that existed before. When every person with a phone became a broadcaster, when every moment became potentially shareable, when the number of people watching you became something you could actually count, the entire value system around visibility shifted.
Suddenly the man stepping back from the camera was not displaying dignity. He was leaving reach on the table. The man in the light was not performing. He was building an audience. And an audience, in the attention economy, is currency.
What I have watched happen to Jamaican men in this environment breaks something in me. Not all men. There are still quiet, grounded, purposeful men building things and raising families and leading communities without a follower count. But the cultural image, the aspirational model that young men see and absorb and imitate, has shifted. The man arguing with women online for engagement. The man threatening rivals in a video for clout. The man measuring his worth in views. This is what is visible. This is what is loud. And what is loud shapes what is learned.
The Attack on Masculine Identity
There is something else happening alongside the clout culture that I think is connected to it. There is an active campaign to redefine masculinity as toxicity. And I want to be precise about this because I think the conversation has been badly framed.
If masculinity as it has been expressed by some men is toxic, then what you are describing is not masculinity. What you are describing is a corruption of it. An inversion. True masculinity, the kind that built communities and protected families and provided quiet strength in moments of crisis, is not toxic. It is essential. The same way true femininity, the nurturing and the grace and the emotional intelligence that holds the human side of life together, is not toxic. It is essential.
What is toxic is the inversion of both. The man who performs strength while destroying everything around him. The woman who performs care while manipulating everyone who depends on her. These are not expressions of their gender. They are failures of character wearing gender as a costume.
When we allow the failures to define the category, we lose the category. And Jamaica is losing men who understand what they are supposed to be because the models have been replaced by the performers.
Who Our Children Are Looking Up To
The deepest cost of all of this is not what is happening to the men who are lost in it. It is what is happening to the children watching them.
A child needs someone to look up to. Not a perfect person. Not someone without flaws or history. But someone whose life, when you study it honestly, points somewhere worth going. Someone who carries themselves with a dignity that invites imitation. Someone whose relationship with their own identity is settled enough that you can borrow from it while you are still forming yours.
When I look at the public figures Jamaica is producing right now, the politicians and the celebrities that our children can name and follow, I feel a specific kind of grief. Not because there are no good people. There are. But because the loudest ones, the most visible ones, the ones the algorithm rewards with reach and the media rewards with coverage, are so often exactly the wrong models.
She, the creative intelligence behind all of this, did not put us here to chase light. She put us here to be it. There is a profound difference between the man who draws attention and the man who deserves it. Jamaica has always known the difference. The question is whether we still have the courage to say so out loud.
"The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud."
Coco Chanel