Above: AI generated image using Google’s Nano Banana

BitDepth 1550 for February 16, 2026

Baby, I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the grey
The more I get of you, the stranger it feels,
Now that your rose is in bloom
A light hits the gloom on the grey

– Kiss from a Rose, 1994, Seal Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel

This column will lean in heavily on some mansplaining, but it’s directed at the menfolk, so if you ladies want to leave the room, I understand. Or, y’know, you could stick around to point and laugh at what comes next.

So we are clear, this column is all about the decision by Tribe to include a rose, a particularly innocuous looking clitoral stimulator, in goodie bags for its female masqueraders.

Given that most of its masqueraders are adult females, it would not be a reach to presume that some bright spark at a goodie bag planning meeting suggested that those grownup women might appreciate a rose before Valentine’s Day.

Not a perishable cutting with carefully pruned thorns but a gift that would keep on giving, or coming, so to speak.

It isn’t clear why this should be so surprising. Tribe is a Carnival brand that has, right from its beginnings, marketed its offerings focused on the satisfaction of its masqueraders.

Given that robust commitment to customer service, it seems a small step to expand into facilitating customer self-service.

Yet parts of this country, even while immersed in the all-consuming and all-consumptive lead to a two-day celebration of nation-wide hedonism, have collectively lost their minds over a device that not will be waved in nobody’s face, twerk its assets for any cameras pointed in its direction or, indeed, do anything other than make it possible for its user to navigate to a manually guided orgasm.

Yet, for more than a decade, the same band made condoms available in the goodie bags it assembles for its male masqueraders. Is it possible that one tool for safe personal satisfaction is inherently more socially acceptable than another?

A condom generally facilitates male-led engagement with sex. A rose dispenses entirely with the requirement for a man at all, though I am assured by modern lady friends, it is also useful in ensuring mutual satisfaction when both partners are together.

Why are we discussing this in a column about technology, you may ask?
That’s largely because sex has been lubricated significantly by technology since the advent of the open internet.

Technology, in turn, has made p*rn pervasive, and that has changed everything.

We have come some distance from the days, specifically the days of my early youth and sexual awakening, when the discovery that an organ heretofore tasked with urination could be coaxed to an entirely different kind of service.

Back then, the only available sources of visual stimulation were old copies of Playboy and Penthouse.

Some lucky lads would find them hidden in stashes created by a father or uncle, others would take a carefully hoarded allowance to distinctly downmarket used bookshops that reeked of aging paper, disinfectant and marginally washed man-sweat.

There you were invited behind the counter to quickly (“No lingering there lad”) review the offerings, and pay a staggeringly extortionate price.

Compared to today’s offerings, which quickly migrated from paywalled online galleries posted by these magazines and the photographers who created the photos, to the free-for-all of modern RedTube and P*rnHub, which cheerfully strip the revenue potential of the commercial sites producing these clips.

As of 2023, Trinidad and Tobago had been bounced off the top 30 list of countries searching for p*rn online, but that’s only because so much of the rest of the world, including countries that formally ban it, has discovered the treasure, or cesspit, according to your inclinations, of the x-rated material that floods the web.

Most of this material is ugly stuff. So-called gonzo sex abounds, a style of adult video that is violent, sadistic and unrealistically brutal.

It’s believed to be where p*rn addicts end up when they become desensitised to viewing more traditional online copulation, and it’s a terrible template for real-world relationships.

Mr Sturge’s wholly unnecessary warning about public sex is simply a tone-deaf distraction. Public masturbation, recorded on phones over the years on maxis and buses is exclusively a male aberration.

Local incidents, with clearly identifiable perpetrators, have been dismissed without any action taken. Boys, after all, will be boys. But what happens when women decide to be women on their own terms? How far do we realistically think male perspective policing will take us?

There are less than five x-rated websites that cater specifically to couples and consider the woman’s perspective in consensual sexual activity.

This proliferation of staged, angry copulation also appears to be where a disturbing number of boys and young men in TT get their sex education, viewing violent sex made-to-order, by participants paid to recreate scenarios of male dominance, simulated rape that sometimes turns real when performers exceed agreed on physical boundaries.

I know Archbishop Jason Gordon. He has done me a solid at least once, the kind of thing you don’t ever forget. His job is to reinforce the position of the Catholic Church with his flock, and he should never be faulted for articulating the tenets of his faith.

The secular public is also entitled to note that the Catholic Church imposes a hard ceiling on the role that women play in the church and beyond that, there is the question of subject matter authority when it comes chaste priests discussing sexuality.

Tribe, for its part, has played a role in making a tool of intimate sexual gratification a matter of public scrutiny. Does the band have the capacity to ensure content-appropriate goodie bags are distributed to teenage players?

For that matter, should parents allowing their teenagers to play with a band that is determinedly adult in its Carnival outlook, not be reviewing and screening how their children engage with its approach to celebrating Carnival?

If nothing else, the thorns that have pricked many in the matter of the rose point to a clear need for society to be more open, accepting and proactive in discussing the role of sex and personal intimacy to teenagers who are far more aware of its mechanics at an early age than they are of its role in building healthy and positive relationships between couples.

The fuss when I was a teenager was about sex education in schools. Now, there is likely to be a need for sex re-education, a concerted effort to deprogram children who see sex as a wrestling match, not an erotic dance.

Across all the years that Tribe gave its players condoms – a technology developed for safer, non-reproductive sex – it was an implicit acknowledgement that the band’s masqueraders might choose to explore fun at its most intimate level.

This year the band sent a different message, that a woman’s orgasm could be self-directed, personally managed, and man-optional.

There is clearly a huge difference between the message of the condom, “Aye, Tribe honouring meh manhood” and that of the rose, “Wait, Tribe saying I not needed?”

I have not heard of any adult female who plays with Tribe expressing annoyance, disgust or even surprise with the contents of their goodie bag.

One news report noted the concerns of a parent who faced an unexpected discussion with their teenage child.

I should point out that I saw my first rose two years ago when a teenage girl showed it to me.

A discussion followed, but it was not one that denied the child dominion over her body or sought to diminish the influence her raging hormones exerted on it.

Men, we talk a lot about women as partners, but that word has a specific meaning, particularly between genders. It should acknowledge fundamental differences in our biology and the way our sex organs respond to stimulus.

A rose is singularly threatening to a certain world view of relationship dynamics.

Traditional dildos and vibrators mimicked the male organ, juggling size, texture and motors to change the experience of using them to the advantage of the user, but they were still, recognisably, dicks.

A rose centers a woman’s sexual experience on its essentials, the ability to manage clitoral stimulation to achieve orgasm.

If you’re a man who has a problem with that very specific and targeted application of technology, perhaps you should rethink the way you’ve been doing things with your partners all this time.