The first time I was eager to be a youth corps member, I was 14. I had been hearing it, but that moment was the first time the desire spiraled into life — It seemed fun and exciting to get sex with ease.
If memory serves, that moment must have been
at a football viewing centre — three guys ranging between their mid-20s
to early 30s shared stories of their experiences during their compulsory
one-year Nigerian Youth Service Corps while drinking pelebe and dealing with the equally near-mandatory post-NYSC depression from unemployment.
What they discussed; their various sexcapades,
taking advantage of underage girls in the schools they were posted to.
Some of them even told stories of how they slept with other people’s
wives in the face-me-I-face-you apartments they lived in.
It was not wrong, it was simply a
rite of passage, that you couldn’t dare ‘miss’. Anybody like the
graduate-turned-barber sat amongst them, who claimed he never got a
taste of the forbidden fruit was shamed and made to feel inadequate — he
was dead to them as the discussion suggested. Admittedly, I even judged
him — he wasn’t was not 'man enough.'
Honestly, that wasn’t the first time
NYSC is historically a time to frolic. That
couldn’t have been the first time I learned of such crushing details. Of
course, I must have noticed some weird eye contact and favoritism
towards my classmates who matured early from Corps Members posted to my
schools over the years.
That moment, at 14, was when it truly
registered. It’s also most commonly practiced amongst men than with
women. But now, I see these men as kids; products of what porn and
internalized vices do to an impressionable mind. Sadly, we don’t discuss
it enough.
It was also during these times that
you heard tales of how a woman wanted you to chase her when she says
‘No’ in the heated room of colliding pheromones and heat-seeking objects
from the nether regions of the body.
We were told It was ingrained in us that ‘No’
in fact meant ‘Yes.’ We ran with this for a while and some of the claims
on what now turns out to be rape seemed true for a while — but thank
God for good parents.
Back to 14…
My memory of that particular conversation
became my target of enjoyment during NYSC — even though I was only an
SSS2 boy who had just recovered from a collision with a sliding glass
just 5 months prior.
I wanted to jump out of that era to NYSC and
equally start sowing my oaths; a life of sexual activity; testing
hormones stimulated for my selfish and very ignorant pleasure.
I even fantasized about ‘the life’ — some of those girls cooking for me.
Sorry to burst your bubble, it never happened
About 10 months later…
It was a Sunday morning, we had just eaten a
delicious plate of yam and fried eggs. As usual, at the time, my Dad
wasn’t much of a churchgoer, fighting his inner demons and intellectual
rebellion against religion as a former 'Rosicrucian’. Mum also decided
to have a day off.
Out of the blue, Dad decided to give us some
very harsh education on sex — my sister and my cousin were 17, I was
going to be 15 in a month.
Quite characteristically, Dad didn’t hold back
or sugarcoat the truth. He lectured us on managing our sexual urges,
how to deal with harassers — yes, even us guys, the wrongness of
pedophilia and the age to truly think about having sex and the perils of
having sex — even responsibly.
After the crushing weight of that message, it
was like the three of us had our cookies yanked from us. On Sundays like
this, we would usually watch movies all through, but that day, we
didn’t; we couldn’t.
At that moment, I realized that a lot of
people are victims of internalized practices — my first rude awakening
to the cruel life of sex at different levels, including what was consent
and what was in fact, rape. Oh yes, Dad held nothing back.
I felt robbed of an opportunity to live like
the streets had promised I could live, but I couldn’t disobey my
Dad — his instructions have a hold over you and were imprinted
psychologically, that whenever you intend to do anything contrary to
what he lectured you on, you literally see his virtual face repeating
those instructions you intend to flout to you.
My Dad was clear, “never have sex with any
girl under the age of 18 between now when you’re 23. When you’re 23,
your target should be girls above 21. When you’re above 25, you can act
according to what is right because then, you’d have a clear idea of
what’s right and wrong.”
Mind you, he said all these things
predominantly in Yoruba, with explanations delivered in English. He also
rubbished the sex education we got in school, our Guidance Counselors
and Biology teachers — he was from a different era.
I think you get the picture; dreams were
shattered, but then, I conformed because he was my Dad. Eight years down
the line, I fully understood his point, while I also appreciated him
forcing me to take cognizance of my environment.
A lot of people were not as lucky as I was
We are a product of the terrible vices we have
internalized as norms. It is why we face an uphill battle to help
people understand and accept that, ‘No, in fact, means no,’ and anything outside that is rape.
It’s also why some of us struggle to grasp the
concept of gender equality for what it’s meant to be. Vices and
problems relating to sexual impropriety get transmitted generationally
through time in its essence — they don’t just up and exist one day.
The reality of one generation then becomes the
problem another generation struggles to eradicate because no generation
simultaneously internalizes solutions unless the threat of brute force
or punishment is involved.
As such, the middle class is usually the last set to shed the last skins of a terrible run.
Pedophilia
is one of such problems and one of its vectors is one of its NYSC. Just
as those egbons who unintentionally informed me of ‘the life’ at 14, a
lot of other young Nigerian men go into their mandatory one-year of
service to sleep with as many female students as they can, wowing the
village girls with the predatory nature.
Though some of them understand the wrongness
of the action to the extent of these girls’ parents finding out the
sexual activity of their daughters, they do not grasp an understanding
of the fundamental wrongness of bedding teenagers into sexuality that
early.
No matter how you want to spin it, anybody
below 186 is a developmental mind and should never be open to the
dangerous forms of sex.
Some of these brothers of ours also introduce
some of these straight children to homosexuality with the threat of
failure and other things an impressionable mind would fear.
But still, our brothers enjoy it
I think the idea isn’t just to tell someone
something is wrong — it’s more about letting them know why it’s wrong
and the risk factors attached.
What is wrong is wrong. Sex is an emotional
and physical activity that should be enjoyed by two consenting adults
and not between an adult and a minor.
In this world where women are held to higher
moral standards and conscripted to sexual conservatism, indulging a girl
that young could be more disadvantageous to her than even her abuser
long-term.
Thus, it is important to teach our children
the brutal truth of sex education when they start getting into puberty.
We do our children no favors by protecting them from the conversations
around sex, they will found out!
The best we can do is prepare them for what’s
coming because puberty is an age of curiosity and early youth is an age
of experimentation. An ungrounded and unprepared child could easily fall
off the rails from experimenting or what we deem ‘enjoyment.’
It is also important to not hold our girls to a
higher moral standard or tell them to not have sex, the idea is
bringing our children up in the right way, so they distinguish right
from wrong and then, hit them with the brutal truth of sex education and
let them make their own choices. Lessons from our own lives should
teach us that we cannot shield kids from having sex.
Also important is teaching our children the
truth on consent, rape, pedophilia, methods of protecting themselves
from predators and more importantly, self-worth.
I learned all these thanks to my father.
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