THE SEXOLOGY X-RAYS: DEAR MEN, WOMEN ARE NOT PREYS

As someone who grew up without a sister, it took a while for me to understand women. My mother was more of a man than a woman. The tough job of nurturing 6 boys and her husband was enough to dilute her feminism to its barest minimum. She was the commander-in-chief of her army and I still hear her orders n my head many years after. 

The first time my mother spoke to me about girls was the day I was about to leave for college. Her words were firm and straightforward ''When you get to school, you have to be very careful with girls. If you get any girl pregnant, you are in soup''. Knowing my mother very well, I reckoned the soup would be hot enough to decolorize my future. So I stayed away from the girls but not for too long. 

Over the years, I have interacted with various shades ‎of women that have greatly shaped my orientation of the female folk. No two women I have met are the same but they all share one thing in common. The desire to be loved and protected. Unfortunately, men often take advantage of this for their own selfish gain. I have grown to respect women, even the ones that have lost it. It takes a man to deprive a woman of her pride and it takes another man to restore it.

As men, we have some erroneous orientations that have largely been centered on demeaning women. We believe that if we have our way with one girl, then others should line up for us in submission or that when a girl says stop, she means go on. We also presume that once a woman gets comfortable around us, it’s a clarion call to devour her. There is also the assumption that once we have done a woman a favour, she is bound to repay us on our own terms and conditions because we are the men. And that nothing good comes easy in Nigeria, that we have to force our way to have everything we want; women inclusive.

Our culture mirrors women as weak and vulnerable, hence manipulating them unjustly is not perceived as an infringement. Men are always given a soft landing when they are caught because we blame their manhood for leading them astray. His libido is branded as the devil while we do all we can to salvage him as an innocent bystander who was bound and helpless as his manhood wrecked unimaginable havoc. 

"He is a very responsible man, how could he have descended so low?" we cry out in amazement. According to John Charles Ryle ''Men fall in private long before they fall in public''. As men, we all have our demons, so it's left for us to tame it ‎in private before it destroys us in public. It's difficult to build a good reputation and even more difficult to redeem it when it's tarnished. 

The lack of self-control is never an excuse. No matter how great he is, a man without self-control is less of a man. If you cannot control yourself, then you cannot control anything. 

What shall it profit us as a people if we keep fighting corruption and ‎carry on corrupting the lives of our women? Who will raise the future leaders that will sustain the integrity of this country. If we turn our women to mere objects that can be abused at will without attendant consequences, what kind of women do we hope to marry?

Men who take advantage of the women that count on them should be punished. If not for any reason, for making it very difficult for good men who spend months and sometimes years trying to convince women that we are not all monsters. It is high time we contain the excesses of men who disrespect women, so that we can gradually redeem whatever is left of our collective image. ‎