Boys have simple bodies.
No. Men are complex—and ignored.
Hey, how are you?
Reading Fikayo today just inspires me to write again. It was Monday yesterday and, God I hate to say it, I forgot I had to send a letter. Maybe because my sense of time—and what day is what—is nebulous here. Maybe because I was too busy being Metro Boomin'
My PC is propped on a pillow on my thighs as I write this and I am typing Steve Jobs-style except for the pillow.
And I have a pillow on my thighs for two reasons.
First is so my wrists are relaxed on the keys as I type, it's very relaxing when they are at this angle. Second is to shield my genital area from the laptop heat that they say causes prostate cancer or some ugly thing like that.
I care more about stuff like that now—all those men-men stuff—and I think it's one of the markers of maturity and adulthood. You know, when you start paying more attention to stuff about reproductive health than you used to.
Phrases like sperm count and erectile dysfunction are no longer just fancy medical terms that those medicine hawkers at parks use to sell their wares—preaching over loudspeakers in rustic Pidgin English (and I always imagine their "medicine" as vicious concoctions of roots and herbs; foul-smelling, gut-crushing)
Phrases like these mean a lot now. Like big pieces of my life. Like keywords to the syllabus of being male.
My ears prick up a little when I hear even a wisp of a word about male health. And it isn't good that I think I have always known more about menopause and ovulation.
Growing up, it seemed like there was nothing much to talk about being a man. In the neighbourhood, at school, on television. Was there ever any TV programme mentioning balls aside sports?
It was as though our bodies were simple casts of steel.
Just, there.
Women on the other hand, were complex and varied. There were whole cultures around their bodies: they somehow bleed and they had to manage it somehow; they have trouble having children at certain ages: they can only get pregnant at certain times of the month, right?
But then, as a child, there was some form of comforting pride to being a man, to being simple. To not being complex: the way I only needed a haircut once in two weeks. Women were a lot of trouble. Women were a 10-year degree programme at name-any-hard-to-graduate-out-of university.
I don’t feel that way again. Men are complex—and ignored.
We had these routine pep talks in secondary school.
They'd call us out of our classes and split us into two huge groups: girls and boys. The girls would sit in the hall inside, while us boys would be crowded on the assembly ground outside, or on the small field beside the grounds.
Male teachers would congregate with us and take turns speaking in the festering afternoon heat while we shaded our eyes from the sun with our palms. You know the things they tell us boys: avoid bad boys, smoking is bad, read your books. Wash your boxers.
The sex talk was nebulous, cloudy. They talked like we knew it all. Someone "bold" would just skirt over it like, "If you get a girl pregnant, you will have to leave school"
To me, the boys looked around like, "how do you get a girl pregnant, boss?"
Maybe. I can't know what they were thinking.
Me, I was the bespectacled boy who read everything. You'd be surprised what you'd find when you have your nose in everything. Books, I mean.
After the long advice sessions, we'd mix up with the girls again, and they'd be chuckling and whispering to each other as though they were just initiated into some fun, female-only cult. They would be holding little books with covers tinged pink and they won't even let us touch it. The lady guest that had come to speak with them had told them not to tell "the boys". The secrecy was amusing and curious and annoying.
C'mon, we can tell you all they told us. They told us not to smoke.
Tell us yours naw.
One of my female friends, I'll call her O, we were very close and she told me they told them girl-things, and she'd spill some details, laughing while at it. She said they taught them how to wash their parts. She said they said boys shouldn't touch them.
I am grateful for those sessions. It was really thoughtful for my school to put them together, and I think we had them once every year. But for us boys, they were too many things unaddressed, too many things untaught, too many things.
Outside school, it's the same.
The quietude is disheartening.
You teach boys puberty and tell us our voices will deepen. But boss is leaking semen at night and growing up thinking it's some superstitious matrimony to the marine world.
Does society just trust boys to figure it all out somehow?
Should I stop the ‘whining’?
If girls suffer from misinformation, boys suffer from no-information.
That's why we are here, done piecing the meaning of premature ejaculation.
Special thanks to male friends in those group talks that switch from celebrity gossip to sex to philosophy like a DJ on steroids.
Also, thanks to those internet blogs—the credible ones from doctors with many suffixes after their very white names.
Oh, and those gems we found while eavesdropping on conversations on buses.
So, penile length is varied? Thank you.
Little story …
A day after we signed out, G and I went out to sign on friends’ shirts as is the tradition. Law finished first and other departments wrote their last papers on that day.
So after touring the school, it started drizzling while we were taking pictures with Big Wave, our rapper friend at Sciences. So we went to sit at the back for shade. Another rapper guy, Ayo, came along and started talking. Big already knew him but G and I didn't and he had signed out that day too.
We were arguing top 10 rapper lists and hip-hop and I was getting incensed but I could tell there was something about him, something familiar. While we were at it, Big and Ayo started a small battle, and it was going so mad I whipped out a phone and recorded it.
It was wow. Wicked double entendres. Mad puns. Funny takes. Sinister rhymes.
Thank God we recorded it because now, G made it into a beautiful video and we posted it on YouTube. (You can even hear G and me howling and laughing in amazement at the background)
I had to tell Ayo that he sounded so similar to Big Glock Tobi, another singer friend. And Ayo said he was his brother. It was a sweet coincidence in the end.
In other news …
Ab-Soul’s 2024 album, Soul Burger, was out on the 8th and I have a few favourite songs. That’s all. I am not feeling it too much. I need more listens.
A review of Tyler’s CHROMAKOPIA is slowly forming in my head and it’s a lot irreverent than I had first imagined it to be.
Thank you for your reviews on the last letter. It was a rare moment of vulnerability for me and it was comforting to share and feel appreciated.
The GRAMMYS released their list of nominations and I’m happy to see Tems and Kendrick Lamar have multiple nods. Tems has three, Lamar has seven. It was easy to predict that ‘Not Like Us’ would be strolling on the GRAMMYS carpets.
But I am fuming that ScHoolboy Q’s BLUE LIPS is missing. I am angry. It's not on Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance or Best Rap Album.
BLUE LIPS is arguably the best rap album of 2024.
Pitchfork’s Dylan Green gave it an 8.3 and said:
“it reaffirms him as one of mainstream rap’s most engaging and daring stylists. Few MCs, on his label or elsewhere, are capable of firing in so many different directions and hitting this many targets at once without sounding out of their depth, but Q corrals the ups and downs of his lavish lifestyle into a deliriously entertaining joyride.”
Well, it is well.
It's always nice to write to you. Enjoy your week.
PS: Here's a link to Green's Pitchfork article if you'd like to read more:
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/schoolboy-q-blue-lips/
i think society just expect boys to figure it out. The culture of silence surrounding the male body is really disturbing, especially considering that people would rather sexualize these experiences rather than educate.
It simply sucks, and I never really thought about it until I read this piece.
Brilliant job as always Emmanuel