The Man Child and The Sexualization of the Girl
Every time I do my emotional dysfunction intensive course for men, 70% of the attendees confirm that they weren’t intentionally taught how to be a good husband and father. I have committed my life to helping men in this generation break this cycle.
We can raise strong, mature and responsible men to give our world quality leadership in every sphere of life.-Deji Irawo, Chief Responsibility Officer, X2D TV Lagos, Nigeria.
A lot is going on with our young people, and frankly speaking, they are not getting the much needed help they require to cross from the childhood stage into adulthood. To say the least, most of our young people right now really do not have direct access to older people who are wise enough to help the young ones learn wisdom. And why is that? The older ones are mostly also the victims of dysfunctional homes, families living daily by unwise counsel, decisions, choices and a failed society. We now have a “modernization” situation on our hands, where our young people are raised by social media influencers and the fake lives they live online, virtual mentors who mostly do what they do for the money, and then the nannies and house-helps at home who we have made sure are not so learned so they do not ever challenge our choices. Mummy and daddy are too busy being the very same social media influencers and virtual mentors to know that, right under their roof is a disaster brewing and about to explode. So, we speak fine English, and drive fine cars, but we cannot see that right within our sphere of influence is a beast we are feeding and raising to maul our nearest future. We are staking the future of our children on the pawn shops of our own insensitivity. And to even make matters worse, Covid-19 did come to show us how much we have left the lives and the well being of our children in the hands of the government, their lying medical agents, and the private companies who sell pharmaceutical drugs. You know what I mean, right?
We allow the government and the fear of an unseen death from Covid-19, which is 99.9 percent survivable, to push us to vaccinate our children with experimental vaccines whose long term side effects we do not know, and which we cannot reverse if it turns out that what we allowed them to take as vaccine was actually poison. And by doing that, we missed the chance of a life time to teach our children how not to respond to issues with fear, but rather by meticulous analysis of events, and thus, informed responses. A most important virtue, which they need for the world that they are stepping into, which is loaded with all manner of agendas steeped in evil. We shy away from making tough decisions and choices, just so that we do not have to take responsibility for our children. We leave such responsibilities in the hands of the government, and then later expect to have responsible children in society. How can we raise responsible children when we have not given them the chance to see us take responsibility ourselves? We need to stop lying to ourselves.
So, from where I stand, concerning life and living, I see that we have somehow created a situation where we are busy training, raising and preparing the girl child for life in the new feminist world, life in the corporate world and even for marriage, which are good for whatever they are good for, but we are forgetting that a trained and well raised girl child, living in a marriage under the “headship” of an untrained and un-raised boy child will lead mostly to disaster. You do not need to look too far to understand what I am saying. The surge in the cases of domestic violence, familicides, suicides, the numbers of separations and divorces that we are currently experiencing in our society, should be enough to show you that something is wrong with the direction we are facing as a people.
In the government, we have the ministry of women’s affairs, the ministry that takes care of the affairs of children, lots of NGOs that cater for the needs of the girl child, but what about the boy child and what about the ministry of men’s affairs? What about the organizations that are dedicated to raising and nurturing true leadership in the boy child? We do not have much of such. But why? I guess we miss the point when we tell ourselves that men can take care of themselves, or that men are leaders by design. But I am still waiting to see a man who gave birth to themselves by themselves, to say the least. We motivate ourselves when we tell people that they are born leaders, because the sperm that produced them was the one that won the race in the womb. A beautiful anatomical analogy of leadership, but whose intention was supposed to show us that leadership is not by chance, but by dedicated running towards perfection through training and accurate nurturing. For, if the environment of the womb, where this analogy is taken from, is corrupt or sick, the sperm will never become that winner who becomes a human and who becomes a leader. You get my drift, right?
We must teach them to see DIVINITY in every HUMANITY they come in contact with.
Sexualization of the girl child
There have been cases where teenage boys have been sent to prison or correctional facilities for having sex with young teenage girls of same age. I am not talking of rape cases, but mutually consentual sexual acts between two young people who are below eighteen years’ old. And the excuse is that, the law does not allow a girl of below eighteen years to have sex, and any man who does that to her has committed an offence. And this is irrespective of whether it was the girl child who actually initiated the sexual act. The young man just has to be punished for the very act that he had with a consenting female of his own age. And this is not some misguided talk. I have seen in some recent videos online where young school girls below eighteen are the ones even promoting sexual acts and tying to pull their male school mates into the act. In fact, there are couple of videos shared online where young school girls were warning women to watch their husbands, that they, the teenage girls were coming for them. Imagine that for a moment.
We keep missing the point
When two teenage children, a boy and a girl of below eighteen years’ old have sex, based on mutual agreement to do so, and not a forced entry, why should the law sentence the boy to jail, while the girl is made to feel like an innocent victim and sent home to her parents? While I do not condone such sexual engagement among children, it does not make sense nor give room for wisdom when such sentencing is done to the male child, like a villain, and the girl child is sent home like an innocent victim. We have been laying the wrong foundations for our societies, especially with the way we deal with sexual issues, and then act surprised when we are faced with domestic violence in marriages. We have been neglecting the emotional needs of the male child, while protecting the emotional expression and innocence of the female child. But should we not by now be teaching them the true virtues that make for our collective humanity, and not trying to pamper the individual tendencies that create misbehavior?
We all have our responsibilities
I really do not know if this is the best way to put it, but I think we are over-sexualizing the mind of the female child, while overly trying to carve out a man figure out of the male child, even while they are not taught the basic principles of how to be and act as men and women. So, we protect the sexuality of the female child from the sex hungry male child, beat down the male child for expressing that which is innate in him, and then create a situation where the female thinks that the only thing she is worth is the sex she has to offer to the male, while the male child thinks it is his right for the female to spread her legs for him. So, basically, our training and teaching of the male and female child is from the angle of sexuality, and not from the angle of HUMANITY. So, when they grow up, they do not grow up with the intention to be humans living among humans, but as sexual beings living among sexual beings, ready to be used to satisfy sexual needs, or to use sex as a weapon of destruction or a tool for favors. And then we complain when we see rape cases soaring at alarming rates and the cases of women ready to do anything to get what they want, including using sex, going sky high.
Now we see the so-called celebrities that we have allowed to invade our homes, and to teach our children on TV, have multiple children from different women, and the women have broken off from various marriages. In fact, having multiple baby mamas and multiple baby daddies seems to be a mark of celebrity status right now, and the numbers are increasing. Hollywood has created an over-sexualized society in their movies and our children are watching. For example, you watch a movie scene where a tired man goes to the bar after work, orders a drink and as he sips, a woman walks in with the intention of also getting a drink. Both get into some chit-chat about how stressful their day at the office or business was, even though they never met before. You can guess what the next scene is. Either both are in a room peeling off their clothes like they have suddenly been set on fire, with lips sealed in a passionate kiss and knocking things down or they are wasted in the bed wrapped with the bedsheets after a hot sexual entanglement. So, somehow we have created this narrative that says that it is ok to have sex with anyone, anywhere, and anyhow like animals running around in a zoo. And this is the narrative we are exposing the young minds of our children to.
We have even sexualized our adverts and product promotions.
You see a toothpaste advert with a woman in a bikini, all sexied up. But what has toothpaste, and the cleaning of the teeth and mouth, got to do with a “hot” model wearing a bikini? So, the male child who is not taught, and whose mind is not trained to handle such an over-sexualized society, goes out there thinking every vagina is for the taking, and every woman must be a sex toy. As for the female who has been told that the most important parts of her being are her breasts and vagina, she thinks that her power to make influence is found somewhere within her clothes. That is definitely a lot of torment to deal with and the torment is real out there.
My personal experience
I really do not like putting myself or my story out there, but I think what I am about to share will give a bit of strength to this article.
I grew up believing that I was going to marry a white woman. It got to the point where, even in my adult years, that I thought it was God’s plan for me. And that was because God had told me before that I would not marry from my home country, Nigeria. So, I was set in my mind that a white woman it was. So, when I knew it was the season to get married and the direction I was being pointed to was Kenya, it did not make sense at all. I was like, I thought it was a white woman story. This was when the Lord started to make me understand where I got the narrative of a white woman from. He took my mind back to somewhere in the 80s, when I was about five or six years’ old ,and I was stunned about how far back in our lives the things that influence our present day choices and decisions can be. I could remember the age bracket I was then because of where we were living when the event happened.
What happened was that, a friend of my mum’s came visiting and they got talking. She was telling my mum about how her husband left her for another woman. Her story was that, her husband went to Europe or America, I cannot recall exactly, and got himself sexually entangled with all manner of white women, and forgot about her. She was very particular about the sexual side of things. I was in a corner of the living room, so I could hear what they were saying and that story made a huge impression on my mind. I think because, as an introvert who loves to imagine and create things in my mind, even as a child, I began to imagine why it was possible for the man to leave his wife and go after a white woman just like that. In my young mind, I reasoned that white women must be very good looking, sexy and very romantic for such things to happen. To make matters worse, that was the era where Bollywood was making those their three hour long movies with lots of beautiful women singing, dancing and plenty of romance. At that time, I had no idea about the difference between a white woman and an Indian woman, as long at they appeared in the movies they were the same to me.
Now, imagine the magnitude of impressions that that seemingly simple conversation between two women made on my mind for decades, to the point where my choice of a wife was a white woman. What if I was not helped by the Lord to see where my imagination came from? What if I had opportunities to travel to Europe or America while growing up, and then came in contact with white women? What would have become of me, my destiny as a person, from the perspective of me thinking that white women are just sex images and nothing more? Would I, by now have had children that are half Afrikan and half American or European and then told myself I had achieved God’s purpose for my life? Imagine such deception. But what I want you to much more imagine is this: How many people in our world today are living their current lives based on former lies that they imagined in their minds, or things they were told by others from the past that formed the bases of their judgments? From the rate of the pseudo-lifestyles that we can see in our world right now, and the influence of these social media influencers, you will agree with me that not many are living their own lives, but they are living the pictures they see in others. Now imagine what kind of world we will have in the next few decades, if we do not begin to correct things in our children that are detrimental to their true growth.
And please do not get me wrong and think that I am against marrying from outside of Afrika. Not at all.
What must we do?
It is definitely easier, and less costly, to train, raise, and build responsible children than it is to repair broken men and women. And that is where the challenge is. We must begin by renewing our minds, and begin to redefine what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman, and how both redefinitions will create the communities and societies that we hope to see and live in. Why is that important? We can only be on the outside or in the society what we are on the inside and in our homes.
Our lives, like my own story that I shared, are set in daily events like layers upon layers. And it is very difficult to know which day, month and year a particular layer of our lives was created and hidden. It is like a library of books with no titles. How do you know the book, the chapter, the page, the paragraph and the line where you saw a statement decades ago? It is almost impossible if you are not helped. And that is why we must be careful of the layers of events we create each day, which have the ability to define our lives.
So, instead of just teaching and showing our children things that make them men or women based on their biology, maybe we also need to begin to share with them simple principles, rules and mindsets. Those that help them understand that when they go out there into the world, it is not a fight between who is male or female, who is richer than the other, or even how to play the game to “win”, but how to be humans, and live like humans with selfless hearts, compassion, kindness, love, inner beauty, which sees good and beauty in others and not sex toys or human ATM machines. We must teach them to see DIVINITY in every HUMANITY they come in contact with. We must let our boys know that the female is not a toy for sexual gratification, but mothers and sister that must be honored and respected as carriers of life. We must teach them to take responsibility and to do it with noble hearts.
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