Men Are Covers, Women Are Books…Modern Masculinity Is Judged And Slotted Into Categories We Didn’t Sign Up For.
The moment you take your first breath of ZED’s air and a mid-wife says, “It’s a boy!” you know you’re in for a lifetime of expectation. Because being a Zambian man is an indictment of how you’ll probably repeat or remix the mistakes of your father, presidents, brother or friends.
As a man, you will probably spend your life proving that the apple not only fell far from the tree but rolled a hundred metres away.
This is why nature resists an encore of the same man. Thus the mixed results of a father who tries to replicate his exact success through the son.
So, there is an argument that we’re no different from one another. But even if you’re referencing the family jewels as proof that men are the same, some have more carats than the other.
Take the frankly hilarious perception that men who do not drink alcohol must have another vice. Womanizing tends to be the shoe they try to fit on you. The agreed wisdom is that if you don’t enjoy booze then you’re focused on boobs.
It is entirely plausible that the man averse to alcohol is simply not interested in alcohol. One perceived bad thing does not need to be a substitute for another. Men these days must discern and protect this about themselves.
If we openly love our wife or partner, we’re not doing it to hide our secret life blessing another woman with attention, rentals, holidays, phones and shopping sprees. It can be that we simply love our person openly.
Society does this to us. These boxes we’re fitted into ultimately and subliminally lead us into repeating precarious precedents.
Workaholic men do not have to detach from the responsibilities that go beyond a TXN to their wives for that month’s groceries, hair, nails and maybe a pair of shoes. No, make it two pairs. You should know the drill by now.
Your father and his father were workaholics who did not have time for their wives and children. But a man can work terribly hard to put a meal on the table and still be at the table.
We should push back on the universal BS that dangles us a glazed carrot of addiction, womanizing, abuse, alcohol, misappropriation of funds and suicide when we forge new, unprecedented paths for ourselves as men.
Life’s algorithm wants society to laugh last at how man builds a house, his marriage unravels, the car is repossessed, job is lost, business closes down or health deteriorates. You’re supposed to have stolen, cheated or bribed your way to ruin, like every man before and after you.
Our survival, relevance, influence and impact is heavily dependent on resisting the onslaught of perception, treatment and enabling us as being ‘all the same.’ We must resist precedents.
When the chickens come home to roost, they must find a barbeque stand, a full cooler box, and Bluetooth speaker waiting for them.
