Intimate Affairs: Young men, older women, by Funke Egbemode

It happened somewhere in Kogi State, according to some randy reporters and amplified by randier commentators. The woman had been married for 18 years without a child. The man is a 300-level undergraduate. We can safely say he is 22 years old.

Yeah, he is that young. Maybe that’s why he had the energy to do the damage that he did. You didn’t think what he did was a maximum damage, a 20-year-old knocking up a Vice Chancellor’s wife?

Let’s back up a little. According to my friend, Professor Abigail (surname withheld). There’s a lot going on in this story that must be analyzed. Trust a Professor to bring critical thinking to everything. I told my friend, it was a straight story of using what you have to get what you want. She said it was too simple. Prof wanted to examine who the victor and the victim were? She wanted me to go and check the venue, the deeds and the frequency of the deeds and terms of reference of the deeds. Professor Abigail is like that, let’s pardon her. This is an intimate affairs case. Yes, it may not be simple, but it is not as complicated as Prof wanted to weave it out to be. One could hear her critical thinking mind concocting stuff like methodology, abstract and other hard stuff like that.

What kind of 20-22 year old thinks it’s okay to bed and impregnate a woman old enough to be his mother? Love is no respecter of age because age is just a number? Noooo, don’t even go there. Even if the woman got married at 22, she had been married for 18 years for crying out loud! That would make her about 40 years. Ahhhh, this guy looked at a woman his mother’s age and flipped her so hard, she threw caution to the wind and forgot her status and consequences.

She could have blackmailed him, said Professor Abigail. Blackmail him for what? I don’t see how. I can still relate with the logic of a virile young man sowing his wild oats. I can understand a young adventurous man thinking slamming and slaying his VC’s wife is equal to winning a Noble laurel. But I can’t see how he is a victim.

I see chance. I see choice and choices. I see two people who decided to fall headlong into temptation instead of resisting it.

I hear things. I’m sure you do too. Years ago, indigent and ‘I-shall-not-gree’ undergraduate girls commissioned the aristos business, and recruited others diligently to fund their education and most times, their greed. Young girls, older men, parties and everything printable and unprintable were common concept on many university campuses. I heard the enterprise is still thriving beyond borders of higher institutions. Hook-ups and ‘Olosho girls’ selling what they have to the highest bidder, irrespective of the risk to their lives and limbs, especially in these days of Yahoo-plus guys and their dark ways.

So, was our undergraduate guy an ‘indigent’ or a ‘badly brought-up’ child? Prof wanted to discuss that.

‘Let’s explore the kind of young man who saw nothing wrong in bedding his mother’s age mate. Did he do it for money or he is just a randy youth who loves to give it to older women. Yeah, there are men who think they are gifts to sugar mummies.

Sincerely, Prof’s logic has become a sore point in our society. I thought the ‘hook-up’ and ‘aristo enterprise’ were exclusive preserve of girls, but not anymore.

‘What was I expecting? These new day men now spot nose-piercings and rings. They spend as much time in the hairdressing salons as their wives and sisters. If you ask me, I’d say they basically envy who women are and want what women have.

On campuses and even outside them, more young men are turning their bodies to sources of income. They look for women-in-need or make themselves available for movement to certain parties where they are ‘assessed’ and posted to older and richer women who need their services.

Appalling and sad? Yes. Whether it’s a girl child or boy child that ends up at this sorry pass. It is tragic, of course, and reflects badly on the parents or guardians of the child who becomes this person, this hooker, especially when this hooker isn’t an indigent student.

Dear Daddies and Mummies, let us pay more attention to our children’s tendencies. Let us listen to their thoughts, their opinions and size up their worldview on subjects such as sex-for-money.

A commercial sex worker is a commercial sex worker. We can try to coat it with flowery tags. Find out if your son sees nothing wrong in using what he has to get what he wants. Find out if his hours in the gym building muscles and his love for tight-fitting shirts and trousers has hook-up undertone. His weight lifting efforts, are they for keeping fit or to attract ‘customers’?

Occasionally, let’s start a topic that will generate a robust debate on the matter. Note the views of your children. Don’t get angry and start speaking in tongues if they say hook-up is part of life. Don’t start casting and binding your village people for bewitching your children. Calm down and calmly tell them what risk is involved. Tell them their ‘hook-up’ sugar daddy could one day show up as their father-in-law. The sugar mummy could be a ritualist. They could end up being framed for drug trafficking, when all they are guilty of is being in the wrong place at the time of an NDLEA raid. Money trails could link them to fraud investigation by EFCC. Hepatitis B, HIV, Syphilis and their younger cousins are also part of the mix.

Today’s young men are results and report cards of their parents. Unruly beads and behaviour, vanity fashion that reflect effeminate inner self, inhumane abusive husbands who were once-upon-a-time half-baked sons. Our parenting skills are due for review. Parents and guardians need to do better, a lot better, otherwise, university dons, like Prof Abigail will soon fill our space and faces with research reports on badly-brought up sons who impregnate Vice-chancellor’s wives or their bosses’ wives.

Didn’t one young musician just strip a former royal wife naked at an international village square?

For now, let’s look at how not to embarrass your husband even if you are under pressure. Marriage is full of pressure, we all know that. Every veteran wife knows that marriage is tough and most days are more about crisis management than romance. But the women who bring home foreign DNA are the ones on the hot seat this weekend.

Could a woman desperate for the fruit of the womb have done better than succumb to the temptation of sleeping with a younger man while still living with her lawful husband? In the year of our Lord 2024, one of the options open to a woman in the Lord’s waiting room is a sperm bank. There are sperm and egg donors that can be officially and formally accessed. I am assuming that if a woman has lived with a man for 18 years without a child, the man, among many other challenges, may be suffering from an ineffective streams of sperms. His sperm count could be low or his ‘boys’ too lazy to swim from a woman’s shrine to her womb.

That a woman slept with a younger man and then got pregnant after almost 20 years of trying further buttresses the points against the husband. But it does not exonerate her from a major sin. She humiliated her husband. It was bad enough that she slept with another man, a younger man but that she actually got pregnant therefrom is mean. She rubbed his nose in his inability to plant in her a seed that could germinate.

Yes, the pain of being called barren is pure torture for a woman but my take is if you want to try a greener, more fertile pasture, do it on your own time, in your own space. If you are married to ‘Osun ’, do not sleep with ‘Oba’. You can’t be married to one man and be pregnant for another.

*Egbemode (egbemode3@gmail.com)

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