Eavesdropping The Sex Lessons: What My Parents Kept Away From Me -By Ogungbile Emmanuel Oludotun

If I could clearly remember, I was just a 13 year old and I can hardly reminisce if I could savvy anything called sex. Yet, one thing I could mull over is that I’ve always envisioned somehow, how the scene might want to look like. Like a typical local boy, I was raised in an environment where the word ‘Penis and Breast were hallowed and adequately kept away from us, especially by our parents. We’re meant to believe that they are emphatically ‘adult words’ that we are later taught how to euphemise them as we grow older, with agreeable words such like ‘kini mi’ (My thing), ‘nnkan omokunrin'(my manhood), ‘kokoro'(insect), ‘baba ibeji'(Twin dad), and other laughable consecrated words that we learnt while we were very young.

As I walked through the sequence of shrunk knowledge and growth, I recalled how my reproduction classes in junior school sometimes go obscene. In fact, I educed a particular class that we were taught this particular ‘sacred’ puberty topic in an untainted shy class. I reminisced how I personally sniggered and gawked at how one of my friends made signals and blushed artlessly. Yes, Tolu my friend, did the anticipated nasty and impolitic thing, he brought out this about three inches depressed penis, which made our innocent class of teenagers go haywire. When we all saw it, we burst into this unimaginable laughters and squealed chortles. Indubitably, that was how my ‘innocent’ generation was raised. To be clueless and reserved for everything, awkward, ashamed and dismissive about our pubic regions and sex education itself.

If I’m not mistaken or misapprehending, this experience should not be really far from many other experiences of kids who were raised in my generation. We were indeed the sufferers and the ‘nesciencer’ of sex education. Our well informed, respected and over-protective parents will not want their kids to be exposed to the ‘devilish knowledge’ of sex, they’ll tell us different plausible lies in myth and fallacies such as “you will get a girl pregnant, if you dare touch them in the breast”, “you must not seat next to a girl when she is on her period”, you are not yet mature to think or talk about sex”, when you grow old you’ll understand, and many other thought-provoking superstitious lies alike that made us so scared, skeptical and distanced to the opposite gender, and even sex as a word itself.

Consequently, many times like that I’ve chewed over the convincible reasons why parents had covered so many imperative secrets from us, why they expected us to grow so old to learn our sex lessons? and even from whom do we learn them from when we grow that old. Sometimes I justify to presume they don’t want us to go all way to be a sex addict or maybe they don’t want us to be ‘pre-gulped’ with the pleasures of sex which might cost us distractions, or maybe they don’t want us to go on experimenting different phases of viciousness and immoralities around the streets. Really I don’t think I know!

Growing up for me was massive and challenging, sprouting in increase and strengths, with swift increment in everything, most especially, my depressed lower part and few tangible growths all around the salient surfaces. My mind couldn’t stop being inquisitive nor nosy, hence, I began to create questions that I might encounter difficulty in answering. Sometimes, I got locked in different crossroads of whom to tell, what these curling hairs mean? why am I having my boxers wet with absurd smells at night? Is it bedwetting or what? Why am I having unnecessary attractions towards the opposite sex, and why does my penis grow so thick when we are together? Wherefore it created a dilemma of questions which I thus found my unreserved comfort and rescue in taking to the immoral colleagues of whom we are in the same shoes, downloading porn videos from its entertaining source, watching them secretly at night, asking few bigger friends who gave me information than I required. To be candid, it was a cold experience that constituted the highlights of my life.

In this way, as if that was not enough, I began to seriously thirst for wider information about this weird reaction that sights out of me, so also was my research about sex and requirements fiercely grows. True, I became vast in ‘all’ knowledge about sex, that I broke the bond and the so-called ‘secrecy’ and everything my parent reckoned I could never learn about sex, till I was old enough to share my experience of how uphill it was to get a sex lesson without any parent directions, which has its own implications and consequences which I cannot start to unfurl. Thus, I’m still concerned and perplexed about what the future holds for kids that were raised like my generation and even the ones coming behind. That is, is this how everything is going to be encrypted from them till they end up in the hands of ignorance and immorality? I think I can emphatically say I fear for what will be of these ‘innocent’ kids who are being denied of this salient talks about sex.

Our 21st-century African parents cannot keep on hiding this acclaimed secrecy away from their lads, kids are growing smarter and sharper than their crude forefathers, they need to be adequately informed about Sex education, the importance, value to the community, processes and dangers that may engulf out of it. Parents need to raise their kids in the most decent way, and not being too overprotective of information they might get from any where. let the Lads be Informed! Let them get the 21st century Knowledge.

Ogungbile Emmanuel Oludotun