First, I want to make something very clear before the Meninists jump into my inbox: ‘I do not hate men.’
No matter what you have been told, I don’t hate men. It’s not even possible for me because my father is a man, my brothers are men, and I have male friends. I go to literary programmes with men and listen to them, even if I think some of their opinions are a bit dumb. You know how men can be.
I actually don’t think it’s humanly possible to hate men if you seek the pleasure of what lies between their legs. No woman can hate men; after all, they do father our babies. And one day I will have a son and will look into his eyes and fully understand that men are human too. I will marvel at how that tiny detail escaped me my whole life.
Let me start by telling you the value of men. Apart from being a father, husband and great life supporter, just raising a son increases your chance of a good life, considering boys are more empathetic and are more likely to look after their birth families, even though men after marriage belong to their wives’ families.
Therefore, men are treated as valuable humans and with all this knowledge, it is impossible to hate men. I literally cringe when I hear those Meninists telling you otherwise. Never listen to them, they are bitter, angry, wifeless and want you to end up like them. They exist to destroy the core values of family life. They are sponsored by evil Western groups to destroy what is left of our culture.
I know I don’t have your experiences, but I also believe I have the right to speak over you and tell you my opinion about your own experiences. And just because I want to shut you up doesn’t mean I hate you. You don’t know what’s best for you, and I am here to put you on the right path.
So, discard that idea that women hate men; we can’t hate what we need to use in the future.
A woman’s heart is not like a man’s heart; instead of being made of veins and muscles that can be penetrated by a simple stab of a knife, the woman’s heart has special sensors connected to the stomach, a path that can only be opened by the taste of a man’s good cooking. I know this may seem hard to believe, but this is a fact we have known our entire lives.
You cannot be happy as a man unless you equip yourself with the amazing cooking skills that will make any woman’s heart open for you without question. This means that no matter how many talents God decided to bless you with, you must place them aside and focus on learning how to cook. Instead of wasting money on French class or dancing class, use that hard-earned money to pay for culinary classes.
When it comes to cooking, there shouldn’t be any excuses because all men come with cooking skills installed in their XY chromosomes. So, when you are asked what your hobbies are, it is not the time to start mentioning writing, reading or sleeping; this is the part where you swear on your dead grandma’s grave that you have never enjoyed anything more than cooking.
You can choose to give details about how you came into this world clutching tomatoes in between your hands, even as the doctors struggled to cut the umbilical cord, but one thing you should know for sure is that this is your duty. And no matter how well a woman can cook, it is not her duty to, except of course it is a professional competition or job, and that is when we can all accept that women are better cooks than men.
Right from childhood, you are trained to be a cook because your worth lies in your ability to prepare a perfect plate of jollof rice or stew — your degrees, achievements or other talents do not matter if you can’t do that. Our grandfathers and fathers knew this, and that is why marriages lasted longer. Men knew their place.
Even when my grandfather reached eighty, with a bent back and poor eyesight, he made sure my grandmother was always well fed. He never allowed someone else to cook for her, except their children. I love seeing them together, even though I hardly ever hear them talk for more than five minutes, and I have never seen my grandfather smile with teeth, but I don’t need anyone to tell me that that’s not what a real man and a real marriage are.
The problem with the men of this generation is that they have been brainwashed by Meninists into believing that they don’t need to cook for women. This is bad, very bad indeed. If our fathers can go to work from morning till evening, and then come back home to cook for our mothers who had been home hours before them, while cleaning, doing the laundry and other house chores, I don’t understand why you cannot do the same.
It breaks my heart to see men on social media buying into these harmful ideologies. Women are created to be served by men. It was a result of consideration of our feelings that you were created. Women do not need to do lowly jobs like cooking the food they will eat or washing their baby’s bum, no matter how jobless they are. We need more orientation, especially for these poor young men who have been brainwashed into thinking that their value or worth lies in their humanity, not in the perfect pot of egusi soup they can prepare.
And parents need to do better in making their sons cook, even if they have one son among five girls. The negligence of parents leads to women cooking in the kitchen and this leads to an imbalance in marriage and other relationships. Men need to understand that they have a unique advantage over women because they get to nurture their families and that is a great honour indeed.
So, instead of teaching women how to cook, we should normalise praising men for their hard work or making trending videos about us giving them money for doing their chores, which will get us on the list of good wives and women. I think men ignoring their duties is what is wrong with the world. That is why we have increased illnesses, and we went through a global pandemic.
Men need to learn that their true power comes from serving. We all know that the real bosses are men, not women. Cooking, cleaning and not having a life outside your family may not feel like a lot but it is the fabric that holds the world together.
Stop complaining about cooking or serving your family. Everything worth doing is worth doing well. Save women the stress of looking for good food outside their homes. If you don’t take your duties seriously, do not blame your wife if she looks elsewhere. Don’t let another man snatch your wife’s attention by doing what you failed to do.
Women may be superior beings, but they are, after all, just women and have the capacity to lose their senses when they see a hot plate of pounded yam and egusi. How do you expect them to control their urges when other men outside fulfil the role you recklessly ignore?
Excerpt from ‘YOU CAN BE THE HAPPIEST MAN IN THE WORLD’ — a satirical work addressing gender dynamics using reverse roles.
Hauwa Saleh Abubakar is a Nigerian writer, poet and journalist. Her work has appeared in Lolwe, Ake Review, The Weight of Years: An Afroanthology of Creative Nonfiction, Agbowo and more. She is the founder of an organic tea brand, Maimah’s Cup of Wonders, and is currently a journalist with HumAngle Media. Hauwa considers herself an accidental lawyer and aims to make people feel something with her work.
