Mr Ernest Bazanye

At some point you will expect me to refute the idea that women are more predisposed to emotional than rational behaviour. You may become exhasperated at how long I am taking before saying it. So let’s get it out of the way now. I need you to stay with me to the end: Some people are emotional sometimes and rational at other times and dicks is not how you identify which is which. Now, let’s do the essay.

If you want to show bad manners in people, do this: tell a woman to stop being emotional.

Then, when the whole book club or cell group or kwanjula contingent or whatever group of people you chose to piss off is appalled at you, act like you’re the victim. Be genuinely surprised by the audacity of your offended audience. Wonder loudly where they get off and who they think they are to roll such eyes and suck such teeth at you.

Please do it. It amuses me so much to watch.

If Olympics gymnastics superstar Simone Biles and martial arts master Jet Li have an unprotected threesome with the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s CGI machine, and the child they produce not only surpasses the expectations that come with its genes but even goes so far as to incorporate an upside down cripwalk bakisimba into its act as a signature move, it still won’t be as acrobatic as the emotional contortions that a manly man goes through when someone reacts to him telling a woman that she is being emotional.

He feels angry, he feels defensive, he feels victimised, he feels like something has been taken from him, he feels like he must put up a fight, for if he doesn’t, his manhood will be diminished, and he feels such a deep love for his manhood that he can’t let anything threaten it. No! Not the manhood!

He doesn’t think he will win the argument he is beserking himself into, but then again, none of what he is doing is thinking. Everything he is doing is feeling. He doesn’t think he will win. But he feels he must fight.

Dude is getting emotionally worked up because he told someone to stop being emotional.

It’s fascinating.

It has to be a guy talking to a woman, though, otherwise it has a different effect. When a manly man says the equivalent to another manly man the result is opposite: It’s not indignation. It’s immediate compliance.

The manly man who has been instructed to stop being emotional will fold, and break himself to the will of the guy who told him to stop being emotional.

Of course the “alpha” will have to phrase it differently: When manly men say it to other men they put it differently. They don’t say, “Stop being so emotional.”

They say “Stop being a bitch.”

Mandingo: Gwe lend me your new car for the weekend. Mine was impounded by kawunyemu, but I still want to drink a lot of Guinness Smooth and then drag race up and down Najjera booze strip.

Caraballo: You want to drunk-drive Suubi the Subaru? No please.

Mandingo: Also you just give me the key. Stop being such a bitch.

Caraballo: Okay, but it’s your fuel.

It’s like Baby Biles-Li-CU has found a way to add Kyrie Irving moves to its repertoire.

Cos look at what you are doing: You emotionally manipulate the man by appealing to half a dozen of his most childish emotions: his vanity and the need to feel strong; his fear of being seen as weak; his other fear of being ostracized from the group for non-conformity to the manly archetype; his need to belong to the group. Strike at those feelings and you will get him to do what his thoughts had told him not to do. Like surrender his car so you can drag race down a public road while drunk on a susu beer.

Mbu stop being emotional.

….

The world is a chessboard and people are pieces. They have a strictly regulated range of motions they can follow. They can’t do otherwise. Bishop can’t spiral, Rook can’t leap, Queen can’t somersault. Men and women are like chess pieces: Men provide, Women nurture. Men protect, Women submit. Men dominate, Women just allow. No other configuration is possible. Genders are fixed orbits no one can divert from. The woman is this and the man is that. It is immutable. It cannot be changed.

This is the view of society that comes from the member of an alien species who has only ever played mobile phone games. People who have actually lived here and paid attention will know, however, that humans are not simple npcs with limited arcs and scopes of behaviour.

In real life, we have real people, billions of them just today, not counting the number who have been there in all the 200,000 years of previous days and their infinite configurations of chance and circumstance. Man is a provider of the home and Woman is a homemaker? But we’ve all seen men who don’t provide and women who don’t nurture. Society hasn’t short-circuited, buzzing and crackling to a halt because of this. Instead we have thrived. In real life, we are too many, we are too random, we have too many variables and diverse circumstances. We are not either mountain or sea. We are particles of dust in a storm.

The idea that there are some people, whatever genital you chose to assume signifies which people they are, the idea that there are some people who are primarily rational and live by knowledge, thought, logic and clever assessments of available information, and others who just float wherever their feelings blow, it comes from the Alien Phone-Chess Theory of Gender.

…

I put it to you, I declare boldly, full-chested, in fact, that man shit is emotional. Let me illustrate with Patrobas, for example.

He is 35 and is five-seven with a developing pot. He has a wife and two toddlers, drives an Imprezza, works pushing pencils in one of those companies that do something vague and boring like financial acceleration solutions, and is, in general, a regular Kampala kopret guy. He is just a guy there, the way you see them. Just a guy there, the way you see guys there.

But everyone has childhood trauma somewhere. Everyone has a secret personal Vietnam, a scorched earth battle fought and lost in their past. All that remains from it is smouldering embers and ashes in the shadows beneath the mind. But from these ashes there is a smoke that keeps wafting, gently, silently, inexorably forward into your future to haunt the rest of your life.

Something in Patrobas’ subconscious won’t let him be satisfied with just being just a guy there. Something makes him need more. He needs to be great. He can’t just be Patrobas. He believes he should be Thanos. He wants to be a titan, a mighty space titan with a mighty finger snap and a mighty manifesto of purpose that can only be aptly articulated by Josh Brolin’s gravelly gravitas.

He has to be a Man and Man means wielding power and accumulating awe and reverence from others. Like Thanos.

Patrobas doesn’t realise that most average, typical guys who are just there are content with just being there. We are grown up and mature enough to appreciate that we can’t all be the clown, bruh, someone has to sit in the audience and watch the show. But Patrobas believes he is the typical one. That what he feels is true manhood. Real man is Thanos.

But then, eh? But what made it like this?

We blame women.

Okay one woman: His mum.

She called him a good boy one time too many and Patrobas never matured enough to learn that when a mummy calls you a good boy, she is full of shit. A lot of the time she only says that to get you to shut up and stop bothering her.

“Good boy” usually means, “Oh, not this again. Why is his appetite for attention so deep? I have important things to do. I can’t be constantly massaging this ego. But if I tell him to shut the fuck up, he will just start crying, because he is so fragile and sensitive and emotional. Look at him, so frail and needy, thirsting unceasingly for validation. If I deny it, he will collapse into very loud infant anguish and yet, as aforementioned, I have things to do. Let me just take a short cut. I’ll just say ‘good boy’. He will believe it and he will chill me kko at least.”

Baby Patrobas: Mummy yook is a dudu. I shee a dudu. Yook a dudu! Mummy! Dudu! See!

Mama P: What? A dudu! Oh good boy, so clever!

And now he thinks that his insect-observation powers are a mark of his excellence.

Mummy, I have eaten my mugoyo and finished. See. Tis finished all.

Mama P: Good boy!

Now Patrobas believes that his capacity to consume food is an indicator of innate genius.

Every time he wondered if he was great indeed, he turned to her and she told him he was. Soon he just took it as a forgone conclusion, a fact that had been long-established and didn’t need any further discussion, after all, the teacher before all teachers, the first line of truth and knowledge, his mother, had told him, every time, that he was a good boy.

So he grew up and now he finds himself in a world where some forces, some people, and some circumstances disagree with this view of himself. When things happen that contradict his belief that he is the best boy, he automatically decides that they are wrong.

When they push the matter, he suspects that they are not just wrong, they are lying. They are lying! They wish to deny him the praise that he is entitled to because they are evil, malicious, oppressors! And then he stomps off to YouTube so that the red pill maninist influencer confirmation bias algorithm can call him a good boy again.

I think this is where the entitlement of man shit comes from. It’s emotional. It’s feeeeelings.

Of course not all men. Some of you are not emotional. You are repressed.

Shit. That was supposed to be a genuine apology for the broad generalisation but I could not help myself. I think that I might need a caveat, I think I should try to sound balanced, but I am an emotional writer. I just felt like doing it this way.