All males, not men, cheat to boost their egos

Man, it’s hard out here for a woman. Not only do you have to be a superwoman but you have to convince your significant other that he’s a superman. If you can’t persuade your partner that he’s good enough for you, he will take his bruised ego and lay it down on some other woman’s massage table. Or so a story goes.

“Males cheat on loyal women to boost their ego. A woman can be perfect for him. Beautiful, career minded, own money, cooks, does whatever he wants her to do in bed, loyal, intelligent, educated, faithful and yet, he will still cheat on her with an ugly, kangaroo- looking girl every time.

But why? In his mind, he thinks one day she will mentally awaken to the realisation she deserves better than him and leave him. This is why males cheat on a woman, to have power over her.”

I stumbled on this little gem one night when I had just refreshed my Facebook page for the gazillionth time. It is the gospel according to blogger Ebrahim Aseem.

Quite ominously, the blog post is titled, ‘Why ALL MEN CHEAT on loyal women’.

How a ‘male’ (NB: a male, not a man) treats a woman, he says, is not proportional to her worth. Rather, it is a reflection of his own sense of worthlessness. Most males, Aseem says, are more insecure than women. And cheating makes them feel like they are worth more than their over-achieving wives and girlfriends.

That’s sounds like a truly profound explanation. One that may even make cheating okay, because when you boil an issue down to low self-esteem, then anything is forgivable.

But in actual fact, it is just another excuse. Another way to blame the women who have and do everything, for the shortcomings of men who cannot rise to the occasion.

If women were not so powerful then men wouldn’t feel so disempowered, etc etc. It’s the boy-child sob story all over again. Blah, blah, blah.

Sounds like some really well-packaged gobbledygook, right?

You wouldn’t believe it if other men/males actually subscribed to this school of thought, would you? Ah, well. But they do.

“It’s not easy being a man my friend,” a guy said to me early this week. “You women are so unreliable. That’s why we have to spread the risk.

Did you know that men in Nairobi County suffer the most from domestic violence? Now why would a woman beat up a man who most likely has a good education and a job? You Nairobi women have lost the plot. That Sh20,000 I would be spending to pay rent for just one mistress in Nairobi, I would be supporting many more in the village. It is a good thing that polygamy is now legal and out in the open.”

At that point, other men jumped in with their tales of woe, talking about how women had used and abused them and left them doe-eyed at the traffic lights.

The golden thread was that women are not to be trusted and men had long ago learned not to place all their eggs in one woman’s handbag.

The more women a man has, the higher the chances he will always have at least one wife.

“In fact,” the guy continued, “when I meet my ex-girlfriends with my wife, I introduce them as my co-wives, so that she knows.”

Huh. One thing’s for sure – this battle of the sexes is a power struggle. Unfortunately, neither side is sure what they are fighting over. It’s abundantly clear however, that both sides have deployed their egos to the frontline.

Julie is a Revise Editor for The Standard

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