"Think Like A Man...At Your Own Peril..."

Steve Harvey is one of my favorite comedians ever, so I couldn't wait to pick up a copy of his book, "Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man" when I was back in the US recently. I figured since I'm unattached and looking to change that situation someday really soon, maybe I could pick up a few pointers.

It was actually the perfect read for the flight back, and I saw a lot of my own past counterproductive relationship behavior in those pages. But in retrospect, I may be forced to write the definitive rebuttal to Harvey's runaway bestseller. After nearly a year in Kenya, my proposed tome would be entitled, "I CAN'T Think Like A Man Because I Don't Have A Penis, And That's What They Use to Think With." I'm thinking I could make much bank with that project.

Now, I ain't trying to hurt nobody's feelings here, but as Steve himself might interject,

"I'm just sayin', dawg!"

Yesterday's blog post got me to thinking real hard about that seemingly misanthropic theory. After all, I used it to focus on my mother's role in the Jones family planning process, when I should have spent a few more minutes trying to plumb the depths of my father's psyche. I mean, what was Lewis Jones thinking, after the 5th, 6th, and 7th babies he couldn't really afford to provide for showed up???? Weren't condoms created by the time the mid-50's rolled around? I'm pretty sure self-control was.

Don't get it twisted---I ain't hatin' on my father by calling him out on this issue. And I acknowledge that he worked just as hard as Mama did every day, from "cain't see to cain't see," over 40-odd years, loading bags of grain onto Ohio River barges. But surely the issue of producing more mouths than he could feed--and his role in curbing that phenomenon--had to have occurred to him at some point...didn't it?

Apparently, that issue got trumped by more earthly considerations. Moving away from that personal example of my central thesis, consider the evidence I've gathered during just 11 months in Kenya.

1. Watching the Grand Coalition Government slowly but decisively descend into a pit of chaos and destruction, what it all boils down to is One Gigantic Pissing Match between one ethnic tribe versus another, led by two bombastic old men who TOTALLY just need to sit down somewhere and be quiet.

2. Recently, following the one-week so-called Sex Strike staged by Kenyan women activists, a man filed suit, saying that going one week without his conjugal rights left him depressed, stressed and virtually unable to function. I'm sure his wife enjoyed the vacation.

3. Research shows that the HIV infection rate in Kenya is growing fastest among married couples. Now, I'm not saying all Kenyan wives are saints, but the main reason for this increase is because married Kenyan men have lots and lots of sex with people other than their wives.

4. Just this week, a Kenyan men's rights group announced that Kenyan men are actually more at risk of domestic violence than women. Citing examples of this violence, group leaders stated that Kenyan men were actually being forced to cook, clean and care for their own children more than in previous years. And they said women were even depriving men of their rights to decide how big their families should be.

5. Last week, during a meeting of village leaders in a Kisumu neighborhood, one man was asked what men need to do to ensure they only had as many children as they could afford to care for. He responded that they needed help from philanthropic Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). When told that many NGOs were trying to provide support in the form of family planning methods, he replied that family planning went against his beliefs. Period. So when asked what men themselves needed to do to control how many children they had, he said most men are able to abstain from sex when necessary. When the large numbers of needy children in his own neighborhood were pointed out, he was asked what should be done to help men who can't abstain. He said those men needed help from NGOs.

I could only conclude he wanted those NGOs to slap his hands with a large ruler everytime he reached for his zipper.

Those are just a few examples. There are plenty more, trust me. And no matter what you might think, I'm not trying to demonize Kenyan men with this screed, but since they're who I'm interacting with mostly these days, and they supply me with a steady stream of examples of penile-related thought processes, I'm forced to run with 'em.

But that doesn't mean I'm giving up on the big galoots.