A friend of mine is an ardent bodybuilder. He is the thoughtful kind who put on ties and power suits. He is a banker. When out of his suit after work, you might find him working his glisteningly hard abs and bulging biceps in the gym. Like many bodybuilders, he is also not averse to showing off the muscles out of the gym. I thought of him earlier this week when a BBC news item reported research findings that taking steroids to get a buff physique can damage fertility. I hoped my friend was not on steroids, and thus not the kind of fellow the news item described as an evolutionary paradox, where men damage their ability to have children during efforts to make themselves look more attractive. There is also the hair or loss of it. The researchers say there is a loss of fecundity in men using medication to prevent male pattern baldness. The drug Finasteride changes the way testosterone is metabolised in the body and can limit hair loss, but side effects can include erectile dysfunction and a hit to fertility. Except for the side effects, one cannot fault a fellow seeking to project the image of hale masculinity. It is not unlike the current fad where fashionable young men are sporting nicely trimmed beards. However, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, the celebrated French writer and intellectual, one is not born, but rather becomes a man. This is not to diminish my friend or the young men with the comely beards, but that muscle or the beard does not make the man. The man in de Beauvoir’s quote is not unlike imfura who in Rwandan culture is the personification of moral astuteness – a gentleman who, by definition, is a chivalrous, courteous and honourable man. Each culture has its own estimation of their imfura, of which I pick that of the Romans, one of the most analysed cultures in human history as told in the book, “A History of Virility”. The book traces how the meaning of manhood has changed over time. In ancient Rome, according to the book, “The virile is not simply what is manly; it is more: an ideal of power and virtue, self-assurance and maturity, certitude and domination … courage and ‘greatness’ accompanied by strength and vigour.” In the terms domination, courage and greatness is also the suggestion of conflict, of which through the ages one of the major ways to prove one’s virility was through “heroic death on the battlefield.” This was not until the First and Second World Wars when this perception changed. Virility seemed to suddenly appear as not just objectionable but utterly unnecessary. The carnage in which 40 million perished in the World War One together with an estimated total of 70–85 million deaths in World War Two only served to “undermine the military-virile myth and place masculine vulnerability at the heart of a caring culture.” It was then that, only a few years after World War II, use of the term masculinity became more common, particularly in the West, reference to virility dwindled. Today it is difficult to see the term being used to describe manliness. Along with the debilitating war effects on the surviving soldiers, history also records that this change in the meaning of manhood in mid-twentieth century also had something to do with feminism. The women’s movement was then gaining ascendance and, in the process, rubbishing the myth of male virility. Here in Africa, we know that our traditional perceptions of masculinity are no longer the same. Echoing those in the West, they have been transformed by, among others, colonialism, the labour movement and the gradual acknowledgement of women’s rights. This is not to mention their increasing assertiveness giving rise to the men many of us are today. This brings me back to my buddy, the bodybuilder. I know he is doing well on the fertility front as a father of two. But I also know he is a man of his time. Traditional manhood is no more. For this reason, along with economic, social and technological change in our time, anthropologists suggest it is this that has led many men into a quest for masculine certainties. For this reason, my friend is the many men today trying to express virility in gentle and innocuous ways. He is the same as the guy with a high-end sports car vrooming in the streets. Such showing of masculinity may also be the chap who is always ready to debate the merits of Arsenal despite their emphatic 4-1 loss to Chelsea in the just concluded Europa League final. You might hear some people make a sweeping claim that men of today are not like the ones of old, suggesting that the former are weak. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are just men of their time. The views expressed in this article are of the author.
