You’re not ‘being a man’…you’re just dirty

There is a widely held belief that boys—and later on, men—are particularly messy

Like most men, housework turns me off. You will never find me singing Hosanna while doing dishes. Bending to wash clothes all but drowns my libido. Still, I do not give in to the charms of a dirty house.

For that reason, I am about to wash some pretty gross linen in public.

So, an acquaintance of mine—let's call him Bro—invited me for drinks a while back, and boy. Oi. His keja was an unsanitary blight. I am not saying I was walking into Dandora dumping site, but I am not not saying that either.

It was disgusting.

Everything was everywhere. The sugar was spewed on the desk, spoons scattered over the floor, all the plates were dirty and a blunt was neatly stuck inside the Bible (holy weed, hehe!). Everything seemed to be competing with the other to become the story, like a drunken uncle at a ruracio roaring and grizzling just out of shot.

This was a terrible cameo, but the highlights reel had barely started: is that underwear in the sufuria? And what is that odour, that blossoming chief attribute of every bachelor pad: is, is that the smell of urine?

The cockroaches—oh God—those slimy bastards were having a carnival in the kitchen. Emboldened by the sea of dirt around them, they weren’t even scampering away, just staring at you coldly with their empty suspicious eyes. Or if you’re reading this from the cockroaches’ view—you were in their shared apartment. I hadn’t even seen them until they became all I saw. The cockroaches' USP is that it does nothing but populate, practicing nothing but ubiquity.

It was bad.

So bad I was clamouring for the last copy of “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” 

First, let’s state the obvious. If we were still in our heydays as bustling young men, this would pass off as laughable. Cute, even. Because a girlfriend or two would come to clean up later. But, Mr. Speaker Sir I reject the idea that a man’s girlfriend or wife becomes his next mother or housekeeper and it's sad seeing this notion being handed down to successive generations. Onto my first point…

There are two ways to establish masculinity: one is to do typically male chores—and the other, well, is to refuse to do typically female ones.

Now, I would not go as far as to term myself a neat freak – let’s just say I can’t leave my house until all the counters are cleaned and the bathroom sprayed.

For this, I blame my mother, who after I had scrubbed the house clean, would scurry back with the eye of a forensic expert and still find dirt on the shelves. It’s one of the reasons I love her, but it’s also one of the reasons she will never step foot in my house. That woman, short of calling her a sorceress, was a sorceress. She planted the seeds, and now the branches have grown too large to the extent I recently called an exterminator after I spotted (one) cockroach in my house. If you can’t tell, I really hate cockroaches.

“It must be the new neighbour’s,” I told no one in particular. I’ve never really trusted them—the neighbours, and the cockroaches.

Not being messy is a lifelong project.

I know it feels macho to be a litoo dirty, a lil bit rough around the edges but I can’t insist enough. There is nothing sexy about messy. I don’t believe in the hogwash that you can be dirty as a person and have a clean heart. That’s an oxymoron. Our environment is who we are.

Precisely because you are a man, a bachelor nonetheless is why you ought to be clean. Someone’s daughter paid me a visit recently and before she left (I really don’t want to go if you don’t want me to—her words as I swiftly ushered her out) she marvelled.

“So you clean this house all by yourself?” she said.

“You sound disappointed...” I said. 

“No woman comes over?”

“You’re the only woman who comes..”

“Are you su..”

“Over.” I finish.

And that got me thinking. I know of a friend on campus who was spotless. Clothes were always ironed, shoes polished and he even colour-coded his closet.

He was labelled. People perceived him a certain way.  

It’s a tired trope that "men are just like that." That being clean is somehow a woman thing, somehow a clean man is usually fastidious, may be gay, or both. Modern masculinity is not a role per se; more a patchwork of disparate abilities, conflicting attitudes, and aha! Moments. Even today, with the End of Men almost upon us, it’s easier to sweep everything under the carpet—if you get time to sweep that is.

“Nioge kila siku, kwani mimi ni mwanamke?” This dark humour is masculinity’s defense mechanism.

Yes, housework is intimate drudgery. Chores are the dreariest form of foreplay. If you’ve watched “Mad Men”, there’s a scene where Don Draper rips off his shirt to fix a broken sink. The women, apparently wet everywhere (and not from the broken sink I might add), applaud. As they leave the house, Don, and Megan pull off to the side of the road to ‘indulge’, because, as Megan says, “I can’t believe how much I loved watching you fix that sink.”

Whilst you may not be Don Draper reincarnate, nevertheless I’m laying down the gauntlet to you, my fellow man: Slovenliness is only attractive in teaspoons, not spades.

As I left Bro's keja, images of my father up at dawn cleaning our compound, trimming the hedges, and cutting grass ushered me out. He, my old man, did this every other day, on top of his other roles like putting food on the table and fixing kitchen sinks a la Don Draper. I tried to follow his domestic footpath, but my efforts have fallen short both in quality and quantity. Sometimes in the past, I have often found myself somehow wanting to be acknowledged, a pat on the back, a tip of the hat. But the real lesson was in the mundaneness of it all, the personal pride, the self-satisfaction, the adult in adulting. 

And that has been the philosophy of personal responsibility that I subscribe to. If you make the mess, you clean the mess. Otherwise, you’re not being macho, you’re just dirty.

 Shabby is not chic. Not even if you do it for the chics.

 [email protected] @eddyashioya

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