This is the era of séx marketing. If you turn right, séx leaps into your
face; if you turn left, séx jumps at you. In the street, in the
shopping mall, in the church, in the office, on your computer and phone,
and even in your living room, séx chases you around.
Séx – subtle or barefaced – has become all-pervasive in our society. Our
society has become so séx-charged that the safety of our children is no
longer guaranteed. Before, the rule was that during the children’s belt
on TV, materials with adult content were not shown.
Then there are the so-called Nigerian and Ghanaian home videos that are
anything but homely. Even though many of these films are rated 16 or 18,
they are shown on regular TV stations during the day when children are
home watching TV. Even within early news bulletins when families are
expected to be watching TV, film trailers with smooching scenes are
advertised. What do you do?
These days, the only things that are not shown on our TV from morning to
about 10 pm are commercials of alcoholic beverages. Any other thing
goes. At such periods, TV stations are competing on which will show more
Mexican soaps featuring deep kissing and erotic scenes every five
minutes. Almost all the stations dedicate about two hours per day to
music videos with bikini-clad girls dancing with men with lewd abandon.
Ban your children from watching TV? That is not an option for me. The
only thing within my power is that I have ensured that they do not watch
any TV/video material that is rated over 13. But what do I do when
these adult materials are slotted into family belts?
If I drive to the news vendor with my children in the car, there are
pornography magazines littering the table that it becomes a crime taking
children to such a place.
If I drive into a filling station or drop by the post office to check
mails, I am confronted by some men selling the local Viagra. The
horrible thing about these men is that they flash their products with
obscene pictures as you are parking. On one occasion at the car park at
Ikeja General Post Office, Lagos, my children were in the car when one
of these unscrupulous men flashed their séx-dripping packs at the car
window, saying: "Oga, man power!" I was so angry I felt like slapping him.
What one sees at social events is another story altogether because of
the if-you’ve-got-it-flaunt-it policy that is in vogue. One does not
complain because it is a free world. But the one that surprises one as
inexplicable is seeing grandmothers in some churches trying to outdo
teenage girls on who would flaunt a deeper cleavage.
Even the social networks are constantly attacked by séx hackers. A
couple of times, Facebook was attacked with pornographic pictures
littering everywhere. The network always reacted as fast as it can to
cleanse its channel. But with such fears and also the possibility of
some mindless people posting nude or semi-nude pictures, one has to be
careful not to leave one’s laptop facing the children anytime one is on
the social network.
Yahoo is not left out of the séx bait. In recent times, Yahoo has been
showing adverts of girls with plunging neckline asking you to chat with
them. Sometimes the picture of a girl pops up by your Yahoo home page
asking to click on her and undress her. Such adverts confirmed to me
that Facebook had eaten so deep into Yahoo’s business that Yahoo does
not have any scruples about collecting all kinds of adverts. To check my
emails on Yahoo, I have to turn my screen away from my children to
avoid such pictures flashing in their face.
Then there are the hordes of bloggers who want to draw traffic to their
sites so as to start making money from advertising. One common way they
use for this is to post sensual adverts on the internet urging you to
click and see what one celebrity did with another celebrity. Knowing the
power of séx, they believe that with such a bait, people would click
and be taken to their blogs, which have counters that record the number
of visitors.
Also, any time I attend a party like a birthday and children are told to
dance, I always feel embarrassed at the type of érotic moves made by
girls who are less than 10 years old. At one of such parties, a friend
whose eight-year-old girl came first in the dancing competition was so
shocked at the way her daughter wriggled her waist and backside that she
vowed that she would not allow her watch music videos on TV anymore.
The dancing of the little girl looked more like what a
professional strip tease woman would do rather than what a girl of eight
would do. The mother confessed that she had seen her daughter dance
with her siblings and friends now and then but had never seen her dance
in such an obscene way.
Furthermore, a contemporary novel that is not dripping with séx is
“archaic.” I remember reading Half of a Yellow Sun of Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie some years ago, and when my niece in secondary school saw me
with it and asked me to give it to her after reading it, I told her
stories for weeks, all in a bid not to let her have the book. I told
myself that I would not be the one to give her a novel with so many
love-making scenes. If she had to get such a book, let her get it
herself, not through me.
In the same vein, I heard of one of the rave-making novels of the world
in recent years, which was described as a success story in
self-publishing, and decided to read it: 50 Shades of Grey by E. L.
James. I only read a few pages and stopped. Almost every other page
featured raw séx, violent séx, animalistic séx. The “novel” is just an
out-and-out porno book: the only thing missing in it are pictures! Sir
Salman Rushdie said about the book: “I’ve never read anything so badly
written that got published.” Many authorities have described its prose
as low, yet the book has sold 90 million copies since 2011!
It is obvious that most people have realised that nothing sells like séx. So, they therefore exploit séx as sale bait: whatever negative consequence on society is not their business.
Nobody knows if the recent high rate of rapé in our society has any
connection with all these factors that have made our society séxually
charged. Because we live in a free society, the dress code of people may
not be determined by law, but the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission has
the power to regulate what should be shown on TV when our children are
awake and watching TV. Those who sell the local Viagra in packs
decorated with glossy obscene pictures need to be arrested or chased out
of public places.
Interestingly, any time one complains about the all-pervasive séx in our
society, one is either told to close one’s eyes, or to stop being a
hypocrite. But surprisingly, I have never seen any of these so-called
non-hypocrites have séx in broad daylight by the roadside or in the
market. Among human beings, sex is a private thing, done behind closed
doors. Only animals have séx in the public.
An adult mind may not be adversely affected by séxually explicit
materials, but exposing our children to such materials has a very
negative impact on them. We must not fold our arms and wave it off as
modernity.
