David Beckham | LITERATI:SATIRES ON NIGERIAN LIFE

Baby, you look 'similar' - can I get to know you?

A few weeks ago, my fellow blogger Esco wrote a most interesting piece called “Girls We Love and Hate”. I read that post and left a comment requesting that he write a follow-up piece called “Men we love and Hate”. Well, so far he hasn’t. So I took it upon myself to do so. This article is by no means backed by any kind of exhaustive and reliable research. It is based solely on my experiences, as well as those of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances. I’m sure a lot of ladies out there will recognize some of these characters as well as I do. I hereby proceed to outline below the types of men Nigerian women love and hate:

1. Chauvinist Pig aka Captain Caveman: This dude really, really wants to be *Don Draper when he grows up. He considers himself the ultimate alpha male, and scoffs at the family man he spots frolicking around on the beach with his children on a Saturday afternoon. Captain Caveman is there with his family only after persistent cajoling from his wife. He sits a distance away from them as ‘The Wife’ plays a game of ‘Catch the Waves’ with the kids. As far as he is concerned, a real man should never be found playing around in public, period. Kids or no kids. He believes a woman is really only good for the three C’s; cooking, cleaning and child rearing, and harbors a secret resentment towards the Manager of his department at work who is a female. Captain Caveman often reminisces about the good old days, back when men beat women over the head with a club and dragged them home to their caves as a kind of wooing ritual. Never mind that he never actually experienced those times. He dreams of a utopia where women know their place, and thinks men who support their wives careers and businesses are wimps. The Chauvinist Pig is rarely in touch with his emotions; he is not a romantic and will only buy flowers as part of his contributions towards a funeral. Personally, this dude is not my cup of tea but I guess one woman’s poison is another woman’s steak. To each his own I suppose.

Mr. Sexually Confused aka Gay but in Denial: So…you know that really cute guy, with the perfectly pressed shirts, who matched his socks to his ties and almost always smelt faintly of some citrus-ey (floral?) scent? The one whom you had a crush on because he always just seemed so perfectly put together? The dude with whom you felt some sort of bond with partly because he knew the difference between wedges and espadrilles, could chat comfortably for an hour about the benefits of loose mineral powder and knew just a little too much about waxing, eyelash curling and deep conditioning treatments (and not because he was in the beauty industry). That guy now…the one who almost seemed to empathize with your PMS and had a mild obsession with watching Sex and the City reruns? No? Yeah, me neither. The problem with Mr. Sexually Confused is that on the surface he appears to be the perfect package. You friends love him, your mother adores him, but you can’t quite shake that nagging feeling that something is wrong, horribly wrong somewhere. It may not be the fact that he seems extremely content to pat you on the head as a sign of affection or that he uses the word “yucky” several hundred times a day. It may not be because his best guy friend has a thing for skin-tight t-shirts and wears lip gloss. You could even ignore the Calvin Klein ads featuring David Beckham that are the screen saver on his laptop and background picture on his phone. But, the day he waits just a few seconds too late before answering in the affirmative when you ask if he is really attracted to you, you realize exactly what the problem is. My advice to women? Upon sighting of a Sexually Confused Male, run! No one ever really wants to be dumped for a male model named ‘Desire’

Boy Next Door (BND) aka Male BFF: The BND is that guy that a girl can talk to about almost everything. Yeah almost. Some things just have to remain private. Anyways, he may or may not literally live a street away from you, but he’s always welcome to come over to yours for a meal of ofada rice and ‘designer stew’. You give him all the low down about the strange hang up calls you’ve been getting in the middle of the night, and how much you can’t stand your girlfriends’ new boyfriend. He is there for you in the ways that matter the most and is one of the first people you think about calling when you get some important news. The mistake a lot of women make is that they shove the BND into the “We can only ever be friends and nothing more” box. Sometimes, this can turn out to be the biggest oversight of your love life. Ladies, don’t risk the chance of waking up one day after dating one too many losers and a ‘gay- but- in -denial’ only to realize that you let the good one get away. By the time you realize this, your BND might just be happily married with 2.4 kids and a white picket….oh all right, white cement covered, barb-wired fence in Parkview Estate. Any feelings he ever had for you would have been completely forgotten at this point. The worst part? That’s when you realize that you can’t go crying to your girlfriend, because ever since she married the boyfriend you can’t stand she’s gone completely incognito.

4. The Player aka Commitment Hater: This Boy grew up watching movies like “How to be a Player” with his older brothers and decided then that he wanted to be Bill Bellamy when he grew up. He struts around with what he conceives in his mind to be major swagger. If he is below 19, this means shuffling about with a permanent slouch, head bent, one arm in pocket, right arm under left nostril, as he tries to chat up victims. If he is older, it means hitting on every female, from the servers at the staff canteen to the boss’s wife at the company dinner. The sad truth about a player is that, a lot of the time, the girls getting played are completely aware of the situation. They often choose naively, to believe that they can change him, that he is that way because he has never experienced true love, that all they need to do is love him enough and one day he’ll realize that one special woman is all he needs. Wake up! It hardly ever happens like that. A person needs to take a personal decision and make a commitment to his self in order to change his lifestyle choices. So unless you want to end up as another Mrs. @Lagoshunter (twitter peeps will get the joke), free this guy. Maybe in favor of the next guy.

5. The Focused Professional aka Young and upwardly mobile male (YUM): The YUM is a career driven or business oriented young man who is not afraid of ‘hustle’. He is hard-working, ambitious and is willing to earn his way to the top. He hasn’t made it just yet, but you can tell from having conversations with him that he knows exactly where he is headed and what he wants out of life. So in the meantime, he drives a 1999 Honda and lives in a self-contained apartment while he works towards his dream. Fast forward ten years, and he is that guy in the customized Bentley who is the MD or CEO of a successful company, and a mentor and positive role model to the YUM’s around him. The YUM is a total keeper. I really think girls need to learn to spot a YUM and see the potential in him. We need to be able to pick him out of a line up of other less appealing types of men and say to ourselves, ‘yeah, I’ll stick with this one’.

The Gold Digger aka ‘Babe do you have some change?’: The Gold digger comes in many disguises. Sometimes, he is a Mr. Fine boy who has sugar mummies at his beck and call. He is probably only dating you because someone told once him that your father is a major share holder in The Central Bank of Nigeria , and he was either too stupid or too greedy to recognize a joke when he heard one. The Gold Digger is always broke, and I mean always. Even though he dresses like he just stepped out of the May edition of GQ. You see, his shirt was a Valentine gift from his Banker babe, his Hermes belt a birthday gift from his girl in “Yankie” and the silver 2010 Honda Accord he drives an anniversary present from Hon. Gbo Gbo Bigz Girl in Abuja. He is the sort of guy who will take you to The Oriental Hotel for Sunday brunch, and then pretend he left his wallet at home when the bill arrives. At other times, The Gold Digger pretends to be a YUM who’s extremely close to landing that major deal/contract that will bring in billions. In the mean time, he needs you to foot his bills while he chases Alhaji around town. So, you pick up his dry cleaning bills, help him with his rent, pay off a few of his monthly car payments and top up his credit at regular intervals, in between loaning him most of your life savings. The Gold Digger should be recognized for what he is- a user who won’t wait two seconds to dump you like hot ‘dodo’ the second he catches a bigger ‘financial’ fish. You have been warned.

I know this list is not completely exhaustive, so I welcome any additions or contributions from other female (and males) out there. So, please feel free to drop a comment, what other kinds of men do you think are out there?

*The lead character in the TV series ‘Mad Men’