Sometimes staff meetings rise above their normal boringness when the headmaster uses them as an opportunity to talk about whatever he has been thinking about recently. He seems to have recently happened upon sperm banks and artificial insemination, and wanted to know if it was true that "women could have babies without a man doing his part." I actually thought he was talking about parthenogenesis until he explained further. He asked me if it was true that such a thing can be done freely at hospitals (well yes, but one has to pay, and it's not really at hospitals, but this isn't the time to explain the difference between TZ and American hospitals), how a woman would select the sperm she wanted (I have no idea), and concluded by wondering how they got the sperm from the man. I honestly couldn't tell if he was joking or if he truly didn't know, the latter being not so much an impossibility as one might think given that masturbation is so Not Done it's not even a joke. And I didn't follow up because I can't start talking about masturbation in front of about 100 teachers. I just can't. Condoms yes (talking about condoms at any possible opportunity is in my job description), masturbation, not so much. Which is a pity, really, given that I happen to think we should be pushing masturbation. I know that sounds odd, but there is a deeply held societal belief that no one can be without sex for very long. Women in particular are told that they will go crazy if they go too long without sex.
As a side note, this may be one of the reasons behind the demon possession of girls, other than the obvious reasons of exam time possession and claiming it is the fault of some disliked teacher. Imagine one is a teenager in the hormone-riddled morass that is high school, trapped in a world of rigid gender roles, told that nice girls don't, pressured to do it by boys (or raped by teachers. It happens), told (not in so many words, but the way almost all abstinence-only sex education happens is that boys are assumed to have the want-tos while girls are just the holders of a commodity that boys want) that they do not have sexual desires of their own and are there for the male gaze which it is their own fault if they provoke through dress, but by the way, no sex leads to craziness. To make this more fun, only prostitutes have condoms, but pregnant girls get kicked out of school and absolutely no one should ever masturbate. I'd probably have a bout or two of demon possessed craziness myself out of confused frustration. I'm sure there's also some placebo effects going around, if people told they are poisoned act like it, why shouldn't people who sincerely believe they are going crazy start experiencing some symptoms? This may also be somehow related to the Victorian beliefs about green sickness and vibrators as cure for hysteria, but that's me wondering about things I know very little about.
Anyway, in a culture that sees sex as something no one can possibly abstain from despite all efforts of the perennial and perennially annoying missionaries to the contrary, masturbation seems the obvious solution to some cultural catch-22s as described above and risky sexual behaviours like having multiple partners, which, based on the girls willing to tell me about their multiple boyfriends, is common. I can't really have these conversations with men, but a male volunteer friend of mine says that he hears similar things, and late at night in bars when men ask how he manages not to have a girlfriend he has actually tried to explain masturbation, and just wasn't believed. Granted, the concept translates into Kiswahili literally as "I hold myself" (najishikia) which to me sounds a little odd, but I think the point still gets across.
That's a good thing not to talk about!
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