'Kusugua risasi': Why girl-shy, broke comrades embrace it

There are things we - boys - can only talk about over a tipple. Especially myself. I was brought up in a very reserved community, things like homosexuality, masturbation and kissing and sex among teenagers were unheard of.

So we grew up avoiding such conversations because of how uncomfortable they made us. But alcohol was made by the devil and the devil does not give a rat’s piss about your feelings, you will spill it all out.

Ever since a little joint was opened within our student center, we rarely ever go out to clubs.

It’s never too full or too noisy so that’s where we usually huddle up around one bottle of whiskey and talk about our issues. We were at that joint last weekend when all of a sudden one of my boy’s leans over to me and says: “Man, I haven’t had sex in like six months.”

At first I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just sat there quiet and sipped from my glass.

But then the chap continues: “It’s like none of these ladies think I’m good enough. So I said to hell with them, siku hizi ni kusugua risasi tu.” And then he laughs at that.

“How frequently do you do that?” I ask; a question which makes me uncomfortable but I’m also a curious person so I really want to know where this leads.

He leans back in and says: “About three times a day. It relieves so much stress.”

So I bring down my walls and fully delve into that conversation. And he tells me about how he has been turned down so many times by campus girls he nowadays fears even approaching any of them.

He opens up about how he sometimes feels lonely but that self-pleasuring has also reduced some of the eccentricities of being in a relationship like spending on birthdays and gifts and dinners and endless quarrels over stuff you did in 1997. 

I took his case to fellow comrades and turns out this madness is common, especially among the shy types who fear girls and the broke guys.

Some said it saves them a great deal. Apparently, they no longer have to worry about wooing or impressing anybody, only themselves. That comrade who brought up this topic told me he is so free nowadays and his mind is usually clear and he can even concentrate during lectures, adding that his grades have improved.

Campus girls can be a handful, especially if you don’t have anything in your pockets.

Oddly, a couple of the guys I asked around, have embraced this madness.

A friend shocked me. Hear him: “If you feel you have tried to get ‘get some’ in the proper manner and failed, let the ladies be, it’s never that serious. Take the law into your own hands (quite literally), kwani boss iko nini?!”

Another told me how when the urge comes calling, he always puts on a steaming Scarlet Johansson movie and proceeds to ‘handle business’.

I asked a medic how dangerous this trend is and to my shock he said it doesn’t cause any disease.