Perverts who unzip publicly for women

By Linda Keya

Some men, it appears, have taken to shamelessly displaying their private parts to any woman they meet along the way. It is as if part of the society has gone mad.

They do it in restaurants and public transport vehicles. The most perverted even have the guts to wank publicly, in front of a female stranger to whom they have taken a crazy fancy. These twisted men, according to a random survey among women, are slowly increasing in number in major towns like Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu.

Tabitha Onyinge was walking out of church along Mamlaka Road at around 3pm when she noticed a decent looking man clad in a jungle green T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans walking towards her.

“I didn’t think much of him because I knew he was a passerby like any other — until he jerked up his T-shirt and his ‘willy’ was all out. Of course, I turned my face away and quickly made my way to my car visibly shaken at what I had just seen,” says Tabitha.

A friend, on the other hand, had just dropped Claudette Akello by the Valley Road flyover to wait for a number 46 matatu to Kilimani at 7.00pm when she noticed a man walk towards her.

First she thought he also was out to catch a matatu home till she noticed, to her horror, the man pointing his firm member at her, and she ran for dear life.

Another victim who sought anonymity says she was meeting a girlfriend for a meal at Sarit Centre one evening when she encountered a flasher.

Jumped

“Half way through our meals, my friends got a panic attack and said she wanted to leave,” she says.

Confused and wondering why her friend was acting weird, she tried to calm her down as the people at the next table were getting alarmed at her outburst. Suddenly, the friend, who was seating opposite, jumped and sat next to her.

“She asked me to swap seats and when I did, directly opposite me, I would see a man in a suit who was fondling and pleasuring himself unbothered by what was going on around him. Imagine people were eating around him and he was doing it!” she says.

In Mombasa, stories abound of men who pull out their member on the ferry and wank on a woman’s buibui without her knowledge. Many women just discover they have been messed on later when at work, or when another person sees the stains as happened to a senior teacher in Nairobi.

“I was walking down the street when a woman tapped me on the shoulder and whispered that I had this stain on my skirt. Imagine my disgust and shame when I saw semen on my skirt. I have no clue which pervert did it — or where and why, but I have never felt so angry and violated in my life,” she recalls.

A Donholm resident who witnessed a man ejaculate on a woman’s dress on a queue says that sort of thing is commonplace. 

“I saw it with my own eyes. I was wondering why this man kept pressing on the woman who was ahead on the queue late in the evening till she suddenly screamed and jumped up. Her dress was wet. That man was beaten senseless,” she says. 

We spoke to several Nairobi women who said one notorious flasher hangs around the Barclays Bank ATM at the Kenya Cinema building.

“The man is always in a suit. When you turn to walk out of the ATM after withdrawing cash, you notice him holding his member. The most disgusting thing is that somehow, he ensures he has touched you. Imagine a man coming to town to do that,” says Catherine. 

Paul Namai, a university psychology lecturer, explains that this sort of behaviour could be attributed to some form of sexual dysfunction.

“Such men derive sexual pleasure by exposing their genitals to unsuspecting victims, and the shock or look on their target victims’ faces drives them crazy. The victims may not necessarily be a stranger, but a woman they have seen a couple of times, admired and even fantasised about. This condition is known as exhibitionism in medical terms.

“Such people need help, not ridicule. In fact, most of them are harmless, by the way. They might just masturbate or fantasise about masturbating while exposing himself but makes no further attempt at sexual activity with the stranger,” says the psychologist.

 Other experts are, however, of the opinion that this could just be a manifestation of porn addiction, saying men who flash assume that the observer will also be sexually aroused as happens in pornographic movies.

What is, however, most abhorrent is that some of these perverted men flash their dudus at children.

A journalist who went to State House Girls High School in Nairobi says, “There was a man who would stand in a trench coat on the road opposite our dormitory. He would expose his nakedness the moment we opened the curtains and the more we screamed, the more fun he got. But we reported him to the headmistress and she got him arrested.”

Ten year olds

One woman (name withheld) says, “I still remember my first (and last) train trip to Kisumu but for the wrong reasons. Some pervert kept flashing my cousin and I. How do you flash ten year-olds surely? So my mum brings snacks and my cousin innocently says, ‘Auntie, yule mtu anatuonyesha dudu yake (that man is showing us his thing)!’ We were bundled out of that carriage so fast!”

A senior editor with The Standard recalls that when she was in Form One, a man standing next to her on a bus not only exposed himself, but also pressed his member on her.

“I screamed so loudly that the bus driver instinctively braked and brought the bus to a stop. The man, fearing he would be beaten by other passengers, jumped out of the bus and fled — with his zip open. Even today, I still wonder what was going on in his mind,” she says.

But according to a post on www.psychologytoday.com, Ogi Ogas, Ph.D., and Sai Gaddam, PhD, say men are compelled by an unconscious, evolutionary urge inherited from our primate ancestors to expose what Mother Nature gave them.

“Male monkeys and apes routinely display their penis to females to indicate sexual interest. In other words, it’s a very natural urge; of course, so is burping, but most men are able to restrain their sonorous belches around the ladies.

“In fact, male exhibitionism has long been understood by clinical psychologists as a non-dangerous compulsion, men who flash their organ to strangers rarely seek contact afterwards, instead describing a powerful sense of relief from the display alone,” the two psychologists opine.

 Abel Wanjala, a legal officer with the Standard Group, however, warns that such behavior is punishable by law.

“The Kenyan laws don’t have specific laws on indecent exposure — defined as the ‘deliberate exposure in public or in view of the general public by a person of a portion or portions of his or her body, in circumstances where the exposure is contrary to local, moral or other standards of appropriate behaviour’.

“But such acts can be categorised as indecent acts under the Sexual Offences Act of 2006. Where children and persons of mental disability punishment are involved, the punishment is a minimum of ten years in prison. If the victim is an adult, the culprit can be jailed for five years, fined Sh50,000 or both,” says the lawyer.