Timothy Bukumunhe : I Am Not A Perv!

Perv. The Cambridge English Dictionary describes the word - ‘pervert’ or ‘perv’ as: ‘A person whose sexual behaviour is considered strange and unpleasant.’ Example: “Stop leering down my dress, you perv.”

With that, let’s try and put it into context. It’s a given that when men see an attractive woman they will look at her. When my tights and I look and admire, we tend to do so on the sly – almost undercover. Other men that I know of don’t take the sly and undercover route, but leer and ‘undress’ her till she is nude. Some don't stop at her being nude. They are already in bed with her. But I don’t stand about at the street corner in Wandegeya with binoculars and fene whilst leering at all the women who walk past me. Its not my style.

I was in school in Kenya with a lanky and dark skinned Peter Komeni, a Nandi from Eldoret and who was not the most handsome looking schoolboy there was. When it came to school dances with the girls from Greenacres school, Peter was in a class, a league of his own. Once the music started, he would be the first out of his seat and striding across the empty dance floor to Greenacres Girl on the opposite side.

That was not all. He would stand in front of the first girl he came across and without disguising it, he would leer her up and down. If she was not to his liking, he would move on to the next and the next till his leering was quenched and found somebody suitable.

When he found his quarry, she would inevitably say 'no' - but no, was not a word that registered with him. Short of yanking her out of her seat, he would stand there and glare at her till she said yes and offered herself to him.

Then there is Norris. What makes Norris’s brand of leering particularly nasty, is that his eyes don’t sit back in the sockets like those of ‘normal’ people. His are chameleon eyes – so huge that whenever I see him, I half expect them to squirt out of the sockets at a mere blink.

With his chameleon eyes on the verge of squirting out once he sees his prey, he is so focused that he starts to drool, then goes into a meltdown - unable to function on anything else except his leering and without being aware that he is doing it, he nastily tugs at his crotch. Not cool.

I was minding my own business. I was walking down the sidewalk while at the same time, trying to send a txt message. Every now and again, I would look up to see where I was going so I don’t bump into people coming towards me.

This time when I looked up, I saw the mass of hair. Then I saw her. Tall, very leggy and for a moment she scattered whatever message that I was trying to text. Was I going to look at her? Heck yes! I didn’t even have to think about it because it was a given - that as soon as she passed me, I was going to turn back to leer - no tell a lie, to politely look at the rest of her. And I did and yes, she was all that. But when I swung back round to continue with my walk, Plan B was also walking down towards me.

Eh, a ‘double given’ in the space of 30 seconds, is every man’s dream. Plan B was smoldering. She was hot and oozing sex appeal all over and once she swanned past me, I took two extra steps on, then turned back to look. To my anguish, Plan B and not continued with her walk. Rather, she had had read my mind and had sussed that I was a ‘turn-around-leerier’. She had stopped dead in her tracks and was menacingly standing put with hands on her hips while her non too amused laser eyes that were capable of frying anything into smithereens fried me. She also had a ‘message’ flashing across her forehead that read something along the lines of: “Now check TB. You of all people? You are such a dirty perv. Have you no shame in perving in broad daylight?”

I was mortified. I got this feeling that everybody - in the salon, Bon Apetite, the shopping malls across the roads, in their cars, taxi and on boda had seen what had gone down and that they were all baying out – “TB is a perv, TB is a perv all the way to Porn Cops office.” With that, I fled and into a dark side street.

While a survey said men spend almost a year staring at women, I think they might just have to revise it especially for the Ugandan men who work downtown or in the taxi park because, their leering is on a different level.