Our Porn is Not Affecting Academic Work - Says Lady Undergrad

The Audacity of Porn: Is the university also a place where students are taught not to respect their elders? At what point did I intimate in my article on university pornography that students of yesteryears did not have sex on campus? Last week’s report was a broad brush on the rapacious sexual behaviours of students in relation to recent events of recorded video clips that are posted on the internet for global consumption. Indeed, in the first paragraph of the article, I was emphatic: “Let’s face it: There has always been sex on our university campuses.” But pornography being no respecter of chastity and established traditional authority, a lady undergraduate in our premier university wrote me an x-rated email, making nonsense of all the years I have put into my writing profession. She fumed: “Who told you there was no sex during your time? You did worse things. The only difference is that you didn’t have laptops to record them. You would have done more than we are doing now if you had the means to do that. You these oldies always pretend but you are the same people who demand bjs and sex in your offices before you give us jobs. All my dad’s friends want a piece of me. Is that not worse than porn?”

The mail also sought to justify campus porn by comparing academic performance and the scholarship of the days of old, where sometimes just one person or even none made a first class, to the donkomisation of the first class degrees of today. She put it quite poignantly: “Our porn is not affecting our academic work.” In the concluding paragraph, which contained a lot of swear words, our lady student wrote that if I was tired of my ‘old, wrinkly wife’, she was prepared to “give me some action.” She didn’t have the courtesy to sign off with a subscription because she did not start with a salutation. Instead, she reoffered her invitation, threatening that I would pass out before the Viagra in me began to work. Then, of course, there was a stinker: “Mind your own business.”

That is today’s digital scholarship. To begin with, I have never used Viagra and my wife is not old and wrinkly. In fact, she looks half her age, even as a mother of two. In any case, is sex in the open a private business? When you make a public showing of what should normally be done in private, it becomes a public business. There was sex on campus in my time but we didn’t record it and put it out for the world to see how skilful we were. Would we have recorded our sex bouts if we had access to technology? To be fair to the sender of the email, we had alangyima, a shameless practice where male students prearranged with their friends to spy on their sexual performance through key holes and other available openings. But it was seldom done. It was not clear whether the first person to have done it was called Alan Gyima. I looked out for anybody who bore such a name, or even closer its homonyms like Alan Gyan, Alan Gyamena or even Alan Gyau, but there was not a single soul in Legon during my time. Well, not that I knew of. If there was an Alan Gyima, he may have died of his sins before I was ever a student.

If Gyima didn’t die, then he may be one of those pretenders that the lady’s email spoke about: oldies who feast on the flesh of young university girls. They are also those who buy them the laptops and the expensive mobile phones to record their porn movies. She wrote that all her father’s friends want a piece of her. So, perhaps she is doing them a favour by serving the whole flesh on the internet for the old pretenders to watch for free. We the old folks may be part of the corruption. If we are unashamed to produce soft-porn Ghanaian movies, showing naked hairy male bum and toned female behinds slugging it out right on the souls of Ghana, then why should we have the compunction to speak against amateur porn clips by university students who may have just done it for the fun of it? Maybe we should talk about the commercial porn produced these days by our film industry and question whatever happened to I Told You So and Boy Kumasenu. We got the love messages all the same even if the actresses never kissed or hugged.

Is abnormal sexual behaviour a sign of the times? What time is it now, anyway? Things were done properly in our time. Wooing a girl the ‘conventional’ way was fun and followed respectable standards of decorum and civil behaviour. It was a laborious process that required the suitor to necessarily please friends and roommates of the girl. Often kelewele alone didn’t do the trick, especially if your girl was in Legon Hall Annex B. And it also depended to a large extent on the quality of the shoes her roommates wore. In my case, I couldn’t muster the ‘temerity’ to even ask her out for a drink. My friends used to tease whenever we met her graciously entering or exiting the classroom: “Today is your last chance. At least say hello.” Of course, I managed to say hello after a long rehearsal, and I memorised her response and sang it aloud throughout the semester. I could go no further because her roommates belonged in a very intimidating social class. They drove Jeeps then and wouldn’t have approved of a mere course mate who dressed like the apprentice of a fetish priest. Today, such a venture would be very easy in our modern universities, because the roommates themselves would be ready with electronic gadgets to videotape sexual rendezvous and also join in three and foursomes.

So, predictably, scholarship has fallen, contrary to what the lady undergrad is intimating. And perhaps that is because university education these days is particularly easy. Students have too much time on their hands to indulge in fleshly pleasures after a multiple choice examination. After all, you would save more time typing your assignment in the comfort of your room on a personal laptop, with the internet always available to vomit already prepared sample answers to exam questions. The entire library could be found in a computer, so there is no need hurrying to secure a seat at the library. The university is a world of convenience. What use would they make with the spare time?

In the end, who pays for this expensive joke? Quality is suffering. It has suffered for a long time in our universities. The University of Ghana did not have a student newsletter when we were there in the early 90’s. They may not have it even now. Yet the university boasts of a graduate communication school. Even very small Canadian colleges have quality newsletters and other monthly publications. These newsletters are produced by 18 and 19 year old students. It is very well done and would rival most of our most important newspapers, both in editorial scholarship and aesthetic presentation. Well, our students have chosen to act porn instead of putting their energies in a newsletter. And I think there are too many universities in Ghana today. We still haven’t figured out the quality of students who easily gain admission into private universities because they didn’t make grades good enough for our public institutions. The whole university business should be given a serious look. They should be managed a lot better than public corporations. In the meantime, who wants a piece of action from our lady undergrad?

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin writes stress-busters and opinion columns from Ottawa, Canada. He is presently working on a book: Between Sickness and The Cure: Africa’s Naughtiest Professor, a humour-laden satirical treatment of hard subject matter and interesting personalities.

Email: bigfrontiers@ymail.com, quesiquesi@hotmail.co.uk