“A guy (a male) can get pregnant, right?”
That’s the question that opened a confession posted to a Nigerian confession pagefrom someone identifying themselves only as a student at the University of Abuja.
Uh, pause. Surely that’s just a joke, right? Just some college humour? Surely sex education in some parts of the world isn’t so dire?
Well, based on the rest of the confession, we’re scared that we’re not so sure.
He described having sex “just a trial” with a fellow — his word — and then noticing cravings, cramping, lethargy. Convinced something was wrong, he wrote in, anxious, saying he’d asked the same question on other confession pages before and never got “a right solution.”
Okay, let’s strip away the shock value and the judgement. Yes, it might have been a joke, but let’s take it seriously. Because the truth is, not every country has the same approach to sex education.
This individual may very well be a young adult, old enough to be at university, yet has no basic framework for understanding his own body. Submitting an anonymous message to this confession page might’ve just been his way of trying to access the sex education he never received.
Actually, this might not even be a one-off
Confession pages across Africa, South-East Asia, and the Middle East are full of these posts.
Maybe the male pregnancy thing is pushing it too far, but there are actually a lot of students without the right knowledge who are desperate to find out more about symptoms after sex, whether they have an STI, or whether what they did was even sex at all.
The anonymity is the appeal — nobody has to know it was you who didn’t know the basics. But it’s also the problem. A confession thread cannot correct misinformation the way a classroom can. It can only host more of it.
Study International has looked at why so many countries still get sex education wrong, and the Abuja confession is close to a case study of the consequences.
Where comprehensive sex education is absent — as it often is across much of Sub-Saharan Africa, where curricula are patchy, under-resourced, or entirely abstinence-based. But young people don’t stop having sex. And when they do, they’re left with so many more questions about their bodies afterwards.
What international students should take from this
For students moving countries to study, sex education gaps travel with you.
Previously, an international student has also revealed to us that they did not know that PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a prescription medicine that HIV-negative gay and bisexual men take to prevent getting HIV.
It’s things like these that, if you don’t know, you just never know. A student raised in a system where these conversations never happened doesn’t suddenly gain the knowledge by crossing a border – they often have to learn the hard way.
Although the confession about male pregnancy is a little bit absurd, it’s worth sitting with. It’s a solvable problem, but only if it’s named rather than laughed off in a comments section.
And hey – someone in the comments of the confession post might’ve been on to something bigger. They said, “I think you should go for a test, bro. Somehow, the same symptoms for pregnancy in females are almost the same for testicular cancer, I guess, go for a test.”
In reality, it’s not exactly the same symptoms, but hey, at least they’re trying to help.
