The norm that young men should do what young men do

The norm that young men should do what young men do is a social and religious prescription for masculinity: young men are expected to display heterosexual desire, sexual bravado, risk-taking, and action rather than hesitation or disclosure. In Niru Ikemadu’s story, the rule does not simply describe behavior; it produces pressure, shame, and self-surveillance by treating conformity as evidence of manhood and deviation as a problem to be corrected.

Religious Definition and Heterosexual Expectation

Reverend Olumide gives the norm its theological language. He tells Niru that it is acceptable for a man to possess the desires associated with young men because those desires are God-given and natural. Desire is presented as the reason babies are made, while adulthood is defined as learning to harness desire in the service of the command to reproduce within a one-man, one-woman order. Masculinity therefore becomes inseparable from heterosexuality, sexual appetite, and eventual conformity to a prescribed family structure.

The instruction is both expansive and evasive. Reverend Olumide tells Niru not to fear becoming a man and to do manly things, but he does not specify what those things are. The absence of a clear definition leaves Niru to learn masculinity from the sexual talk of his classmates. Their graphic discussions and his attempts to look at girls’ bodies become an improvised lesson in what male desire is supposed to look like. Yet the performance fails internally: the bodies remain merely bodies, the sexual language does not arouse him, and nothing turns him on. His lack of desire is not treated as a possible truth about himself; the surrounding norm makes it appear instead as something suppressed, unhealthy, or ungodly.

Action Versus Speech

The rule also organizes a contrast between masculine action and vulnerable communication. When Niru tells his mother that he is not using drugs and does not have a gun, he is responding to the secrecy and surveillance surrounding him. His mother cannot openly explain what she suspects, while Reverend Olumide’s doctrine supplies an explanation for silence: men are defined by doing rather than talking. The maxim makes communication itself seem unmanly, even as the family’s refusal to speak leaves Niru isolated.

This opposition matters because Niru needs language for an experience the rule cannot recognize. He requires calm rather than desire, and he is already struggling with episodes in which the world turns gray, sound becomes muffled, and breathing feels painful. Religious instruction does not give him a vocabulary for those conditions. Instead, it redirects attention toward masculine conduct, making action appear like the remedy for inner uncertainty and making confession appear like another failure to perform the role correctly.

Peer Performance and Risk

Reverend Olumide’s companion principle is that there is no growth without risk. In the social setting of a Friday night party, the principle becomes a test administered by other young people. After Niru’s disappointing race, Adam and his friends urge him to drink, calling him Harvard and turning his hesitation into a public challenge. Niru accepts a red cup containing vodka and Coke, then drinks again as the group chants and celebrates him.

The alcohol produces a temporary social transformation. Adam rubs Niru’s back, the group cheers, fist-bumps, high-fives, and hugs him, and Niru feels himself cease to be an isolated individual and become part of something larger. The scene makes the norm’s reward visible: participation is treated as belonging, while refusal would leave him outside the circle. The pressure is not imposed by Reverend Olumide alone. It moves through classmates, jokes, touch, alcohol, and the collective rhythm of encouragement until compliance feels like a route into male fellowship.

The party also exposes the instability of the prescribed identity. Niru is surrounded by heterosexual display, intoxication, sexualized joking, and young men who treat transgression as proof of freedom, yet he remains frightened and disoriented. His body becomes numb as the world tilts and blurs; he loses the hand of the girl who led him toward the light and is absorbed instead into a crowd of gestures and slogans. The norm promises self-discovery through risk, but the immediate result is a loss of self. Its demand that Niru swallow the experience becomes literal as well as symbolic: he must take in a behavior before he can be recognized as participating in the group.

Enforcement and Narrative Significance

The norm is enforced through several overlapping authorities. Reverend Olumide supplies religious legitimacy, Niru’s classmates provide everyday policing, and Niru’s own attention becomes a mechanism of self-correction as he searches for evidence that the expected desire exists within him. His mother’s warning that he should not follow the foolishness of white children adds another competing standard, but it does not relieve the pressure. Instead, Niru is caught between parental caution, religious masculinity, and the party culture that treats risk as ordinary.

The rule’s central violence lies in its conversion of difference into deficiency. Niru’s calm, silence, fear, and absent sexual response are not allowed to remain neutral facts. They are interpreted as signs that he is holding back or failing to become a man. The norm thus operates less as a description of what young men do than as an instruction about what they must repeatedly perform in order to be legible to others. Its heterosexual assumptions and insistence on action narrow the available forms of masculinity, while the social rewards for conformity briefly conceal the cost of surrendering one’s own perception.

In the larger narrative, the rule functions as a bridge between religious correction and peer initiation. The same command that tells Niru to become manly also prepares him to treat risk, drinking, sexual display, and emotional silence as tests of worth. Yet his experience reveals the contradiction at the rule’s center: the more urgently he performs belonging, the less securely he inhabits himself. The norm promises growth, but for Niru it produces pressure to imitate a masculine script whose desires and gestures do not arise naturally from him.