SUBSTACK ENTRY 1 - Debater's Piece: The Meat Pie Metaphor and the Death of Human Dignity
Welcome to our Substack!
Every two weeks, we’ll be sharing thought-provoking pieces written by our members, alternating between Debater’s Pieces and Writer’s Pieces.
Our goal is to create a space where critical thinking, storytelling, culture, creativity, and social commentary can thrive.
For our first entry, here’s a Debater’s Piece analysing a trending lyric and what it says about modern culture.
Enjoy the read and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!
Recently, a certain artiste has been making waves on social media.
Now, I know a lot of artistes say disturbing things, but this one has particularly gotten traction, and I’m of the opinion that his popularity, and that of others like him, says more about the decay of our culture than about the artistes themselves.
Anyway, Mavo (as he calls himself) dropped a “banger” of a line recently, and I believe it merits some attention because they show where our culture is headed, into some really deep trouble.
So I decided I was going to write on it, exposing the lyrics for what they are and (hopefully) dissuading young people like me from listening to such people (or such music in general).
The lyrics in question are quite simple, yet I’ve heard people trying to dissect them like they’re a difficult passage from the Bible. Some say he used the metaphor he did because the food in question has lines, so it calls to mind the stretch marks on a woman’s body. Others say it is the softness and the inner filling of the pie that better expresses the metaphor Mavo was trying to make.
Regardless of your preferred interpretation, I’m going to take Mavo plainly at his words. Then I’m going to explicate the reasoning that leads to such a statement and show how it is affecting our culture in a very dangerous and alarming way.
Without further ado, here are the two lines that have forever changed the online Nigerian space (and have probably reduced my intelligence from hearing them too much):
“I wan chop your body.”
“Your body na meat pie.”
Spoken like a true poet. I’m sure Shakespeare would be proud.
Mavo has effectively called the woman he is addressing a piece of food, an object to satisfy his hunger.
In the two verses above (and in the rest of his part in the song), Mavo is only concerned about the girl’s body and what she can offer him. In short, he reduces her from a person to be loved to simply something to be used, a food he wants to satisfy himself with and be done with. There’s no love, no concern, no friendship, no regard for the other; just the momentary thrill of the one-night stand.
Is there something wrong with this pattern of thinking? Well, let’s look at how we treat food. When we eat something, we don’t care about the feelings and opinions of what we eat (they don’t even have any opinions in the first place). All that concerns us is what we can get out of it. Our attitude to food is inherently self-directed, i.e., either to nourish the body or to tingle your taste buds.
Do we need to ask food for its opinion before eating it? Of course not. If you have the money, you pay. If you don’t, you go for a cheaper alternative or you steal. Your major concern is always yourself: me and mine.
What happens when we adopt such a posture toward a human being (be it man or woman)? We commodify them. They become not persons to be loved, but food to be enjoyed. Thus, in building romantic relationships, we think not in character or virtue but in money and sexual pleasure, similar to how in buying food, we think (mostly) of how much it costs and how good it will taste. We talk of “sexual compatibility” the same way we ask for samples of a snack we’ve not had before.
But one may say, “Ehen? And what’s so wrong with that?”
Human beings are creatures specially endowed with an intellect and a will to know and choose (respectively) what appears to them as good. This gives human beings a dignity (worth) that far exceeds anything we can find in nature.
This thought experiment might better help you see the picture:
Nobody sees anything wrong with seeing a dog on a leash, but what about a human being on a leash? Instantly, there’s this intuition that something is not right with such an action. That is exactly what I am referring to when I talk about human dignity.
No one can rightly use another person as a means to an end because we are ends in ourselves. We are to be known, loved, and cherished, not used, dumped, and forgotten.
And this brings us back to the animus I have with Mavo’s lyrics (and songs like that in general). What becomes of a culture whose mainstream media pushes things that denigrate the value of a human being and treat people as objects to satisfy one’s own desire? How long would it take before such a culture totally downplays consent? How long before rape doesn’t seem so bizarre?
Today, a number of women in Nigeria are crying out for their rights, but how many people are aware that these little things matter? The average secondary school boy might find a feminist post on his feed maybe once a month, but he is being bombarded with “meat pie” music almost everywhere he goes, on the radio, on the music channels, from his mates, at parties, etc.
This objectification of women is part of the reason why women face the issues they do. And it must be stopped. It’s time to reclaim the dignity of the human being and push what truly matters into the songs we sing, the books we write, and the movies we watch. I’ll end this with a quote from the female philosopher Edith Stein:
“The world needs women not for what they can do, but for who they are.”