A rare testimony. Sikou Niakaté, a 34-year-old French author and director, spoke to L’Équipe about his dream career as a footballer. A career that he was unable to complete partly due to shame of his body.
“I dreamed of Manchester United,” explains the director behind the documentary In the dark, men cry. “I played football for at least three hours a day. I was strong. Excellent even. I played midfield, sometimes 10. I was tall, very tall – in college, I was already 1.92 m tall – but I was technical. But really technical,” he recalls before explaining what held him back when moving from playing soccer with friends in the neighborhood to the seriousness of a structured club and the prospect of a professional career.
“I had the Calbar Crusaders”
Complexed by the size of his penis, too small according to him, Niakaté explains having rejected “the idea of collective showers”. “It was unthinkable. Impossible. What I hid was about to become visible. » Without taboo, the author does not hesitate to return to certain traumatic moments from his childhood, such as the mockery of a friend insisting on comparing the size of their sexes: “You have a very small cock, it’s crazy”.
“I died inside,” he remembers when recalling this humiliating and badly experienced moment. “I walk behind him looking at the ground, head down. I’m a monster. So I decided to never play club football. Never, never. There are some who say that they were unable to make a career because they became the crusaders, I was the crusader of Calbar,” he summarizes with a touch of irony and resignation.
“The size of the penis has taken on an irrational importance in my life”
Eager to evoke in his documentary “the locker room syndrome”, a sort of paranoia of measurements developed by certain men self-conscious about their sex, the author of the book In the dark I scream and podcast Black day talks about all the strategies put in place to avoid swimming pool lessons, skip the shower step in his basketball club… “On match days, at worst, I had to take off my pants, put on shorts quickly, I turned around, I spoke, I created a diversion but the collective shower was not possible,” he explains.
“I am aware that the size of my penis has taken on an irrational importance in my life. But it is irrational on the scale of the world’s emergency; on the scale of my life, it is my inner war”, he concludes, affirming to have “been punished by the genetic lottery” while reassuring about the evolution of his thoughts on this subject.
“I saw clearly with the partners I had to what extent it was neither an obstacle to pleasure, nor even a subject (…) Things are better since I allowed myself to experience some shared intimacies, which was unthinkable for a long time. »
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