Written by Fatimah Haruna
A typical girl’s hostel, bubbling with activities. The room is in perfect symmetry, with bunk beds at each of the four corners. Slices of joint wardrobe at the centre of the two longest walls, offering up a cover, a sort of privacy, to each of the corners. There is a unit: each corner, small space, bunkie and bunker, shared desk, shared kettle, shared wardrobe. Then, there are factions: up and down, your bucket, my bowl, your plate, all brought together by a shared need that evening, by the communal chaos of living. Oriental noodles simmering in one corner, doors opening and closing, plates clinking, music playing to no one in particular, conversations loud and uncontained.
“Na wah o, who is cooking this noodle again?”
“I can’t even wait to get married, honestly. All these books someone is reading, what is the point?”
“Mr. Adewale na bastard. Material one week to exam.”
“Fatimah,” called a voice from across the room, “no night class today?”
“No, oo,” I replied anxiously.
“I am going to have sex,” I wanted to say aloud.
I had always seen the university as my getaway ticket. As a solemn, quiet, nerdish 18-year-old, I wasn’t the ‘started out good but lost her way’ shtick; I wanted to lose my way, to swerve dangerously from the monotony that was my life prior to school. As a curious person, I wanted to explore everything, especially the things I was advised against. And sex was at the top of my list. I had always also been very curious about sex, the way it reads in the numerous fictions I had consumed. I wanted to know what the body can do.
My first sexual exploit was finally going to be ‘Lucinda’ from one of those billionaire playboy romances, whose plot I could never remember. I was excited and nervous, feelings that quickly gave way to apprehension and hyperawareness; everybody seemed to be in on my dirty little secret. Like the word ‘SEX’ was emblazoned on my forehead, especially the group of boys sitting outside his hostel.
A few hours later, after almost drowning in beads of sweat that weren’t mine, trying to balance my body under his weight in the complete darkness, and an unbearable pain that quickly turned to hotness and then nothing, I rode back to my hostel, with Sam Smith singing to my disillusionment, which in turn hung like a sad, little depressed cloud.
I wasn’t Lucinda that night, or any other similar nights that followed.
I’ve kept my share of men, even though “many” is a matter of perspective, from the warm comfort of a relationship to everything else. I have braved through a series of “positive female-centred” porn acts I still could barely stomach. My series of ‘how to enjoy sex?’ ‘how much is a vibrator’ ‘how to masturbate’ ‘how to find the g spot’ to Google. Lucinda still wasn’t easy to come by.
I saw the series Sex and the City quite recently. A story of four female friends navigating love, relationships, and friendship in New York. During the course of this series, I did a good number of eye-rolling. Samantha Jones, one of the four friends, is basically the 60s feminist dream. A sexually liberated woman in every sense of the word, neither shy nor ashamed of her sexuality. She talked freely about sex and her numerous sexual exploits while also putting herself first. As a woman and a feminist, I recognise the cultural significance of her role and what it means to the larger discussion of women and our history of sexual repression. But still, I couldn’t help the eye rolling and scepticism that crept up at her sex scenes.
While younger women of my generation are and are becoming more sexually expressive, the pleasure gaps are still riverbanks apart. A 2017 study found that about 95% of heterosexual men say they usually orgasm during sexual intimacy, while only 65% of heterosexual women reported the same. Women are having more sex and engaging in sexual exploits like Samantha Jones, but these exploits are not translating into sexual pleasure. Why?
First and foremost, we must acknowledge that having a sexual relationship with a Nigerian man is an extreme sport, in whatever context.
An article written by Big Think, Orgasm Gap: The insidious reason women have fewer orgasms than men, used a recent survey published to the journal Gender & Society and its findings to explore the reasons for these gaps. The survey hinged on the following leading hypotheses: that women would have more orgasms if they masturbated more, that—unlike men—they are more likely to orgasm with a committed partner, and lastly, that they would be more likely to orgasm if men made more of an effort to stimulate the clitoris, the primary anatomical source of human female sexual pleasure, basically finding out that only one seemed to be true.
Women who reported masturbating in the previous month were no more likely to achieve orgasm compared to women who did not. Women in committed relationships were also no more likely to reach orgasm than women who were just having casual sex. However, women who received oral sex in their prior encounter were 16% more likely to have had an orgasm “The gender gap in orgasm remains primarily associated with a lesser emphasis on clitoral stimulation,” the researchers summarised.
It all comes down to the clit innit.
In the course of my sexual exploit, it took me a really long time to realise that there was this amazing organ called the clitoris. It took me an even longer time and various YouTube videos later to find out exactly where it was and what it does. Imagine my surprise and excitement when it brought me closer than I’ve ever gotten to Lucinda just by touch alone.
Penetrative sex, which is the primary mode of sexual pleasure for men, has always and still been the centre of sex for most people. The clitoris, which is the equivalent of the penis, is the centre of pleasure for a majority of women, but it is still not getting the required attention. Women’s orgasm is generally not getting the required attention.
In many heterosexual relationships, men’s pleasure is often framed as primary, natural, and urgent, while female orgasm is frequently viewed as secondary and tied to emotional connection. But while emotional connection might get you the feeling of intimacy, it doesn’t always guarantee an orgasm. The clitoral stimulation and other necessary parts of women’s pleasure have been chugged down to the word ‘foreplay,’ a group of activities to be done in preparation of the almighty penetration, rather than it being sex itself.
This is to say that sex is still a very male-centred venture.
It’s deeply disturbing how much of society is structured to prioritise male sexual pleasure while misrepresenting or neglecting female pleasure. From porn to movies, and even the new wave of sexually expressive music by women, these media—though often labelled progressive—still carry the same old undertones. They glorify penetrative sex, frame sex as something done to women, and often include violent undertones, especially in rap.
One of the most unfortunate truths about women’s sexuality is the socialisation that teaches women to accept pain and discomfort during sex as normal, all to please men. This persists even though men are already being prioritised, despite the glaring “pleasure gap” that suggests otherwise. While sexual liberation has made strides, it seems to have veered into a performance for men. Female sexual liberation has subtly taken on a male-centred form, evident in the abundance of “how to ride a man” tutorials flooding social media. If anything, the focus should be on how to please women; we should be flooded with mass tutorials on how to find the clit and pleasure a woman properly.
Even with the advent of women’s sexual freedom, social conditioning still stands firm at the centre of our lives, permeating almost everything we do, our views and interactions with our immediate environment and in this case our relationship with sex. How we view sex, our perception of it and also our relationship with it.
In a review of pleasure and danger, a compilation of many important papers, articles, and talks given at the 1982 conference, done by Arlene Stein and Andrea Press, there were highlights on the effect of social conditioning on female pleasure. “Rather than enjoying pleasure for its own sake, girls tend to cling to traditional ideas about the female body, sexuality, love, and romance, utilising their sexuality primarily as a means of searching for love and security.” This perspective is deeply rooted in a long history of generational conditioning, which portrays women as inherently emotional beings whose pleasure is tied to the confines of love and romance.
As women, our identities are often built around the ideals of love and relationships, instilled with the belief that love and romance are the ultimate goals. Going for sexual pleasure outside of these ideas will always prove difficult, initially. From personal experience, a truckload of mental gymnastics and delusion is necessary.
Women are taught to prioritise servitude in our everyday lives, to put other people’s needs above our own, to perform, to people-please, to twist and turn into uncomfortable positions just to please society, most especially men. It also teaches women through purity culture and slut-shaming that sex is a deviant act. We see how all of this conditioning manifests in women’s sexual relationships: how we tend to prioritise men’s sexual pleasure over our own, and how we are also more likely to endure discomfort during sexual relations. It also makes it difficult for women to comfortably explore their own bodies, have a healthy relationship with them, or even have healthy sexual conversations with women or even their sexual partners.
Sexual freedom, as it stands, often feels more like a socially sanctioned form of exploitation than true liberation. Without genuine sexual pleasure—or when pleasure comes at the expense of another—can it even be called freedom?
This is not to diminish the incredible strides women have made to bring us to a place where we can even recognise the gaps in sexual freedom. Yet, society remains a significant barrier—a repellant, even—when it comes to true sexual liberation. It’s not enough to teach women that they can have sex for its own sake, like men often do. We must also teach both society and women what it truly means to embrace sex for its own sake and to experience pleasure as women in ways that honour and are tailored to our unique bodies. Only then can we begin to close the gap and redefine what sexual freedom really looks like.
P.S. Whoever came up with the concept of a quickie deserves public flogging in the town square—it’s almost certainly a man. A quickie to a woman’s body is like using a roll of toilet paper to mop up a flooded room: woefully inadequate and borderline insulting.
