We don’t talk enough about sex as Nigerians.

Sure we sneak in a couple of pages of erotica every other hour while we’re supposed to be hard at work, download some more adult pornography for the evening after, and spend all the time we devote to office and post-office socialising discussing the pros and cons of sex before and after marriage. But we never discuss actual sexual intercourse, in a matter-of-factly, shame-free way. We don’t talk about the mechanics of sex with ourselves as adults and we most certainly do not discuss it with pre-teens and young adult for whom this information is incredibly vital. We need to change that, especially with young women.

Our inability to discuss sex, sexuality and intercourse with young girls in a mature, irreverent manner isn’t something that only Nigerians parents struggle with. It is a universal problem that is spread to all the different spheres of modern life, from education to socialisation to health care and administration. An American investigative journalist, Peggy Orenstein, in a research to find out how hundreds of young American girls aged 15-24 think of sex, discovered that they were taught and conditioned to see sex as a tool of procreation for women and pleasure for men. They are taught to believe that a woman’s sexual satisfaction is intricately tied to the sexual pleasure of her partner, and orgasms for him equals sex satisfaction for her.

These ‘ideals’ are everywhere when you ask young Nigerians about sex, or even when you do a cursory search of sex-related tweets and posts on Facebook or Twitter. When women ask that their partners to at least try to ensure that sexual satisfaction (in this case orgasms) is mutual, they are often ridiculed or worse, called sluts and whores, reinforcing the wrong belief that sexual satisfaction for Nigerian women is something they should be grateful to experience, instead of something they should demand.

Sex should be pleasurable for both parties. If there is equality in the bedroom, then that equality is more likely to carry outside of it. These things are never unrelated.

Listen to Peggy.

Editor