This week, Chiamaka shares her personal experience with sexual desires and how women are generally advised and conditioned to suppress such desires.
When I was younger, I always felt that something was fundamentally wrong with me. For a long time, I held the belief that some sort of depravity had been instilled in me as a child, whether by trauma that I had pushed far down or simply by the design of the enemy. As I got older, I came to understand that many women around me did indeed feel the same things, we were just discouraged from embracing our sexuality and led to believe that desiring sex or sexual activity was the worst thing a woman could do.
For society, it was a sign of a wayward woman, one who would have no qualms giving her body freely out to whomever, to do whatever, and one who would one day even sell her body to the highest bidder. I feared my sensual needs and my urge for sex because I assumed that this made me a bad woman. I was told that only men sought pleasure from carnal desires, only men had a predisposition to wanting sex, and that women instead would suffer these desires for the sake of pleasing their male partners.
Whenever I read romance novels and saw the way the women delighted in having pleasure, I was convinced that these were only written for salacious interests and that modern women did not behave in such ways. Even though I was drawn towards my attraction to other women, there was shame in that too as a result of homophobia. There was shame in all these different areas and I was also not conventionally attractive. In order to shun my desires, I shut them away and pushed them into the farthest part of my subconscious.
The irony is in the fact that my sexuality has saved me, more than once. The first way I came to enjoy my looks was in seeing myself as sexy, as someone who elicited sexual desires from interested parties and who was capable of giving it back when equal attraction was there. I relished the looks, the stares I got when I wore fitting clothes and when I did my hair a particular way. It was strange for me to see attraction in people’s eyes, rather than pure condescension or downright dismissal.
Understanding that men are not the only ones who are supposed to enjoy sex made me vocal about my needs, both inside the bedroom and out. Unfortunately, there is a harmful assumption that a woman choosing to embrace their sexuality means that any man can assault, harass and demean them freely. Men want to have control of women’s bodies, whether or not said woman is sexually positive. Being ‘conservative’ does not stop male harassment and it is an awful prejudice to assume that a woman elicits thoughtlessness simply because they have chosen to fully embrace their sexuality.
I remember how I would cower and shy away from admitting that something had turned me on, how hard I would press my legs together in order to dispel that thumping pulse at the edge of my panties. Now, I tell my partner(s) about my cravings so often that I fear they might even be scared of the things I will do to and with them.
Women deserve to enjoy sexual activities, as little or as often as we would like. Creating safe spaces for us to do this is necessary work and sexual education is just as important as any other. While caregivers wrongfully assume that discussing sexual nuances with younger adults will increase our tendency to be “spoilt”, the opposite is often times what occurs. Younger adults become obsessed with body parts because they never had people demystifying these things for them. They are unable to speak up or even comprehend sexual assault and molestation because their parents have not said anything to them about how these things occur and how to identify unsafe moments.
