I remember the shock and the trill on my face at the same time, the first time I truly knew about the true concept of the hymen. It was through a Ted talk presentation I had encountered while surfing the internet for new Ted talks presentations.
I was shocked for the main fact that even at twenty something I still knew the hymen to be some sort of “cloth” stretched over the vaginal opening whose job was waiting to get bloody and give out the proof of virginity stamp to a woman after her first sexual encounter whilst waiting to call the next virgin in line “next!”
But what I learnt that day was so awakening and beautiful and intricate at the same time that I couldn’t help but to lecture some group of male and female friends about it. I did short videos and used condoms to demonstrate what the hymen looked like.
Recently, I got to know the full anatomy of the clitoris which i was so surprised to know was some kinda giant self bossy queen with a whole kingdom rather than some little wanna be boss chick I had always thought it to be from one of my favorite Netflix documentary,
Sex, Love & Goop. ( You should check it out).
It’s amazing the things we carry in our own bodies as humans,I can’t say a lot for men but the woman body freaking amazes me to the core.
But suddenly women are thought to revere these parts of themselves as sacred and hence something to be “kept out of my normal everyday conversations” because it’s just uncomfortable or for the lack of better word “ Shameful”. Sacredness doesn’t bother me. It is for the same reason I personally choose to wait to experience sexual liberty and pleasure with a man I am sure about in a “comfortable way”. And by comfortable I mean abiding by the choices that somehow has its root deep rooted in my religion.
Of course, when it comes to sexual liberty, I prefer to speak of my own choices without judging anybody’s. It is not from the fear of being tagged “religious” but rather It is certainly growing up and knowing that life isn’t all white and black and amidst the gray areas are “ a man has to do what he has to do”, so maybe it’s soo unchristian for me to say this but sometimes I let people do what they want to do. My business ends there. But Jezzz, the Shame around the topic of sex really bothers me. Whether it is choosing to have sex or not. The shame around sex liberation bothers me all the time.
Today I held a sex lecture after work with my colleagues and for almost an hour we kept talking openly about the hymen, O- face ( Orgasm face), the clitoris and it was just fun.
The shame around sex liberation bothers me all the time.
As a wanna be sex therapist I gave the
“Go and draw your vulva “ assignment.
Which basically was for them to get home, get a mirror, position it inbetween their thighs and draw the image of what they see- their own sex organ and if maybe they were crazy like me hang it on their wall as a monument of worship.
The blessedness of the female vulva-Her holiness.
I often tell people that there is almost no heathy place to learn about sex. We “all” resort to irrespective of our religious background. And the things we see almost often is far from the reality.There is something that always seem to be missing at least for me, and all the times I have resorted to it to look for the answers there is navigating the truth about sex and also just for the pleasure of being aroused, at least a sign that I am not a dead wood yet for a woman at my age with zero sexual experience.
I often tell people that there is almost no safe place to learn about sex.
And if I get to feel something then bingo! We are on track. The oxytocin and her family members are in the right places. But you see , the truth is, most days a porn site is the least place I want to be but there’s a poster that hang on a brick wall” sometimes man gotta do what he gotta do”. When I am ovulating or for super stressed or for the only reason that my body chooses to be horny on a Saturday night.
And what I see often isn’t what some of my close and vulnerable talk buddies tell me about their personal encounters about sex.
It’s like in porn the rawness & vulnerability and yet the liberation of being subjected to the power of one’s own pleasure and that of partner is masked with a certain unrealistic “perfection plus the need to orgasm all the time at all cost. I think orgasm is perfect and I would want to have multiple episodes of it but how true is its perfection portrayed in porn?
People look so nice and soo well informed. So calculated and soo predictable I must say.
But it still comes back to this truth, whether it can be statistically proven or not, most adults know every thing sex by what these porn companies show us and that worries me. It worries me because of the one sided narrative. It worries me that there aren’t many safe, decent and guarded places to be informed the least about sex, once again for a lot of adults like myself and widely for religious folks and why you too will wonder why at the end we worry about
“ Is it a sin for married couples to watch porn together? but rather we should rather asking
“ Who is telling the healthy truth about sex or where can we find it whist we are in waiting”?
Maybe we should all go back to Anatomy 101.
Maybe we should have more real stories
and narratives.
Or maybe I should just stop trying to “fix” every problem I perceive in our culture and just say
Hello my vulva. It’s nice meeting you. Take me on the tour. I want to know you.
-Jo Nketiah