Often women are conditioned to keep quiet in the bedroom, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of female sexual disenfranchisement. Photo / iStock
Often women are conditioned to keep quiet in the bedroom, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of female sexual disenfranchisement. Photo / iStock
OPINION:
Sex wasn't talked about in my house.
There was the obligatory acknowledgment of how babies were made, delivered via liberal euphemisms, but other than that, the topic was never raised.
I only knew sex was something men did to women in MA-rated movies and on the pages of PornHub, usually with lots of screaming that sounded curiously like pain.
The characters rarely discussed what was about to happen before clothes were flung off. Consent began and ended with the unbuttoning of a blouse, and this was usually tied to the blossoming of an epic romance.
I internalised this message when I became sexually active, letting men do things that seemed to compel them to keep spending time with me – albeit things that routinely left me feeling empty.
Sex was something that happened to me, not with me.
Of course, women aren't taught to be co-participants in sex, and especially not to talk about and pursue pleasure in the same way men are.
In school, boys learn about erections and wet dreams, while girls are warned about menstrual cramps and pregnancy prevention. We tell young women it's crude to speak about sex, and that being "wife material" means being sexually chaste.
And this amounts to a culture of silence around female desire.
Most of the heterosexual men who read this column do so because they want to dissolve this silence with their wives and girlfriends. Often, they're in sex-starved relationships where absent intimacy has become the elephant in the bedroom.
Sometimes they DM me and joke: "My wife doesn't have a problem talking, she never shuts up! So why won't she say anything in bed?"
I tell them there's not a large enough word limit in a DM to explain the complex, systemic reasons most women don't talk about sex – not even with the person they call their partner.
Nadia Bokody explains why not talking about sex is bad for your relationship. Photo / Instagram
In short though, sexual shame isn't something we're born with. It's created from the moment we're first instructed to close our legs and "be ladylike", and stoked via years of messaging that tells us our bodies are not our own, that they exist as ornaments to decorate the shelves that line the halls men walk through.
And this constant objectification – a kind of stripping away of a woman's humanity designed to remind her she's only as valuable as her ability to arouse men – is just the tip of the iceberg of our sexual disenfranchisement.
Which is why, rather than being frustrated at women's silence in the bedroom, we'd do better to examine how we can make women feel safer to vocalise their desires in the first place.
Sex needn't be the daunting, awkward topic so many of us were raised to view it as. It should be something we talk about as openly and frequently as we do parenting, finances or any other significant aspect of our relationships.
So much of our fear around speaking up about sex comes from the falsehood we're protecting something by censoring it from the conversation – that we're shielding girls from promiscuity, safeguarding our partner's ego from a potential blow or keeping ourselves from having to sit in a moment of discomfort.
Conversely, what we're really doing when we treat sex as taboo, is normalising shame and sexual dissociation.
The more we sweep it under the rug, hoping the unacknowledged chasm in our bedrooms will simply resolve itself, the further we get from having the kind of intimacy that feels affirming and satisfying.
I often wonder if I'd have realised sooner sex could be both these things, had I felt like I could talk about it when I first became sexually active.
While I'll never know the answer, what I do know now, is sex is something that's talked about in my house today – regularly and collaboratively. And if parenthood becomes a path for me, it will be a discussion I'll teach my kids to have, too.
• Follow Nadia Bokody on Instagram and YouTube for more sex, relationship and mental health content.
