{UAH}

The sexual (r)evolution of an African feminist – Part I

The newest online presentation tool: it's easy, its' fun and the result is emazing (Emaze)

JANUARY 5, 2015 BY MSAFROPOLITAN4 COMMENTS

(This is the first part in a three-part blog essay about the aforementioned.)

Like many girls I entered puberty with both trepidation and excitement. It was a time marked by changes: psychological and physical. However, I soon learnt that girls were not meant to take an interest in a variety of things that came along with growing up. These things ranged from football to debating to physics, but worst of all, we were not encouraged to – despite all the hormonal changes taking place in our bodies – feign any interest in our sexuality and accompanying urges. No one talked about vaginas – let alone clitorises – not our teachers, family, friends or society at large. The only time there was an awareness that our private parts might have to do with something other than, well, making us girls – and the following happened often – was when boys made a fuss about theirs. The dictionary may define a penis as "the male organ of copulation in higher vertebrates, homologous with the clitoris" but to the boys in my coming of age setting (Lagos) it was ever so much more. It was everything to them: a body part whose various capacities they could boast to one another about, that they could draw countless doodles of, that they could grab as they strutted down the school corridor; that they could gesticulate suggestive jokes with, blow penis balloons, you name it. And as a result of the rather innocuous obsession boys had with their virility, rather than thinking aboutour own bodies, girls were also consumed, in varying degrees, with the penis, and especially with the taxingly growing sentiment that penises were a life-threatening stay-away-by-ALL-means-danger that could do painful (hardly pleasurable) things to our comparatively invisible girl parts.

This circumstantiality meant in my case that I avoided boys who liked me like the empty seat next to a drunkard on a crowded bus. Luckily perhaps, as an awkward and reserved young woman, boys with their 'dangerous' penises chasing girls who were unaware of the implications of – in essence – being 'prey' to 'boy-hunters', was one that I had no chance at excelling in, and I managed to avoid sexually excited boys successfully. Sure, I fell secretly in love with the suave lads who had already mastered the fine balance of what they had been taught was manliness – namely to, despite possessing a secret weapon, otherwise known as a penis, adopt a gentle, unthreatening approach towards their love interest – but I was not good at pretending to be anything at all, let alone a cool and composed proprietor of my own sudden cravings.

Years later when I, despite my sullen, unimpressed demeanour, managed to get a boyfriend, it transpired that the social programming had wired my brain after all, and I played the hunter and prey game as if I'd invented it. It's a game that is marked by a predatory, carnivorous (if subtly so) pursuit of a woman by a man and a sentiment of her caving in and surrendering when she eventually is "captured". And surrender I did, but not until the young man who was to be my first lover had pleaded, waited and finally deserved to have sex with me. My standoffishness was for the best though. Thanks to the closeness this lover and I had established by then, the dread I'd been made to feel in advance of my sexual debut was unwarranted; sex was in fact (and at most at that stage) pleasant. Yet it was not on my terms. And how could anything one "surrenders" to ever be…

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Viele GruBe

Robukui

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