The first time I had sex it wasn’t sex, it was statutory rape. I wouldn’t know that until years later.
After the deed was done – under the cover of night inside a parked car in an open field few people venture into at night. I went home and took a sponge to my body like a maniac while pouring scalding hot water on myself in hopes I’ll either burn away or scrub off the filth I believed had been visited upon my body by the ‘act.’
If I had been free with my parents enough to discuss sex, I would have found help in telling them about what transpired between me and the 50+ years old man who did with my body what he wanted and what I didn’t fully understand at 16.
To anyone familiar with the dangers of purity culture and the value of sex education, the sexual violence epidemic in Nigeria will appear smack at the end of a straight line connecting the dots on why the menace persists in the country. The lack of sex education and Nigeria’s cross-cultural and cross-religious purity culture will take prime spots on that line.
The term “purity culture” is generally associated with the white, American, Evangelical Christian Purity Movement. However, evangelicals don’t have a monopoly on the ethics at the root of purity culture.
In Islam, the phrase used is “honour culture” instead of “purity culture” but the meaning is the same.
Purity culture is an attitude towards sexual relations that only recognises the scriptural view of remaining chaste until one is in a heterosexual marriage. It doesn’t matter if the scripture in question is the Quran, the Torah, or the Holy Bible.
Any other sexual relations are considered null and void and as such, conversations about them that could prepare boy and girls for what could happen are either avoided or approached with fear-mongering and guilt-tripping.
This alone under prepares boys and girls for healthy interactions between and among the sexes – depending on whether or not they’re heterosexual, homosexual or whatever other sexual orientation they may come to identify with. It does more harm than that, however.
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Having the talk
We had ‘the talk’ with our mother all at once. It wasn’t a talk so much as it was an uncomfortable movie time. Three kids sat in front of a boxy TV set watching human anatomy distorted by diseases whose names we wouldn’t remember the next day, chaperoned by a mother who said little.
“This is why you must stay away from anything sex-related. It starts with holding hands,” our mother said with finality after the film had finished its slow run.
To her credit, she gave blanket advice to all three of us; myself and my two sisters.
Other boys aren’t so lucky.
In purity culture, gender expectations are based on a strict, stereotype-based binary.
Men are taught they are primal beings whose bodies will respond to something as trivial as a woman’s exposed calf whether they intend for it to or not.
Women are taught that they’re physical beings, every inch of whose bodies can tempt a man’s insatiable sexual appetite.
By this, women are burdened with the responsibility of presenting themselves in a way that least leads men to the temptation of impropriety, and men are unburdened by responsibility because their ‘penises’ have minds of their own.
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Since any healthy sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage are demonised, no one truly learns about consent, and LGBTQ+ children learn nothing about being safe naming them doubly at risk of sexual violations over time. The data reflects this.
In this tug of war, resentment brews and in due course, many men lean into that teaching about their primal core being sturdier because of their maleness. The violence is never far from that point on.
A clear double-standard
I will go on to have many sexual partners over the course of my late teens, my sister on the other hand couldn’t do more than hold hands with their boyfriends and eventually husbands-to-be.
While both boys and girls are encouraged to stay chaste until marriage, there is no virginity test for men.
To be clear, virginity is a social construct even to begin with.
Ill-prepared boys go on to view the bodies of women as a pie from which they can take and by taking, mar its perfection. While girls are made to put their sense of self-worth in the purity of their bodies.
Many choose silence over outing their violators to share themselves the shame of forever being seen as a used woman. Forever and reduced in worth.
The sexual violence epidemic in Nigeria is neatly knitted with the culture of shame we have around the conversation about sex.
Until we divest ourselves from that and begin to teach our children healthy sex education that better prepares them with the tools and language to navigate the world around us, the fight against this menace may drag on for a very long time.
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