What is it about growing up in a new generation that makes us believe that we’re breaking new ground in human behaviour in the different facets of our lives. What is it about the generation gap that makes us especially confident that we, and no one before us has crossed lines previously forbidden and made the unthinkable normal? I don’t know but I’d like to find out.

A common narrative you’ll hear when you talk to 18 – 25 year old men in 2017 is that sexual liberation has come with the computer. When you ask about their sexual escapades, they’ll tell you that they easily have had more sex, and more easily than any generation before them ever had before. And in some ways, they are right.

Sex literally has never been easier, especially in Nigeria. We might have come to regard the quantum leaps science has made in the last ten years, but that’s only because we first interacted with these changes in our childhoods and teens, the very period where our minds are at their most malleable. We don’t seem to realise that just twenty years ago, families only had one phone per home, and to keep their illicit sexual dalliances away from their parents, teenagers then communicated primarily by letter. Now it is nothing for us to have two phones, one clean and boring in the very slim chance that straying eyes stumble on it, and another where our clandestine texts with our lovers and sex buddies and our most tastefully shot nudes.

What the mobile phone has done is ease the burden of communication so thoroughly that we have become almost preternaturally capable of taking every opportunity to have sex, no matter how slim. We can risk thirty minute quickies because we can call our fuck buddies the minute our families inform us they are leaving and affording us incidental privacy. We can arrange hookups with people who live across the world, piling up the sex for when they come visiting Nigeria for Christmas or Summer. It has stripped sex of courtship, the great hindrance and increased our efficiency. In some ways, it is a marvellous thing.

But marvellous things can sometimes be double edged swords. One of the unfortunate side effects of the internet and the access it provides to millions of young millennial women just coming into their own sexualities is the misconception that the stigma around casual sex for women is gone. It isn’t. Instead, it has changed form, as most prejudices do when they are put under scrutiny, becoming more subtle but more insidious. Terms like the ‘body count’, and hoe phases are examples of this underhandedness. It is insinuated that the ‘hoe phase’ is a normal part of girl’s lives, a period where in the bid to find herself, she has sex with anyone who wants her, and anyone she wants. The girl in a hoe phase is celebrated, but on the unspoken condition that the ‘phase’ has an end. So sex isn’t a thing women enjoy, it’s a biological/phase that is ‘fun’ for a while and unsexy when it doesn’t cease. If it persists, the ‘phase’ is dropped and the woman becomes a pariah.

Women are well aware of this paradox, as they have always been, through each generation’s sexual liberation iteration, and they are well aware in this generation too. They know that they are allowed more sex than ever before, and they are fighting for the right to have that sex, or more specifically the right to choose.

Doesn’t mean they’re sleeping with everyone with a pulse. This shouldn’t be too hard to comprehend, should it?