Pain for a man’s pleasure

Cultural practices that put men’s enjoyment before women’s safety must be eradicated. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • uch ignorant men have been known to peddle myths that women with good lubrication are promiscuous; that they have sexually transmitted diseases, and that if married, they are unfaithful to their husbands.

  • Innocent women are falling prey to these myths; women from a number of communities in Southern and Eastern Africa are using herbs to dry up their vaginas before sex.

  • Others douche with chemicals including soaps, acids and various salts for this.

It is unusual for chama members to be shy even when discussing matters of an extremely intimate nature. I was therefore taken aback when they invited me for their monthly meeting last Saturday and took 15 minutes to get to the point. In case you have never heard of chama, it is a women’s welfare group of which I am the only male member. I am invited to meetings when sexual matters are to be discussed.

“I do not know where to start,” the chairperson said, avoiding eye contact with me. “You see, some of us have doors as wide as the gates of hell, but what we desire are heavens’ gates – narrow ones.” I did not have a clue what they meant.

“We are worried about the size of our vaginas,” shouted a member from the back of the room. “We think we are no longer cylinders but trapeziums!” There was an eruption of laughter around the room.

HARMFUL OBSESSION

After one confusing analogy after another, members clarified that some of their husbands had intimated that their vaginas were wider than normal while others had expressed displeasure at their copious vaginal secretions.

One member had used herbs to dry up and tighten her vagina while another had booked an operation with a gynecologist to surgically reduce the size of her vagina. “We want to be virgins again to please our men and we want to hear your view and advice on how to go about it,” the vice chairperson said.

Through the ages, men and women have been obsessed with making the vagina tight and dry with the hope that this would make sex enjoyable. This is despite the fact that adequate foreplay usually leads to maximum lubrication. An inexperienced man may misinterpret this to mean a wide, unhealthy vagina.

Such ignorant men have been known to peddle myths that women with good lubrication are promiscuous; that they have sexually transmitted diseases, and that if married, they are unfaithful to their husbands.

Innocent women are falling prey to these myths; women from a number of communities in Southern and Eastern Africa are using herbs to dry up their vaginas before sex. Others douche with chemicals including soaps, acids and various salts for this.

A number also use cotton wool, tissue paper, towels and pieces of cloth to dry up just before sex. And now is an emerging tendency for women to ask doctors for vaginoplasty, an operation aimed at reshaping the vagina and making it small.

CATASTROPHIC CONSEQUENCES

The consequences of these practices are catastrophic. Chemicals and herbs kill the normal flora of the vagina, increasing the risk to infections such as candidiasis and bacterial vaginosis.

More worryingly, these chemicals damage the delicate tissue of the vagina. When dry sex is practiced in an already wounded vagina, pain can be unbearable.

The delicate epithelium gets bruised and tears happen. And this presents a conducive environment for the transmission of HIV. It is known that communities that practise dry sex have higher rates of new HIV infections. “This sounds more serious than I imagined,” the chairperson interrupted.

Although these practices carry risks for HIV transmission similar to the uncircumcised penis, governments and the international community have deliberately turned a blind eye to them, possibly because it is a woman’s problem.

There are no policies or education programmes to eradicate vaginal tightening and drying. Women do these things solely to please their men, even though they suffer pain during sex.

All these speak to our beliefs around female sexuality. There is a general myth that good women should not enjoy sex – that it is for the pleasure of men, and that a woman must do everything possible including harming herself to keep a man in the relationship or he will cheat. It is a tragedy and a violation of a woman’s rights to healthy sexuality. It is time to enact policies to end dry sex and tight vaginas; our leaders must allocate funds to educate the populace on the dangers of these practices, just as they have with female genital mutilation for women.

Chama members were upset to realise what their communities had reduced them to: objects of men’s pleasure with no right to sexual pleasure. After we finished our session, a member ordered all of us to close our eyes and said a long prayer following which we all dispersed quietly.