sexuality paper

Introduction

Every Wednesday, I help run a mentorship program for a group of middle school girls in New Orleans, Louisiana. We focus on sexuality and self-love. Not unlike Senegal, there is a need for this kind of interventive program because there is a deficit of publicly funded, sex-positive education programs. These past few weeks, provided several readings on sexuality and the sex work panel, I have been thinking back to a specific session we conduct on sexual decision making. Each year, we ask the girls why they think people might choose to have sex. Notably, similar to the case study we read in class, we generalize the question so as to better engage the girls. They offer many potential reasons, but we like to emphasize a few in particular: to feel closer to their partner, to have babies (if they want to be moms), and—especially—because it feels good.

These reasons are not spoken as such. Often, they are skewed or redirected to reconcile masculine sexuality and place responsibility (shame) on women. That is to say, across all cultures I’ve observed, there is a resistance to conceptualize a world in which women have sex because they want to. When discussing feminine sexuality, the word “desire” is often replaced with “obligation,” and Senegal is no exception to this rule. Over the past few weeks I have observed four presumed reasons as to why Senegalese women have sex:

1.     They are married and, consequently, expected to please their husbands and bear children.

2.     They need money and are socially marginalized sex workers.

3.     Their boyfriends asked and they don’t want to jeopardize their relationships.

4.     They are easy, that is, easily convinced to subscribe to the desires that could only belong to men. 

They are married

            According to Anouka van Eedewijk’s Silence, pleasure and agency: sexuality of unmarried girls in Senegal, being young is not just an age, but a social category. Women can only transition from this category by getting married and, in effect, having sex. On the contrary, men are considered men when they are able to support themselves. Despite virginity being a cultural construct, not a biological fact, the morning after her wedding night, jéballe, the bride is expected to prove her virginity by showing her new mother in law the white sheet which she should have bled on the night before. Traditionally, upon presenting the blood, griots sing, drums are played, and the husband pays the bride’s mother and aunts in order to show his appreciation for having raised une sage fille.

            Adherence to this tradition is not nearly as strict as it once was. It is common practice for the newlyweds to either use fake blood or to escape to a hotel for a few days outside of the family’s gaze. Moreover, few people in Dakar believe that most girls are actually virgins.

That said, the stigma against sexually active and unmarried girls is alive, well, and internalized. The safest way to avoid sex shame is still to wait until marriage. Furthermore, the tradition of gift giving to the bride’s family and showing of blood suggests that this initial sexual act is concerned mostly with serving the groom’s needs. Of course, this is a personal experience. It would be misguided to conclude that men do not care about women’s pleasure during sex because society doesn’t. It would be plainly incorrect to say women have sex on their wedding night because they have to, and not because they want to. However, it is essential to consider the degree to which social perceptions manifest within our self-concepts and our cultural realities. This is especially interesting when we look at sex work in Senegal.

They need money

Senegal is often regarded as a model country in terms of how they deal with sex work. Because it is legal, it is also regulated. In order to be a registered sex worker, you must be 21. You are given a health card and are mandated to go to monthly check-ups. This system is ideal for combatting sexually transmitted diseases and the HIV epidemic, which Senegal is known to have handled exceptionally well. However, despite health-oriented policy, sex workers are still largely stigmatized and therefore unprotected. Our panelists and former sex workers—Manma and Sokna—described feeling unsafe. They said that during instances of violence, police officers rarely take the side of the sex worker, and certainly, they do not take it to court.

Although health policy and behavioral oriented approaches to protecting sex work are widely supported, this way of “dealing with” women’s sexuality has the habit of erasing the possibility of feminine desire, thereby compromising their agency (Eedewijk 2009). Moreover, it is possible that these policy approaches reflect cultural and interpersonal realities just as easily as they reinforce them.

Manma and Sokna described prostitution as a necessary evil. Often, after speaking, they would say: “I was doing it to survive,” as if the impulse to justify has become learned instinct. As if there is no way anyone would do this because they want to. There is the argument that sex work is empowering because it allows women to use the patriarchy to their advantage. However, whether it be formally, with a health card in hand, or indirectly, like a wife who stays in an abusive marriage because she has no other options, I hesitate to call survival sex empowering. Is survival sex savvy? Sure. Resourceful? Absolutely. But in order for economic sex to be empowering, the way I see it, there must be choice. There must desire. There must exist a space in which women are having sex for money because they regard it not as their only option, but as the most attractive among many. It is very possible that this is the case for some sex workers in Senegal. However, because society hesitates to acknowledge feminine sexual desire, it is not acceptable for them to express this fact without social repercussion.

After reading Ellen E. Foley and Fatou Maria Drame’s Mbaraan and the shifting political economy of sex in urban Senegal, I was asked if we are able to forgive these women—single, married, or divorced women who engage in sex with multiple men—since most of them are doing it to survive:

I hope that one day God will offer me a good husband who will be able to take good care of me and my children. I would stop.

I was immediately startled by the phrasing. To ask for forgiveness is to admit to sin, but it is not my opinion that they have done anything wrong. I do not think that this divorcé, whose sentiment resembles Sokna and Manma’s description of female economic dependence, has compromised any moral code. Nor do I think 40-year-old Ouly Sy, who departs from the norm by describing pleasure at the core of her motivation, has broken some cosmic rule.

It’s not because I am a bad woman that I do it, it’s also not because I am in need of money. It’s because the pleasure I am looking for with my husband when we have sex, I don’t have it. I look for this pleasure elsewhere. When I get back home I take a shower, I put on proper clothes, and I wait for him to get home.

Ouly Sy’s account provides a refreshing moment of agency. Not only does she describe her own desire, but she expresses a level of self-compassion and self-love that is strikingly different from traditional perceptions of female sexuality. That is to say, whether the women or society at large agrees, neither Ouly Sy, nor Manma, nor Sokna are unforgivable for engaging non-traditional sex because the question of forgiveness is only worth entertaining if we accept the socially constructed illusion of sin.

Studying the economy of sex in Senegal suggests the likelihood that culture reflects our stigmas just as it reinforces them. In the case of prostitution, we find a space in which many women truly are having sex because they need money, and not because they want to. However, as demonstrated by Ouly Sy, there are certainly exceptions to this rule, even if seldom vocalized.

Their boyfriends asked or they are “easy”

In a case study with unmarried Senegalese girls, researchers found that when asked what motivates girls to have sex before marriage, they were hesitant to explicitly cite desire. Rather, they described fear of losing their boyfriends and made a distinction between “real” and “easy” girls (Eedewijk 2009). 

It is simple to take their fear of losing boyfriends as an example of lost agency; however, it is important to recognize that these pre-marital sexual negotiations are key to establishing gender roles necessary for eventual marriage. In that sense, the way girls respond to a boy’s “sweet talk” is an opportunity for them to exercise and define their identities. Still, like all coming of age milestones, this is not without social pressure that is rooted in gendered bias.

The girls then defined “easy” girls as distinctly different from “real” girlfriends. These are the girls who boys have sex with but don’t actually love. Often, they will treat their “easy” girls to drinks or small gifts in exchange for sex, but this is not to be confused with prostitution, which, as they emphasized, includes an explicit commercial element. Notably, girls who have sex before marriage and without “love” are named in reference to their ability to resist men, not their desire to engage in intercourse. “Easy,” as in, easily convinced. “Weak,” as in, too weak to resist sweet talk. This suggests that feminine pleasure is so taboo that even women reproduce its erasure through the language they use to describe one another. Moreover, the argument can be made that these two reasons for pre-marital sex are nothing but projections of the way men grapple with their own sexual identity crises: having to be both serious and serial in their proceedings. In order to accomplish this paradox, they need women who will resist their advances, to marry, and women who will give in to them, to express their sexual prowess.

Conclusion

By simultaneously sexualizing women and defining them as sexual beings at the service of men’s masculine expectations, women are denied sexual agency. Too often, this process is reflected and reinforced at a policy, cultural, personal, and inter-personal level. Indeed, there are exceptions to this rule. Even if they don’t say so, there are certainly women having sex because they want to. Even if they must do so under the guise of one of the previously mentioned reasons. Whether it is for the sake of pleasure, desired motherhood, economic success (with and despite alternative modes of survival), or the expression of emotional intimacy in a physical way—there are women having wanted sex because, just like men, women tend to want sex. It is within this realization that agency lays.