LET'S TALK ABOUT SEX, SHALL WE?

I wonder what my mom thinks about masturbation.

Sometimes I watch these black movies and there’s always that woman who won’t stop talking about her body and sex, masturbation, periods -you know, all the topics you don’t want to discuss at the dinner table during thanksgiving. Except, I kind of do. I kind of want someone, a female adult to talk to me about these things without me cringing out of my skin, without it becoming the oh so dreaded ‘talk’.

Growing up, I envied people who had great relationships with their moms. In the environment I grew up in, there were not very many of those. Not to stereotype, but most people with such relationships were girls from single mom families and/or were the only kids. The rest of us had a stronger relationship with our mothers’ slippers than the moms themselves. My earliest memory of something resembling a talk is one time, and I laugh every time I tell this, when I was walking around in my mother’s room and she asked me “na unaoshanga hio pussy vizuri?”.Why this is funny is because we had a cat named Alejandro and at that very moment, he passed in front of me; and I answered, quite enthusiastically “na shampoo kwanza”. She didn't brought it up again once she realized I had no idea what she was talking about hence I was too young for that kind of talk. Funny thing is, I only came to know what that word meant after I was done with highschool. The next awkward moment was when I was in primary school and she handed me a set of things I called ‘booktops’  which I later on, in a very embarrassing manner learnt were called boob tops, and told me I had to wear them underneath my everyday apparel because in her words, ‘nimekua mschana’. Little Dzidzi was to learn much much more on her own that I wish somebody would have told her.

I have a big sister and an extended family known to the community as ‘ boma ya wasichana’.I went to a good private school with lots of female teachers. You would think in such a setting I’d know a lot about being a girl, or at least have been taught how to wear a sanitary towel or that I shouldn’t use soap to clean my doodoo because its is a self cleaning oven. But that’s where you go wrong.

My first period found me unprepared; I had no equipment and no means of getting them at that. Even if I did get them, how the hell was I going to operate them? So for a good number of hours, I changed tights at certain intervals and did not dare sit down because I had no intention of washing anything more than the tights, not that I was ever taught how to wash clothes anyway. All this time I was on a mission to turn my house upside down looking for a sanitary towel and behold! I found one at the bottom of a pile of my sister’s old books. I didn’t know if it was still good for use-come to think of it, do pads expire?-but I ran to my room and changed into a fresh pair of tights and slapped the towel on to my panty. It was on wrong, but it was nice to know I finally could sit down and enjoy some breakfast. Crazy right? For months after that, I survived on borrowed pads from my sister and mom’s rooms until I went to boarding school and it was required that I bought some at the beginning of every term.

Long story short, I knew close to nothing about my body until I had my first phone and could consult with the good old opera mini for all the questions I had. So technically google raised me, of course with the help of various myths propagated by my trusted age mates like how using a tampon would break your virginity and your tits would grow bigger if a boy touched them. While other people might not have been thrown into the deep end like I was, I’m sure they weren’t told everything, maybe just the basics of that time of the month. But the hymen, the clitoris, masturbation, sex, contraception, abortion, lesbianism, heck nobody told me how horny people get when they ovulate and how much food is required to feed a menstruating woman. Don't get me started on shaving. You learn as you go, sometimes even when you do its too late. Most of us as children were made to believe  that you shouldn’t hug or sit too close to a boy because, well, Gonorrhea.

I don’t blame my mother for her methods of raising me because that’s the way she was raised and turned out okay and she raised her firstborn daughter the same way and she too is just fine. I think. I blame everyone else. Her mother for raising her like that, my big sister for not trying to help and finally, the school system. I mean we learn about adolescence and the reproductive system in one 40 minute session as part of the things to cram and get over with. I just recently learnt about the outer parts of female genitalia that most people I know just simply refer to as the vagina. Nope, the vagina is just a tube down there.  Imagine if math was approached with as much shyness as sex education; you’d be a genius if you knew how many hours make a day. Considering at this point in my life figuring out what a g-spot is is much more important than vectors and logarithms, I need to know myself first before I can invite another person in. 

To this day I am very shy about my relationships and my sex life but as I said, I blame everyone around me growing up. I can’t even imagine the day I bear a child and my poor father looks at it as proof that I had sex. Unfathomable. So all I’m saying is I think we should drop the act. Sex is going to be a part of our lives for as long as we live- unless my dream comes true and we all wake up without our genitals one morning , story for another day- so we may as well talk about it. The shame surrounding the conversation is so old fashioned. It wouldn’t exist if we talked about it as the normal thing that it is instead of dreading the day you find porn magazines (do these still exist?) stuffed under your son’s mattress or find out that your daughter’s friend Laura at whose house she does her homework is actually a Simon and the school doesn’t issue homework on Fridays; because then it’d be a tad bit too late. Teach boys about girls’ bodies and girls about boys’ because there’s a whole lot of guessing when it comes to the matter. Trust me.