By Bolatito Adebayo
Yes. Women get aroused. Women fantasize. Women flirt. Women masturbate. Women watch porn. Absolutely, women want sex as much as men.
For many years there have been misconception that men have higher sex drive than women and that men can have sex anywhere or anywhere when turned on.
Let me burst your bubble, research has proven that male or female desire cannot fit tightly into jar.
Therefore, saying that men have higher libido than women may not be true after all. One of the reasons is that women have been conditioned to repress their sexual feelings while men have been given a free ticket to speak openly when they want sex and do it whenever they want it.
For religious and cultural reasons, a young girl is raised to speak about her sexuality in hushed tones while the boy child is permitted to speak proudly of his without being shamed.
A Nigerian man is seen as a real man based on his high libido or the number of women he has been with. If a married man cheats everyone says, “A man will always be a man”, that is a good excuse for philandering.
On the flip side, when a married woman cheats, she is tagged a slut and ungrateful. These are the factors that affect women, most especially in Africa.
Consequently, a girl child who has grown up in this environment will remain conservative and prefer to pretend to avoid being mocked. I am of the opinion that, if men and women were raised equally without shaming or shrouding the other gender sexuality in secrecy, they will be able to communicate their sexual needs better.
Praising a man promiscuity and shaming a woman’s promiscuity will only increase repressive sexual desire of a woman.
Although, it is hard to measure whether women want sex more than men, but recent studies have proven that men and women sexual wants are more similar than different.
The truth is that gender stereotypes about women’s sexual drives are outdated and should be trashed.
There are men with high libidos and same applies to women. Also, there are men with low sex drives and same applies to women too.
Therefore, as humans, we are different, and everyone’s sexual experience is valid in as much as our sexual experiences are healthy.
So, it is high time we stopped boxing women’s sexual desires into a box. No, you can’t dictate to us how we feel, many times we fall outside the box and we are comfortable there.