Pillow talk women should have
There is much more to enjoying fulfilling and safe sex than just Pornhub mechanics
‘How do two women have sex? You see I saw this thing on Pornhub …” I must always stop the person right there, Pornhub being the Wikipedia of the sexual education realm. This question comes up more often than one would think. The intricacies of sex without a penis tends to baffle a great number of people, including some women.
The study of women’s sexual practices outside of the realms of “taking the ‘d’ ” is quite often relegated to a certain space on the internet, with few mainstream conversations taking place, though never about “how does one film this in the most gritty manner ever?”
Thus, we at HOLAAfrica! decided to do a series on safe sex and pleasure for women, starting with dialogues, moving on to a workshop and ending off with a manual that had everything from sexually transmitted infections (STIs) women can get to what to watch out for when making your own sex toy.
It was an enlightening experience, with women from around the continent speaking about sex that did not involve the opposite sex.
When embarking on a safe sex and pleasure series, you learn a few key things about two women having sex.
Safe sex between women is the unicorn of the health realm. Any consultation on safe sex worth its salt will always raise one question: Are you sexually active? This is fairly reasonable considering what you are there for. But the minute you mention that your partner is a woman, you suddenly become akin to Sister Martha from the Order of St Francis asking for condoms. You can practically hear them writing “celibate” on the form.
Few medical practitioners consider the sexual health needs of women who have sex with women. The perception is that gay men can get HIV, straight people have the reproduction thing to contend with but, when two women get together, they just have a pillow fight and fall asleep cuddling. Such thinking leaves women vulnerable to a host of diseases, including the human papillomavirus, chlamydia, gonorrhoea and the herpes simplex virus.
For women who have sex with women, HIV rates are low but they exist. Studies by Theo Sandfort and others in 2013, and Helen Wells and Louise Polders, in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana, say there is a 9.6% rate of selfreported HIV infection among them.
Zethu Matebeni and Vasu Reddy, in their 2014 report, I Thought We Are Safe: Southern African Lesbians’ Experiences of Living with HIV, tell of an informant who says: “Five participants self-reported, with much disbelief, that their female partners could have possibly infected them … Although difficult for all of them to understand, the only possible route of transmission … they could report was sex with other females.”
Dental dams, a recommended safesex technique for women, can feel like a nuisance. They are hard to use and even to find. Using cling film as a replacement is not necessarily safer — or more fun.
The stunted nature of the conversation about safe sex between women means the conversation about consent is also underdeveloped or silenced. Cases of sexual assault, fuelled by rape culture-esque ideas of “she gave me the look” and “she never actually said no”, are rife in queer women circles. The resounding silence that surrounds this toxic phenomenon is fuelled by ideas that assault only occurs when someone forcibly shoves a penis inside you. Thus, with two women, there is no penis and therefore no rape, which means there is no need to talk about consent.
This is wildly flawed because as long as there is a body, there are issues of personal space and bodily autonomy, and thus the potential for assault.
Sex between women is mostly left out of the conversation about sexual reproductive health rights because no one is getting pregnant or getting HIV at an alarming rate. But these women are still at risk in terms of health and knowledge, and also emotionally and physically.
Not only is the conversation stunted globally, it is also not happening among women themselves to the extent that it should be. This not only leaves a whole demographic vulnerable and unable to fulfil their rights in terms of access to health and bodily autonomy, it also leaves them on the outskirts of enjoying sex. Without discussing everything from consent to chlamydia and cunnilingus, there is no space to enjoy a full sexual existence.