Young boys in a typical rural environment easily and gleefully compete in a unique game, only boys can play. They stand side by side and unzip their shorts, then start shooting. They shoot and shoot, their hands holding onto their man-hoods. It is the boy who shoots his urine farthest that is declared winner of the game. This game is played even in public; the boys do not have to hide to play the game.

Young girls do not play the same game. This is not merely because they cannot shoot. Maybe other games can be played. Rather because their sexual organs are said not to be for the public view. When a girl sits badly, in the process exposing her private organ in public, we would sing a song mocking her failure to conceal her private organ well. For the boys, the same song is not sung.

Abusive phrases make reference to the female organs. In fact, many abusive phrases refer to mothers and other females. For example, when you hear “Koma-nyoko”, it is the “nyoko” which means your mother that strikes your ears. Swearing refers to mothers as well.  “Nshwere mawe” is an example. It means may I sleep with my mother. Why not male organs and fathers? Why do the abusive phrases only include female organs and mothers?

When a girl starts “going to the moon”, her failure to keep it a secret attracts mockery. Finding blood stained on a seat hitherto occupied by a girl would attract shame to her, with the boys hurling insults and mocking comments at her. The boy who wets his bed with milky stuff does not attract the same insults.

Sex-related expression for the boys is much easier, almost encouraged. For the girls, it is not. Their sexuality is considered a matter to be ashamed about. A boy could boast of how many girls he has slept with and it is okay, but not for a girl boasting of how many boys she has slept with.

On matters of virginity, the boy is not expected to be a virgin. A virgin-boy is looked down upon. The girl on the other hand is expected to be a virgin. A girl who is not an virgin is mocked and considered as scrap.

Mumba Machera, a Kenyan feminist academic narrates her ordeal while a young girl and juxtaposes it with the urinating contest we started with to make the point I am building. In a chapter titled “Opening a can of Worms; A debate on Female Sexuality in the Lecture Theater” in Signe Arnfeld (Ed); Re Thinking Sexualities in Africa 2004, Mumba writes;

“When I was about nine years old, my mother caught me red-handed looking at my “private parts” through a mirror. I guess I was just curious to know what this very private part looked like. Mother gave me a severe beating and warned me never to do that again. It is “bad manners”, she said. A good girl never looks at that place; a good girl sits properly (with her legs drawn together) and never talks about issues regarding the vagina.”

Mumba after narrating her ordeal gives the boyhood experience of her age-mates participating in a urinating contest. She writes that both adults and children would find the pissing contest very interesting. She further writes that the applause the boys would get from the spectators would increase their pride, making them proud of their little penises, while girls walked around with something between their legs which they would never dare look at.

I agree with Mumba that the genesis of sexual gender socialization is configured around approval and disapproval. In Mumba’s chapter cited above, she goes ahead to cite examples of perceptions around the female genitalia. She writes of the use of the vagina to curse among the Kikuyu peoples of Kenya. The form of curse involves deliberate exhibition of the vagina towards the person being cursed. The aggrieved women remove their undergarments, stand in line with their backs towards the offender, bend forward and lift their backsides in unison. The Kiga call this “okukunama”.

I know some people who are keen to say that such perceptions of female and male genitalia are only in Africa, those who spread the lie that the western society is more perfect than the African. Incidentally, it appears that the western society is worse.  Mumba writes that a number of European women she has talked to from Sweden, Finland and Norway felt that the vagina is a “shameful” thing to talk about in the western world. Enter religion, especially the Christian religion and the situation is exacerbated. Proverbs 30:15 as quoted by Mumba says; “There are three things that are never sated, hell, the vagina and the earth.”

Societal expectations and definitions of female sexuality and its treatment of the same as different from the definition, expectation and treatment of male sexuality show the extent to which women are detached from their own sexuality and men encouraged to embrace their own. Later on in life, when women become sexually active, they struggle to perfect the act of pleasing others and never thinking of pleasuring themselves. The silent hand of control and ownership of female sexuality by the male and the society that the male controls operates thus.

Sexuality is a social-political arena shaped through cultural, economic, familial and political relations which are conditioned through the social organization of gender and sex relationships. As long as female sexuality is still perceived as something to be controlled, contained and suppressed, as something dangerous that must be constrained, it cannot be left to be considered as a “private matter”.  Why should it be left to be a private matter when it is actually not? As we have seen, social institutions, including the family, church, schools and others directly and indirectly control sexuality and set rules for sexual expression. How private is sexuality then? Doesn’t it follow that, like the male is encouraged to embrace their sexuality, the female should also be encouraged?

A quick question I always encounter while talking about these matters is, “What is your problem Brian? You are male and a beneficiary of the male domination of the female.”  My response and which I am concluding with to the question of such nature is; gender and sexual relations between male and female have meaning when conducted on an equal footing. The pleasure and beauty of such relations is in the full expression of each party to the relations. As long as the male controls the female, full pleasure and harmony is not attainable. It thus follows that the male and the female all have everything to benefit from the full sexual expression of the female. Without it, all sexes are at a loss.