Coitus Currency
Nnamdi Ehirim
You might think you’ve peeped the scene
You haven’t the real one’s far too mean
The watered down one, the one you know
Was made up centuries ago
They made it sound all wack and corny
Yes, its awful, blasted boring
Twisted fictions, sick addictions
Well, gather round children, zip it, listen
- Kanye West, Dark Fantasy
(My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy)
Poetry is magical. The same set of words could mean a million things to different people. A typical example would be an excerpt from Roald Dahl’s opinion of Cinderella in his book, ‘Revolting Rhymes’ published in 1982. The excerpt inspired this short rap verse by Kanye West in 2010. This verse on fame and fortune in the United States of America aptly describes my thoughts on the perceptions of sex in Nigeria.
Rap is my favourite form of poetry. I bought my first rap album — Kanye West’s The College Dropout — when I was twelve. In a week, I had memorised half of it. I was sure I wanted to be a rapper. Over ten years and seven Kanye albums later, I still rap at Karaoke sessions in Victoria Island on Thursdays. I ease into my alter ego with verses off Drake’s Take Care. I settle on higher tempo from Rick Ross. If the red berry, triple distilled to forty percent per volume has me loose enough, I attempt Holy Key.
One Thursday, I stayed back after the karaoke session and watched the lounge transform into a nightclub. A stream of female masked dancers in crop tops and short skirts dictated the new mood: more lustful than social as was the afrobeats music. More Nigerian, more alive, as alive as everyone else in the room slowly became.
Somto was one of the masked dancers. I noticed her when she stepped out with the others, dancing in sync, performing on her own. Through her mask, her eyes connected with mine. She told me her name after I danced towards her, after she had rejected the advances of a few other guys, after she had given me her hand and let me lead her to a corner, after she pressed herself on me as we danced till my white shirt got stained with blood and she realized her period had come a day early, just right after she had cleaned up and I had calmed her down outside the lounge where we started having our first proper conversation. She was in her final year in University of Lagos. The first of four children, she worked the job for the extra cash to support her family. I told her she was really good at her job and gave her some cash for that. She asked if I had ever had period sex. I stared at her for a few minutes before acknowledging that I had never had period sex. She told me she had never either but that she was feeling guilty for collecting my money without being able to offer sex.
The people highest up got the lowest self-esteem
The prettiest people do the ugliest things
For the road to riches and diamond rings
- Kanye West, All Falls Down (The College Drop Out)
The next day she came to my place and we spoke for hours. It was hard to begrudge her for her assumptions. The hard fact remains that most Nigerian men consider spending money on women as a debt that must be balanced with sex. For sex workers, it is a ‘money for hand, back for ground’ situation. After she had done her job by dancing for and with me and I had tipped her for it, she still felt obliged to offer me sex. If she was going to have sex with me for money, I felt it was only right we did it on mutually consented terms and conditions. Not as an offshoot of her guilt.
The absence of mutually consented terms and conditions always leaves room for fraud. Everybody in Nigeria wants sex but not everybody gets it with untainted consent. People pressure, steal, cheat, and blackmail for sex. When sex is paid for, it becomes more difficult to prevent the breach of mutually consented terms because everything goes on in whispers. The government criminalises it, our religions demonise it, and our customs stigmatise it. Our society hypocritically demands piety. Both men and women subscribe to this false piety and never discuss paid sex openly. Nobody wants their sister, daughter or mother to be shamed as a whore to the disrepute of the great family name and ancestors that uphold it. And God forbid anybody’s brother, son or father stoops so low as to dirty himself with ‘prostitutes’. It is near impossible to regulate a market that nobody wants to acknowledge.
As we lay in my bed watching the Sausage Party movie, I asked Somto how many times she and her dancer friends had felt guilt-tripped into sex. She laughed. They never spoke about it with each other.
The prevalence of paid sex, especially involving young women like Somto in their twenties, has skyrocketed in the last decade. As with every other issue in Nigeria, accusing fingers are pointed towards economic woes and the divide between the upper and lower social classes. The exponential growth of nightlife businesses catalyzed by the higher class has also exacerbated the issue. Young women, like Somto, struggling to meet financial needs are served as bait to big spenders. The reward for these girls varies. Somto earns as much as an entry level civil servant with a university degree.
I have another friend, Tola. She is a few years older than Somto. She had been working the nightlife circuit at other clubs across the city since she left secondary school. When I met her, she had already risen through the ranks, from dancer to supervisor at a club in Ikeja. Tola earned more than entry level analysts at KPMG. She recently quit, after saving enough to open up a provision store in Ota. Without a university degree, it is near impossible she would ever find a job opportunity outside the nightlife industry that could pay her enough to cater for her daughter and younger siblings.
The risk of mutually agreed terms and conditions being breached vary. There is the risk of rape and murder which guides Tola’s personal rule to never agree to any terms with multiple men or a man who is in the company of a group of friends while she is alone. There are ever present risks of being denied agreed pay and the stigma that accompanies a woman with freedom of sexual agency being equated with a non-human without rights and privileges. She could be killed on the job, and there would neither be outrage nor consequence. These risks are reinforced every day as we publicly berate sex and the discussion of it, as we deny women — like Somto and Tola who depend on the industry for sustenance — their rights to safety and reward for labor through stigmatisation and criminalisation.
We at war
We at war with terrorism, racism
But most of all, we at war with ourselves
- Kanye West, Jesus Walks (The College Dropout)
Any society that champions freedom of sexual agency must go the extra mile to ensure this agency is not stolen. Expression of sexual agency is customarily sheltered under the umbrella of privacy as a convenient means to ignore it, even though infinite cases of domestic abuse and gender based discrimination have proven that custom and privacy are the woman’s enemy and her assailant’s ally. Women who engage in paid sex are in a state of nature — each fighting for self and against every other, everything is claimable by everyone and everyone keeps as much as they can get — and therefore, by default, are set up to fail by a biased society. It is delusional to aspire to the sovereignty of a single social contract by law or otherwise to mitigate the risks these women face as women in more sanctimonious professions who live without the sex work bias are yet to attain such sovereign protection.
In a more ideal world, a more ideal scenario would have any society that champions freedom of sexual agency going the extra mile to ensure this agency would not be the only agency granted to a woman, such that it is her only resort in her bid for survival. If women do not have freedom of agency to attain education, justice and economic freedom, branches of choice that should lead to their apex become a single pole whose peak would only serve to impale their existence.
Do you have the power to let power go?
- Kanye West, Power
(My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy)
Like every other battle in the war against patriarchy, men who exploit the imbalance have an active role to play in conceding defeat as women do in fighting for victory. A few weeks after I met Somto, I brought up the topic over beer with the boys: pressuring women into sex and paying money for sex. Three had begged for sex. Ranging from a few corny lines to hours of intellectual debate, the type of begging that recited listicles explaining why sex was absolutely necessary, the type of begging that was made on bent knees. None of them had ever paid for sex. To three of them, paying for sex was abhorrent, the type of abhorrent that questioned your dignity as a moral man. X was the only one who had never begged for sex and it is important to note that he had never had sex. The reason was simple: he wanted to wait till his wedding night. He was the only one who saw the madness in wanting something enough to beg for it but still be unwilling to pay a fair price for it. His only determinant on whether sex was abhorrent or not was whether it was consensual or not, regardless of whether it was obtained by pressure or by payment. Nothing else outside the expression of consent between the two parties mattered. In his opinion, the Senate of the United States was hypocritical in attempting to impeach Bill Clinton over consensual sex with an adult: a Jerry Springer episode fully funded by taxpayers.
To play the devil’s advocate, X opened a conversation on how women could also be fraudulent with sex, asking if Monica Lewinsky had exploited Bill Clinton to gain unfair advantage over other colleagues in the workplace. Everybody chimed in with relatable instances, the most common being when girls had sexual affairs with lecturers and professors back when we were in University. Other than to constitute controversial conversation, none of us was very interested in intergenerational intercourse. Even though it helped the girls, it never affected our own academic results. And even if we ever felt slighted, the best we could do was to report the lecturer to a superior who was likely to be just as nefarious.
My virgin friend ended the conversation by quoting Frank Underwood, probably the only more sexually deviant American president in recent years than Bill Clinton albeit fictional — “Everything is about sex, except sex, sex is about power”. Not for the first time that evening, I sipped my stout in agreement. Sex is about power and money is power. Money is capitalism’s greatest tool and capitalism has no place for social equity. Sex in Nigeria has no place for social equity. Like capitalism, regardless of how destructive it tends to be to the victimised, those who profit from the system would rather die than allow for change.
I returned home after a few bottles and began this essay on sex as I listened to Kanye West. Nothing seemed more ludicrous than benchmarking feminist and social equity agendas on Kanye West quotes; the man has repeatedly slut shamed his exes, adorned his jackets with confederate flags and courted the attention and patronage of the most high-end brands created for the rich and powerful. He also just happens to have married probably the most slut shamed woman of all time. He vilified white supremacists on award winning songs, shunned relationships with some of the most exclusive brands in the world as a form of protest and dropped some of the most introspective lyrics on feminist agenda and social equity in between all of that. Paid sex in Nigeria, like Kanye West in the world, is the grey area between the black and white of society’s perception of morality.
About the author: Nnamdi Ehirim is a short story and essay writer. His writing has previously appeared in The Republic Journal, Kalahari Review, Afreada and Brittlepaper. In 2016, he was selected for the Ake Arts and Books Festival creative writing workshop.
