SEX

get in, loser. we’re going to abandon all hope of a happily ever after. we’re embracing romantic cynicism and we’re doing better things with our time.or nothing at all.

antiromanticism

antiromanticism is calling in all the hopeless romantics. the optimists who secretly believe that one day, they’ll bump into a stranger in a bus, the stranger will catch them as they fall, and that connection will blossom into the most tragic love story. you’ve seen now that it doesn’t work like that, right? you’re all doe eyed and excited every time you meet someone who could possibly inspire you and pour into you as much as you would pour into them. but then they just drain you. every time. sure, you drain yourself too because you’re actually reenacting those childhood trauma stains that are too stubborn for all your inner work to remove, but they drain you every time. and you’re a romantic. you want a john-cusack-outside-the-window-with-a-boombox type of love. you want a john-cusack-meets-kate-beckinsale-in-a-department-store-and-they-have-coffee kind of love story. it has to be a fairytale for you because you’re a dreamer. you hold on to these hopes that there is magic in this world. and truly, there is, but you know that it is not in romance for you. antiromanticism is leaning into that disillusionment. it’s a call to abandon all hopes of finding that magic in romantic love, and seeking it elsewhere. it’s not a self-love movement. it’s not a divest-from-black-men movement. it simply stems from the realisation that romance does a lot more harm than good most times, and deciding to just leave it alone. 

sex

the sexual approach to antiromanticism is two-pronged: we embrace celibacy, or we embrace a sex that is filled with platonic love and care. ideally, we should be different from “situationship’ people because we know how to communicate with clarity and we try to treat all people with fairness, but it is important to remember that we’re antiromantics. we have chosen to reject the dream of romance. so we navigate sex as a respectful and pleasurable engagement of bodies and souls, and then we go on home.

what is our mission?

antiromanticism is a definite coping tool. it might be petulant even. it’s a deliberate decision not to bother with finding a middle between the ridiculousness of your hopeless romanticism, and the disillusionment of your newfound antiromanticism. it’s an exploration of what is possible for us when we simply walk away from situations that just hurt us every time.

the very first person who touched me with my consent was my high school boyfriend. i was anxious about my very first kiss, and he coached me through the experience. our school had a carnival day, and we ditched it to have this kiss in the back of some block of classrooms. i remember he told me to tilt my head to the side, and walked me through the experience. we had not been making out for long before i was feeling this intense wetness in my underwear. i was sixteen years old. i remember there was a treehouse on the school grounds; we moved to it when we felt we needed to escalate this feeling. in the treehouse, i sat with my legs wrapped tightly around his waist and i rubbed frantically against him, for more of this pleasurable feeling i was experiencing in the wetness of my centre. wherever we were alone, we would seek that feeling together, never pushing it too far.  we explored these wonderful sensations and we were in no hurry to get anywhere further. so thereafter, he introduced the idea of touching oneself to me. we would talk on the phone, and he would softly tell me what to do. rub yourself over your panties. take them off now. put your finger inside. i remember no mention of the clitoris, but we both had much to learn haha. that was nine years ago. 

two weeks ago, i laid panting in the backseat of his car, with my legs wide open. “i’m twenty five years old!” i exclaimed through my delirious laughter, “i’m twenty five years old and i’ve never felt so good.” the pure touch of his fingers had awakened an overwhelming pleasure deep within my stomach. i let out sounds i did not know lived within my throat, and my body shook and squirmed in ways it was unaccustomed to. for days, my coochie and i were plagued by the vision of him playfully spitting on our privates to lubricate, even though we did not succeed with penetration that time (i will not tell you where we were the first time we did succeed lmao).

in the end, what made penetration with him possible and pleasurable a few days after, was his insistence that i should trust him, and my decision to do so. he was at my entrance and it hurt, i put my hand on his torso so i could control the force with which he would thrust into me. “you said you trusted me. why is your hand there?” he asked me with a playful firmness, and then he held my hands. in a weird, i-promise-you-i’m-still-a-feminist way, i rely on his ability to push my boundaries for me to truly explore the heights of my freedom and pleasure. and so i surrendered my control, and trusted the boy who taught me to kiss when i was sixteen years old to delicately push my sexual experience. he told me to breathe, to focus on him. he went slowly, and he said “i got you,” until i started to feel a new kind of pleasure. i gripped him closer to me as i settled into this pleasurable pain, and i myself started to writhe desperately against him. probably right after he whispered “i love you” into my neck. we took turns telling each other how much we wanted and needed each other, and that is what made all the difference for me in the end. i trust him with the purity of a teenager. 

 when i went for my smoke thereafter, i observed that i felt peaceful. i did not feel a dramatic sense of joy or ecstasy. i only felt like i was doing what i always had been doing. how poetic, to be an adult and to experience your (second) first time with the first boy you kissed and loved when you were a teenager. 

i have often seen spiritual discourse and practice manipulated to reinforce patriarchal ideas about how society should be (at this point, i would like to take a pause to state the painstakingly obvious: spiritual healers are people. people have biases.)

in what I recognised to be heavily christian language, we were especially warned that sex created soul ties. that is, if you have sex with someone, your soul is tied to theirs forever. this idea has been circulated in other so-called spiritual circles as well. because i only know how to wholeheartedly embrace or reject an idea, i never imagined that there was a middle that i could work my way into. i rejected all talk that tied sex to spirituality for i only saw a portal to slut shaming and other weird things. this reflection is my attempt at working myself, and whoever needs to come with me, into a middle.

in my very first consultation with a sangoma, she kept inquiring about my uterus, as she had been experiencing pain in there throughout. we both had no idea what was going on, and she had initially suspected an abortion that had not been taken care of thereafter. towards the end of our two-hour consultation, i asked if perhaps what she was seeing was not my vaginismus, an experience of painful penetration that i wrote about here. This caused her to change her line of questioning to, "what happened to you when you were sixteen?" to which I had no answer at the time.

now, i will not belabour what happened to me when i was sixteen because even though shame has never been part of my lexicon, i believe that the details are nobody's business. anyway, as i grew in my ancestral journey, i learned that i had repressed some sexual (and spiritual) trauma. the short of it: somebody had sexually assaulted me with the specific intent to place an entity (known as isilwane) within me that would draw prowess from my womb for their gain. ukuthwebula, this is often called. here, i would like to point out two things:

1. uMndau is an ancestral spirit that rules money, fertility, sexuality and such material aspects of life. in your body as a person who has this spirit, it sits in your womb (as a person who carries one) so if a person were to attack your womb, they would be attacking your Mndau. vice versa.

2. while it is clear that there is a lot of spirituality tied to the womb, i have no interest in writing myself into a corner on the woo-woo internet that imagines cisgender women to be a special kind of divine just because we have wombs. this rhetoric not only makes way for transphobic essentialism around gender, but it is also dangerous for cisgender women as well (consider how this viewpoint may position itself in terms of abortion, the ideas it can plant in cisgender women about miscarriage, and generally how it might affect those with fertility issues.)

in this very blog, i once jokingly wrote that i had committed to "sfebinism" for the women in my bloodline who could not be liberated in their sexuality. it was tongue-in-cheek at the time for i did not actually believe in the concept of ancestors as people and guides you could interact with, but i realise now that my sex and my writing about sex has always been an ancestral project. through this dark magic, my ancestors and my sex had become especially intertwined. learning about this defining event in my life was both vindication and cause for great upset. i believe that my womb had then sought to protect itself and those with a sexual interest in me by closing up my vagina so that nothing else could enter (nary a tampon, dear reader). but i mourned the years of safe-ish, healthy-ish sexual fun that i did not have because of someone else's dark and selfish behaviour. and the several layers of trauma.

but what i have learned from this experience is that my ancestors desire sexual liberation for me, they want me to be a happy and sexually autonomous being, and that is why my inability to have penetrative sex was such a central part of my process to emerging as a sangoma. in my healing, through the treatments and the prayers, i invited my ancestors into my sex life. not to blur the boundaries between us, but because i understand that so much of my trauma is not new, and there are some in my bloodline who have gone through it and now have the tools to help me heal, just as i help them heal. constantly, in my initiation, i told my ancestors that one of the reasons i decided to undergo the process of ukuthwasa was my sex, so i wanted it to flourish when i rejoined the outside world. "ndithwasela ukufeba!" i would exclaim to chatty clients who would think i was kidding. my gobela knew, understood and encouraged this. and towards the end of my process, my ancestors would visit me in dreams several times to affirm that i was to have the sex i desired (note: the affirming dreams were not me actually engaged in sex). it took ukuthwasa for me to have a healthier relationship with my body and my sex. so my ancestors want me to have sex, but my ancestors also want me to be safe, so that they can be safe in my body as well. this is an all encompassing safety: safe from physical illness -protection &/regular testing- safe from spiritual illness -discernment and cleansing when necessary.

out there in the world, we interact with all kinds of people. most of them are gonna find you a little bit weird if you ask them to wash with some medicine before you sleep with them. FAIR. the hegemony of biomedical science (and all it embodies) has created a world that has divorced physical health from spiritual health. so, such demands may look stranger than demanding a condom. so, you might choose to do the odd wash in some medicine at certain points within reason, or you might simply feel empowered by understanding that your sex has a relationship to your spirituality... i don't know. it is only within critiques of southern african spirituality that 'washing' requires scrutiny. ukugeza akuthi ungcolile, it is a hygienic practice that we maintain through our lives for various reasons. sometimes, we even wash simply because we want to cry and process something. but once a healer speaks of ukugeza, then our feminist rhetoric is limited to western iterations of the inference that cleansing assumes you are dirty. i make this statement well aware that there is a number of healers who speak in sexist undertones of "dirty" bodies and spirits that need "cleansing." note, i have no attachment to the word "cleansing" so you have the right to be upset about its place in this...reflection.

anyway, i would be lying to you if i said I jumped straight to penetrative sex thereafter my becoming a sangoma, but i understand that my reasons now are the kind i can do therapy for, and the kind that i can work through with my sex partner. our ancestors and healers are not magicians. the work is unceasing. but now my boyfriend can comfortably use two fingers inside of me, i feel safe and empowered enough to try (and enjoy) performing oral sex, and i am well on my way to a holistic recovery. my vaginismus had had me feeling so disempowered that i anxiously shutdown through all sex. i am no longer there, so that is all the proof i need about my healing.

as usual, this blog is about ME. ther are multiple perspectives on how sex can heal (or harm) us and i am happy to discover more and also contribute them as i grow into my sex.

whew. so i started this blog to dedicate it to my sexcapades! i was so disappointed when i did not become the sexually liberated woman i thought i would be.

i remember around valentine’s day last year, i went out with a boy and we ended up going home together. he was beautiful and soft and i was attracted to him. we made out and it was enticing. and then when it was time to have penetration, we hit a wall. i remember biting my lower lip, imagining that if i just stuck this excruciating pain out for a minute, then the pleasure would come. and when i realised that i could not enjoy the experience, i gently pushed him off me. he feigned patience and kindness, but i’ll never forget the exasperation that hung in the air. i will never forget it because i have felt it many times. my sex does not allow men to get away with being thoughtless. my sex cannot be casual. it requires an interest in me, and the ability to pour into my well-being. my sex is emotional, spiritual work!

at the time, the work felt like a limitation. an inconvenience. i was so tired of feeling broken. so i thought maybe i had an STD. i booked an appointment with a doctor and i got all my tests done. nothing. i was upset. then my doctor started inquiring into my sexual history and we both came to the understanding that i might have vaginismus. and then she just left it there and told me i needed a pap smear.

now, loosely explained, vaginismus is when the pelvic muscles contract/spasm when there is vaginal penetration. this makes intercourse painful (if not impossible). it can be a response to sexual trauma, or a psychological thing. i know that i have had vaginismus for a long time and just never knew because when i tried to use a tampon at 16, it was a harrowing experience. i bought the smallest size and made multiple attempts with my mother’s counsel and it was just too painful.

there is something about not being able to provide penetration for men that makes you feel very useless as a woman. no matter how empowered you are, and how many ways you can critique the construction of masculinity, that struggle with sex can define you. i wanted to date. hell, i wanted to hookup. but i would end the night feeling like a tease as i never provided the main event for the boys. even what the patriarchy calls foreplay would be a rushed, half-arsed effort to be gotten out of the way so that a penis could penetrate my vagina. i walked around for a while thinking maybe i was asexual. or broken. feeling like i would not find love in this life because i would never be able to provide intercourse for men. of course, some of them would say that there’s more to sex than intercourse. that there were other forms of sex they enjoyed. but what often went missing in trying to pursue the sex i could safely enjoy, is the emotional scars that not being able to enjoy penetration left me. i never had the confidence and safety to embrace and pursue those other kinds of sex. to see what i could enjoy giving, because my past experiences had framed intercourse as the most important form of sex. and my inability to provide it as the ultimate sexual failure. a source of shame and distress. so all kinds of sex made me extremely anxious. even masturbation felt like a waste of time.

when i understood what was wrong with me, i truly sank into the loneliness that sex embodies for me. men always try to “negotiate” their way into penetration. maybe you’re never wet enough. if i eat you out for all of three seconds, maybe you’ll be ready. so, there i was in a sexual situation with a guy. a million thoughts running through my mind as he tried to figure out if i’m just not attracted to him. i realised that this dynamic was the loneliest i would ever feel. living with a pain that is little known, and men who only care for their orgasm, i should be alone. there’s no point to sex or relationships for me. it always ends in an alienating sense of self-loathing as i fail once again. and yet another man reducing my pain and discomfort to an inconvenience.

i’ve always felt like i had no control over my sexuality. and even now.

the december sun sets real late in the eastern cape. so, as a child, i was always notorious for going home too late. in between the slaps that hit all different parts of my body, my grandmother would say “usuka emakhwenkweni”- you have been spending time with boys. i could just have been playing udushe with my other 10-year-old friends- as i always was. i do not recall that happening with my boy cousins.

i was eleven years old when a twenty two year old guy who’d convinced me that i was “mature for my age” asked me if i’d started masturbating yet. and, while i drew virtue from not having done it yet, i still felt uncool. and he would form part of many “hot” guys in my village who took an interest in me. no one was around to protect me- to tell these guys to go away because i was just a little girl. i would hide out in corners with these guys and this was a secret that my aunt would sometimes use to lobby for her way. because i was doing something dirty. lucky, none of them ever touched me. 

social media has been empowering in all that it has taught me to be- to demand more, to accept less bullshit and to put myself first. i imagine every heterosexual girl who goes through some journey of feminism starts off by questioning why it is that men can be sexually liberated and women cannot. why is it that our primary school teachers would make jokes about boys masturbating while we were dirty for even thinking about such? our experiences with anything slightly sexual are always tinged with a one-way shame. and, even when it is a predatory guy ten years older than your eleven year old self, you are somehow the party who is responsible for this relationship. and in all of this, you can never want to desire a sex that is safe and on your terms. because sifebe.

i suppose then, that a community of young women on twitter saying “hoe is life“ felt like the perfect thing for me to attempt to embody. what better way to express my rebellion against all the patriarchy that had formed me than to engage in what it termed “promiscuity”? the worst sin of them all? so, i took shelter under this liberating thought. that hoe is life. that i could have as much sex as i wanted and not feel bad about it. but somewhere down the line, it felt more like i must have sex.

i’m something of a late bloomer (i mean, the last blog post was about finally doing #thesex). so, my hoe is life journey had to begin with me getting used to kissing boys. ha! this is how i started drinking; trying to muster up my liquid courage to be the best hoe i could be. this is not a habit i have unlearned. if anyone is going to see me naked and clueless, i am going to need some alcohol in my system. because sex requires a lot of bravery. i find myself in a foreign world where women are wanting to have their “guts rearranged” and my sexual naiveté is not the attractive virtue it once was. and i kind of try to put on this brave face in the bedroom- that i am unthreatened and secure in all of my sexuality. but i always freeze. one time, a very sweet guy asked me to tell him what i wanted because he could sense that i was not happy. i told him to stop. because how the hell am i suddenly supposed to know what i want? 

it’s kind of embarrassing now. i will never get over this jarring transition i have had to make, from a young child who was shamed far away from sex to some wanton young thotiana who knows how to do it all. and i don’t know if i’ll ever belong in this world. and, while i want to be able to exist as a young woman who can choose not to have sex, i would also love to be able to do it without feeling some shame. but this time around, the shame is around not knowing what to do. how do i move from being shamed for even considering sex to feeling shame for not knowing how to interact with the damn thing?

(The hymen is a small, ragged membrane just inside the opening to the vagina (go review our vagina anatomy lesson here). All all hymens are not created equally. So many things other than intercourse can wear the hymen away, including horseback riding, biking, gymnastics, using tampons, fingering, and masturbation. Some women are even born without hymens.)  -Teen Vogue

we are expected to switch from never thinking about sex to knowing exactly what to do when we do have it. the bedding was white. it felt like an archaic mills and boon book when i saw the red stains on the duvet. i giggled and stared at it. “are you on your period?” he asked me. we were having two different sexes.

he didn’t know. how could i have told him? i’ve tried avoiding the v word. “virginity” suggests a naïveté— an incompletion of womanhood. i am as completely (young) woman today as i was yesterday. it’s why i didn’t tell him. how people have written about how women have experienced sex with men has always centred men; made them the ones who grant womanhood. so the rhetoric says you got “deflowered” or someone “took” your virginity–– as though you were a passive figure who did not use your own agency to do what you desired to do.

he was very kind–– asked me what i wanted him to do. he just didn’t know that i could not have known what i wanted him to do when i had never done this before. and my pride glued my lips together and finally released them only to tell him to get off me as i was in pain. that’s when we saw the blood. my relationship with sex has always been tinged with shame. i suppose it’s like that for most women out there. while wet dreams and masturbation are a normal part of growing up for boys, we aren’t really encouraged to think about sex. at least not sex as something to enjoy. in high school, boys would trade stories about their latest sexual conquests and then raise their eyebrows when they found out i was touching myself.

"come home with me"

"i have to be up early tomorrow"

i am scared that my first time sex will disappoint u.

"come home with me"

"i'm tired"

the boys couldn’t find it and really, neither could i. i found it on teen vogue. i am past my teens.

they should make a “how to” guide for black girls. how to navigate the wig situation when you’re about to get it on with a man who is not black. and how to navigate booty calls when you’re a virgin.

he saw me at the party earlier, i had my wig on. i looked stunning. now he’s coming over- my wig is off and i’m just in my sweater. i look stunning. but whatever, let me put it back on because i don’t know if he’s the type of coloured man who will require an explanation and i don’t know if i want that disappointment. i have pledged myself to s’febinism ever since i discovered that my grandmother married when she was 16. i cannot escape this idea that i need to explore as much as possible to enjoy my youth and sexual autonomy for all the women in my bloodline who have never had a chance to.

my fine booty call thang is about to arrive and i’m ready. well, not really ready because he’ll probably want sex and even though i’m psychologically ready to give it to him, i’m not sure that i’m ready to give it to him. he’s here. we’re kissing now. “wait,” i halt things as he gets on top of me and attempts to take my sweater off “let me just do this before things get awkward.”i head to the bathroom. i look at myself in the mirror. you fierce black thing, you. your father, although deadbeat, is a madiba. brenda fassie was a madiba. you know what that means? you have a drop of brenda fassie’s blood somewhere in your veins. i take my wig off and strut back into the bedroom. “that’s not awkward,” my fine booty call thang says and i breathe easy. let the good times roll. hallucinations by dvsn is playing in the background. we are both breathing heavily now. and we are grinding. his lips are on my mouth, my neck...my nipples. god, don’t stop. i am also scared, what if i just don’t do it for him? his finger is in my vagina. how come no man can do this right, it fucking hurts. or am i the problem? i think to myself. “oh my god, did i hurt you?“ he asks me. oh shit. i said it out loud. “let me kiss it better,” he proposes. yes. “no,” is the response i give. i am scared that if he does not make me as high as the erotica says he should when he goes down there, i will be too disappointed. we play around a bit longer until we drift into sleep.

i drift back into consciousness. his arms are around me and he is asleep. i mindlessly draw circles on his chest. he is awake. he is on top of me. he is everywhere. “should i take out a condom?” he asks me. i want to say yes but what the fuck. i know it’s not a big deal- i’m a s’febinist now. but what if it is? i’m just not ready. he gets off me. i cover my hands with my face because why did i call him over? “can you come back into my arms now?” he asks me softly. i can. we fall asleep. that’s it. 

s’febe: a brief etymology

well, children. the word “s’febe” is a xhosa word meaning “whore”. s’febe is often used to refer to a woman has too many sexual partners, a woman who has sex with the different sexes, a woman who has too much sex (AKA as much sex as she wants) and a woman who won’t have sex with this one salty man. basically, the game is rigged. if you’re a woman, you’re a s’febe to somebody 

s’febinism

s’febinism has existed long before this manifesto. unfortunately, we have not been able to trace its roots. however, know that it has been around for far longer than we have been. take mary, for example, mary convinced joseph that the holy ghost had impregnated her. and to this day, we don’t know who jesus’ father is. modeled after “hoe is life”, a movement that has sought to give women space to reclaim their sexual agency, s’febinism is a call for all women to own their bodies and do with it what they will. all under the name “s’febe” because when we reclaim and redefine a word, it loses its power. 

what of virgins?

yes, virginity is a social construct. but so is race, love, god and a number of other things. does this make them any less real? no. virginity is an important concept to engage with because it has real effects on the way in which we perceive ourselves. s’febinism understands virginity as indicative of neither sexual purity nor sexual impurity. just the state of never having had sex. of course this is a tricky thing to navigate because “virginity” centres men on sex. it rests on the idea that a penis has to enter some hole in order for it to be sex (shout out to our lesbian s’febinists. we love you.) 

society would have us believe that there are links between our sexual activity and morality (what’s sex got to do with it? don’t you know we could be many things in the streets and freaks between the sheets?). 

s’febinism advocates for choice. so of course, cisheterosexual women who have chosen to abstain from sex are welcome to join the movement. however, we understand that some choices are easier to make than others. a cishet woman who chooses not to have sex does not deviate too far from what patriarchy wants her to do and so it is the woman who chooses to have sex who bears the brunt of patriarchy. that is the woman that s’febinism seeks to fight the hardest for. 

feba wena ghel