Kenya: Ending FGM

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John can barely remember a time when having sex with his wife did not end with her in tears.  It was just too painful because she had undergone female genital mutilation (FGM).  "Anytime I go to Martha, she recoils, curling like a child. She cries, begging me to leave her alone. She doesn't want to have sex any more," the 40-year-old says. John and Martha come from Kenya's Marakwet community in western Kenya.

Although FGM is illegal in Kenya, girls in their community often undergo FGM between the ages of 12 and 17, as a rite of passage in preparation for marriage.  Martha was cut when she was 15.

Sex as an endurance test
"It is painful when we have sex. I wish this practice would end," she says, adding that it had also made childbirth very difficult for her.  Recounting their first sexual experience, the couple describe it as traumatising.  Martha says she felt a lot of pain and it is not how she had imagined sex would be. She had to ask her husband to stop.

"I didn't realise a part of her [vulva] had been stitched, leaving only the urethra and a tiny vaginal opening," John tells the BBC. "I try to be very compassionate with my wife. I don't want her to feel like I don't respect her, yet we are a couple."

They lived in agony with little hope that things would ever change - not just for them, but they feared for their young daughter as well.  That was until John heard of an anti-FGM campaign meeting in his village, targeting men.  READ MORE

Having Sex Positivity

Lately, it seems like anything and anyone can mention sex and earn the label ‘sex positive’: social-media apps, celebrities and ‘girl bosses’, brands selling intimacy products. But when applied in such a variety of contexts, the idea of sex positivity seems to almost lose its meaning – or at least, its definition gets muddied.

Just as businesses and brands liberally use terms like ‘diversity’ and ‘equity’ to appeal to ethically conscientious consumers, “the same thing is happening with either individuals, celebrities, endorsements, organisations or companies saying that they're more sex positive”, says Emily Prior, executive director of California-based NGO Center for Positive Sexuality. While some “definitely are”, she adds, others “use it as a buzzword to get people in the door”.

But how can you tell the difference, when there’s no single, agreed-upon definition for sex positivity? While sex educators, academics, sex workers and pornography directors all tend to agree that the liberal use of the term indicates both taking advantage of a buzzword and a true embrace of its ethos, based on the context, they all have slightly different interpretations of what it means and where it came from. Depending on whom you ask, sex positivity encompasses everything from anti-racism to male nudity in the movies.

Across the board, however, those who talk about sex positivity note that at its core, the term is about openness to a variety of sexual orientations, interests (or lack thereof), identities and expressions. They find that the term has evolved to become both more popular and more nuanced over time, and that its influence extends well beyond the realm of sexuality into society at large.

The (many) origins of sex positivity
While many credit the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich with coining the term ‘sex positivity’ in the mid-1900s, as part of his discourse on sex as a healthy aspect of humanity, other groups embraced a sex-positive ethos well before he did.

“In the 1920s, there were already communities like ballroom culture in Harlem, New York, and feminists of the Village who were part of sex positive and queer communities,” says Swedish erotic filmmaker Erika Lust. Their experiences have just “often been left out of discussions”, she says.  READ MORE

I believe she's turned on...