Seeking Sexual Freedom

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is on a quest to encourage African women across the globe to live their best sex lives. As co-founder of the sex-positive feminist blog, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women , she has promoted sexual pleasure for African women for over a decade. In this book she shares lessons she''s learnt along the way, and insights gained from research and conversations with sex-positive African feminists, as well as knowledge gained from a series of sexual freedom workshops she has run with diverse groups of women. We Need to Talk about Sex also excavates and reclaims traditional African sexual knowledge and practices in ways that can serve the contemporary African woman. Nana recounts conversations with women who hold responsibilities for organising traditional practices such as the dipo puberty rites in Ghana and the Ssengas (traditional marriage counsellors) in Uganda. And each chapter of the book ends with a bulleted list of journal prompts, and exercises that you can do on their own to find your own way towards sexual liberation.

Autorentext

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is the author of The Sex Lives of African Women and Seeking Sexual Freedom. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, CNN, Essence and more. Her short stories have been published in It Wasn't Exactly Love **and The Pot and Other Stories. **She is the cofounder of the award-winning podcast and blog Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women. She is co-founder and co-director of the Institute for Journalism and Social Change.

Klappentext

A bold foray into African traditions around sexual pleasure and joy, with the personal goal of self-discovery and liberation, by one of Africa's preeminent feminists who 'is changing the way African women talk about sex' (Harper's Bazaar).

While working on her first 'groundbreaking' (Ms. Magazine) book, The Sex Lives of African Women, acclaimed African feminist and activist Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah had access to the wildest dreams and spiciest realities of women from around the world. But so often, she noticed that something was holding these women back from achieving full liberation and unfettered joy. So, she set out to apply sankofa-which means learning from the past to inform the future-to sex and pleasure, reclaiming African traditions in a quest to achieve sexual freedom.

Organised in three parts, Sekyiamah first takes readers across the African continent, from Senegal to Tanzania and beyond, where she meets and trains with gurus, 'witches', and aunties whose job it is to guide girls through puberty rites and later through 'marital training.' She discusses practices like beading and pulling, while highlighting the spiritual and gender-fluid nature of African traditional religions. The second part of the book asks us how we've lost our way, looking at the incursion of colonialism and western patriarchal norms into sexuality which has led to our warped ideals of beauty and shame, internalized racism, as well as state and interpersonal violence that stand in the way of sexual liberation. Finally, Sekyiamah shows that we can overcome these hurdles by returning to a more joyful and free sexual practice, using practical advice and prompts to chart our own journey.