Sex Talk: intricate affair women have with hair and sex 

I bumped into a married friend recently, looking very smart, thanks to her newly locked hair (the type that looks like artificial dreadlocks) and as is my bad habit, my hand went straight to her head in admiration.

“Don’t touch it! It is still very raw,” she admonished. Three days after her visit to the hairdresser, she was still walking around with a painfully stretched scalp and taking painkillers every eight hours to numb her misery.

The hairdo looked great, but the wearer looked close to tears. I asked how she slept.

“With my head hanging over the side of the bed,” she replied, promptly. What about your husband and his ‘conjugal rights’? I continued to probe.

“He will have to wait until the pain is completely gone and this hair is less tight.”
Eh! African women need to do something about this mostly unhealthy relationship we have with our hair, especially in relation to marriage and sex. We cannot add “my hair!” to the litany of excuses as to why we “cannot make love tonight”.

If it is not “My period”, it is “I have a headache”. If it is not that, then “I am not in the mood”; or, “I am really tired”, etc. And now, “The hair is still painful; wait, I’ll tell you when it is okay to touch it.”

And it is not only painful braids we are talking about here. Try romantically frolicking in the pool or sharing the shower with your wife after she has installed her expensive weave; even when it is a cheap one, actually. There are many African women, whose kiwani hair simply cannot be played with.

You cannot pull it or caress it during lovemaking; you cannot replicate the ‘silly’ water games you see in movies; you cannot disorganize it if she has styled and pinned it for a function due the following day…

In fact, writing this reminds me of Chris Rock’s 2009 documentary, Good Hair; it is not just an African thing, even our Black American sisters go through similar pains. There are people whose husbands have never experienced their natural hair, because it is always under a wig, a weave, braids, name it.

And I recently watched on TikTok as a woman advised us to not wash our natural hair for at least six months at a go, because apparently, dirt and filth stimulate growth. From the comments, many women were lapping up the advice with gratitude.

But do you know how badly dirty hair stinks? How are you supposed to be cuddly, sensual and sexy with a head that smells like a dustbin?
The one thing I admire about my Muslim sisters – the ones that actually practice Islam – is how much they simplify their hair business.

They will wear cornrows, natural hair, or simple braids that are adaptable to water. Islam requires a woman to have a full ablution (pour water over her head to cleanse all the way to the toes) every time she has sex with her husband, before she can resume her daily prayers.

So, it is rare to see a married and practicing Muslim woman with this ‘untouchable’ hair the rest of us grapple with. And by extension, this helps their marriages and sex lives, I imagine.

I have seen various social media surveys where men are asked, which hairstyles they find the sexiest, and in almost all the ones I have seen, cornrows and natural hair come out the winners. We just choose not to believe them. Yes, we choose our hairstyles for our own pleasure and happiness, but again, don’t weaponize the ki-hair.

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