In Nigeria, when you think of OnlyFans, you imagine women behind the camera and men behind the screen. Adult content isn’t made with women in mind, but women watch porn more often than you think. According to Pornhub’s 2017 report, the site saw 28.5 billion visits, and the top searches were ‘Porn for Women’ and ‘lesbian’.
For women like 22-year-old Jessica*, the fascination started early.
“I was seven when I started watching. By the time I was 11, I had a secret porn folder on my laptop. The first time I felt aroused, I ran to tell my sister that my vagina was leaking water (I thought my period had finally come). Once I got internet access, I found Xvideos and made it a hobby.”
Others met pornography through darker circumstances. 20-year-old Tianna’s first exposure came from an adult neighbour who used sex videos to groom her.
“He’d show me porn and ask if I wanted to try what they did. The next time I saw it was on my parents’ phone. By then, I knew what it was.”
Even with teenagers, Nigerian fathers are more likely to search for flirty texts than porn folders. Few parents ever imagine their daughters could be addicted to explicit content. This was the case with Desire*.
“When I was 13, my dad caught me watching porn. He checked his browser history and saw that I’d been visiting Pornhub. He scolded me once, and we never spoke about it again. I got my first smartphone shortly after that and learned how to hide it better out of fear,” she tells Zikoko
Desire’s paranoia turned out to be unnecessary; her father never checked again. Left alone, the obsession grew to a fever pitch in late adolescence. By age 17, she was watching explicit content as often as she could and was masturbating at least twice daily. For religious reasons, she decided to quit right before she turned 18 and only returned to the habit in her early 20s.
Porn affects women differently. For men, the addiction is often physical; for women, it’s often psychological.
“Even though I was consuming porn in very concerning amounts, I was not touching myself or doing anything remotely sexual. For me, orgasms are mental rather than physical; the idea of sex just fascinated me.” Jessica says.
She began to explore darker porn categories because she didn’t enjoy regular man–woman porn. She would later discover that it was because she was not into men.
“Back then, I’d watch almost anything except LGBTQ+ porn. I think it’s because, deep down, I knew I was gay. I’m lucky that the kind of sex I enjoy is different from what I grew up watching. Otherwise, it would have been disastrous for my sex life.”
Even though Jessica considered herself “safe” from the disastrous effects of prolonged pornography consumption, she still found it hard to shake the expectations it had created about sex. With other women, she still gravitated to the role of the ‘passive submissive woman’ that populates most of the adult film industry.
“My early discovery of sex videos made me interested in darker kinks. Some of them are quite questionable, but I know better than to act them out on real people,” she said.
When harmless curiosity becomes compulsive use, it can be very damaging to what should otherwise be a healthy sex life off-screen.
“Sex is very awkward. I started watching porn because I wanted to romanticise it. I didn’t realise that creating a fantasy version of it could ruin the real thing. For most of my life, I’ve pretended to enjoy anal sex and giving blowjobs because the women I saw on screen looked feral for it.” Tianna* tells Zikoko
She adds that her favourite parts of sex, like aftercare, rarely show up on her screen.
Her observation is not wrong, as most adult content is made for men. So when women grow up watching male-centred pleasure, they learn to see sex through a lens where female pleasure barely exists.
In other women, it separates intimacy from pleasure. Many women develop performance anxiety from watching porn and spend their adult sex lives imitating the actresses they grew up watching. Women like 22-year-old Onome have never orgasmed with a partner.
“I’m so good at faking pleasure during sex that I moan on instinct even when what my partner is doing hurts. My mind can’t help but wander during sex, no matter how talented or attentive my partner is,” she says.
“I never finish when I try to use my imagination. Sometimes it takes me up to an hour of scrolling to get myself off.”
Onome’s complicated relationship with porn also affects how she views partners who watch it. She says it would be almost impossible not to feel like she’s in constant competition with the women on screen. This behaviour is not uncommon, as many women who watch porn have been known to struggle with accepting partners with the same habit.
“I know it’s hypocritical of me to be so strict when I used to have a porn habit, but this thing is brainrot. It corrupts you. Porn has abusive undertones. It’s an industry that exploits women for profit. There’s no way they won’t bring some of that back to me,” Onome says, explaining her misgivings about the habit in a partner.
While women like Onome hold this belief, others like Halima* think of it as a harmless hobby that, if used right, would result in a very fulfilling sex life.
“I didn’t start watching adult videos until I turned 18. I don’t mind my partner watching porn because I do it too. The last person I was with used to send porn to me. ” Halimah* tells Zikoko.
Although she admits that watching porn made sex hard at first.
“My partner tries to throw me around sometimes, but changing positions is not as easy as they make it look. It gets so awkward that we end up bumping heads — literally. I also used to find it weird that I could not orgasm from penetrative sex the way the actresses could.”
According to UNESCO, two out of three girls in many countries lack the knowledge they need as they enter puberty and begin menstruating. Many young girls turn to pornography as an alternative to proper sex education. For these women, pornography is more than just entertainment or a bad habit; it fills a vacuum left open by a lack of sex education and leaves long-term impacts on body image and overall sexual health.
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