Weird pre-sex habits women have

Nadia Bokody reveals some of the strangest practices women perform in the lead-up to sex.

For decades, I performed a pre-sex ritual I assumed everyone with a vulva knew about.

That was, until I casually mentioned it to a woman I was seeing.

“You do WHAT?!” she asked, aghast.

“You know, it’s when you take a sample from downstairs to check how you smell and taste,” I explained.

“You’ve really never heard of self-sampling?” I pressed, suddenly feeling less confident in my conviction.

“No. I’m pretty sure that’s a straight girl thing,” she smirked.

She may have been right.

Sex columnist Nadia Bokody breaks down the weird pre-sex habits women have. Picture: Instagram/Nadia Bokody

Most of my straight friends admitted to practising it, and a follow-up Instagram poll suggested at least 43 per cent of other heterosexual women do too, but none of my queer friends had ever heard of self-sampling.

Though I identify as gay, as a late-bloomer lesbian (someone who comes out in their thirties or later), I spent most of my life in straight spaces. It struck me to learn that women who’d been living outside that world had a very different relationship with their bodies to my straight peers and I.

Notably, it was absent of the quiet self-revulsion stitched into our experiences of womanhood.

“I use bicarb soda, peroxide, etc to make sure there’s no smell at all once I am wet,” one woman confessed, in response to the Instagram poll I ran.

And, after I shared a comedic tweet that read, “Eating p***y straight out of the shower is very bland. Do some jumping jacks real quick,” a female follower replied. “This has blown my mind... It’s okay to not be totally and utterly scrubbed? I’ve spent my whole life believing vaginas stink.”

Nadia reveals some of the strangest practices women perform in the lead-up to sex. Picture: Instagram/Nadia Bokody

As I read these responses, it occurred to me much of what I’d thought to be standard pre-sex regimes were practices rooted in heteronormativity and misogyny.

The shame I’d felt around my body’s processes and odours, and the lengths I’d gone to hide them from male partners had not been instinctive, but learned.

I realised this after things got amorous with a woman I’d been dating, and I apologetically informed her it was “that time of the month”.

“Oh...is that an issue for you?” she’d inquired, as though genuinely unaware there was any kind of sexual protocol required, or that menstruation would ever present a barrier to intimacy.

The more sex I had with queer women, the more I realised just how much of myself I’d felt required to suppress and conceal when I was sleeping with men.

Even the scrupulous removal of body hair – tweezing, shaving and painfully tearing follicles from my skin to expunge all evidence of their existence – has become a more superfluous exercise since dating women. There’s no unspoken agreement a vulva be returned to an adolescent state in order for it to be acceptable for sex among lesbians.

The cultural imperative for women to suspend ourselves in a hairless pre-pubescence, continuously sanitising and deodorising our vulvas, stems not from a desire to accentuate femininity, but from a rejection of it.

There are no YouTube videos or blogs for men touting, “X tips to prepare for sex”. No products or home remedies designed to help them censor the natural odours of their genitals. And there are no guys I know of who routinely sample their own bodily expulsions to ensure they’re acceptable for a partner.

While men are taught they’re largely acceptable as they are, women are simultaneously told our bodies in their natural state are unhygienic and unsightly: remove your body hair, don’t talk about your period, banish vaginal odours.

The very things that make up our womanhood are erased, and in turn, we internalise a kind of quiet disgust at ourselves that ensures we never let ourselves be truly vulnerable in the presence of a sexual partner.

Nadia said there are no YouTube videos or blogs for men touting, ‘X tips to prepare for sex’. Picture: Instagram/Nadia Bokody

Perhaps because queer women are unhindered by the pressure to appeal to the male gaze, they routinely rebel against these gender norms, celebrating all aspects of the feminine, including the ones we’ve been conditioned to view with shame and revulsion.

But the emancipatory joy of accepting ourselves, of releasing the desire to make our bodies more palatable to a culture that’s taught us to feel embarrassed by them, needn’t be something straight women can’t also bask in.

And it doesn’t have to mean giving up grooming and never visiting a beauty salon again.

Instead, it might look more like leaning away from the instinct to apologise for or mask an odour, a bodily process, or an overlooked tuft of hair, and embracing a less socially constructed version of femininity.

I personally still adhere to a fairly lengthy skincare routine and am unlikely to abandon my razor any time soon, but most of my pre-sex practices – and the shame tied up in them – are far behind me, along with my days of performing heterosexuality.

Which is frankly a relief, because if I never have to self-sample again, it’ll be too soon.

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