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This Is Us
I’m a Muslim Woman, and I Love to Orgasm
I believe God designed us to experience pleasure
I furrowed my brows and turned around as I ladled the last batter of bean cake into the deep fryer, taking a few seconds to process what my husband had just said.
“So many women have never had the big O,” he said as he poured boiling water over the black Lipton tea bags in our teacups. “Many even believe that they’re not supposed to.”
“How do you know this?” I asked curiously, leaping up to sit beside him on the cabinet. This was the beginning of a very long conversation that started in our kitchen and rolled into bedtime.
My husband had joined a conversation about sex at his workplace, and he found out that none of the women knew what an orgasm felt like. Upon asking them why they’d never had an orgasm, some admitted that the idea of the female orgasm was alien to them while the majority responded that they just never saw it as a goal to which Muslim women should aspire.
I met my husband over the phone about seven years ago. He had heard about me from a relative and wanted to meet me. Our relationship was distant and we knew that having decided to wait till marriage before having sex, we didn’t want to spend our honeymoon learning the basics. It was a topic we openly explored, and we both concluded that we needed to take more and more sex education lessons. We both learned about male and female sexual anatomies, and we established that we were both equally entitled to sexual pleasure and consideration.
Upon getting married, we realized that the topic of sexual pleasure could not be exhausted — the anatomy of hymens being on top of the list at that time. With each passing day, there was always so much more to unpack. But we learned together, tried new things together, improved together, and grew together — each new sex becoming the best sex — sometimes sensual and sometimes heated. And each of us ensured the sexual pleasure of the other. Sex in our home is a gift of love that we give to each other.
As I listened to my husband narrate the experiences of the women at his workplace, I became genuinely disturbed. I couldn’t comprehend how women would stay in a marriage characterized by…
