Before she was a reality TV star, writer and now documentary maker, Yewande Biala was a biotechnologist, studying and working with, she says, orgasms. “Not orgasms! Oh my god,” she says. “Organisms. When I started this documentary, instead of ‘orgasms’, I would say ‘organisms’ – and now I’m doing it backwards.”
Initially Biala, 28, didn’t want to make the Channel 4 film Secrets of the Female Orgasm. She had become a fan favourite of the 2019 series of the ITV reality show Love Island, and was on a podcast a few years ago when the subject of sex came up; Biala revealed she’d never had an orgasm. A TV production company asked if she’d be interested in making a film about female pleasure. It took some convincing, but she did it to change attitudes. “I hope other women who have never experienced orgasm will understand that there is no shame in it. I hope if anyone [in education] watches, they will understand that maybe we need to improve the curriculum about sex.”
According to the documentary, during heterosexual sex, 95% of men achieve orgasm, but this only applies to 65% of women, which has become known as the orgasm gap (86% of women come during sex with other women). An estimated one in eight women have never climaxed at all. It’s a topic that has long been neglected by scientists, with evolutionary biologists claiming that the lack of link to an effect on female fertility has meant that “for a long time it wasn’t interesting to the medical community”. Generations of stigma have surrounded female orgasms since Freud claimed that women who experience pleasure from the clitoris rather than the vagina are “infantile” or frigid. He described female sexuality as “the dark continent”.
It’s clear that Biala is riven with embarrassment by the subject. She’s a “nervous laugher”, which makes her a fun and warm presenter, even if you can feel her nerves and awkwardness in some of the most excruciating scenes. In a university lab with machines that can test levels of arousal, she is asked to watch porn. She laughs and can’t keep her eyes on the screen. It helped having a small female crew – they got to know each other over three months of filming – but it was far from easy. “Even going to the gynaecologist for the first time and having someone film you, with your legs wide open…” she says.
Biala had asked them not to warn her too far ahead what they would be filming in case she started worrying too much about it – that included a “pussy-gazing workshop” in which women study their vulvas using a mirror, and a visit to a women-only sex club – but there had to be a conversation early on about whether or not she would masturbate on camera. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say she doesn’t. “As much as I’m happy to grow on this journey with the viewers, there’s some growing that I’m not able to do,” she says with a laugh.
The film is an emotional watch too, unpicking some of Biala’s issues around sex. She was born in Nigeria but the family moved to Ireland when she was three and she grew up near Dublin with three younger siblings. Theirs was a religious family in a Catholic country. Until she was around 18, Biala would go to a Bible studies group, where sex was brought up once or twice a year, but it was called fornication and the young people were told, she says, “how it was a sin, how you shouldn’t have sex before marriage and if you did, how you would literally go to hell”. She remembers the day they were asked to close their eyes but put up their hand if they’d ever had sex; they were told that God would forgive them, but that they shouldn’t do it again. She smiles. “Imagine growing up in that type of environment.”
Masturbation was also considered a sin. A rumour went around her school that one girl masturbated, “and people did not let her live that down. So why would I ever do that and have people slag me? I felt so sorry for her. You’d never want to say to your friends: ‘Do you masturbate?’ because if that got out, it would have been hell.”
So she never explored her own sexuality. For one thing, female orgasm was never mentioned in sex education classes at school – just male orgasm, and then only in the context of reproduction – so she didn’t know it even existed. “Because I’d never experienced it, I thought my friends also hadn’t experienced it,” she says. “It wasn’t until I was about 20 that I was like: ‘Oh, it’s just me.’”
As she got older and had partners, Biala would focus on the idea that you could have good sex without climaxing. “I just believed I couldn’t have an orgasm, so I didn’t make a big deal out of it,” she says. It was other people – talking about it on that podcast, and the friends she told – who made her question it, and now through this documentary. “During my journey of filming, I realised that there were so many mental blocks. Filming the doc made me see things differently.”
The hardest scene was with her mother. Biala wanted to talk about the messages she’d got about sex growing up – in the film, she says she was once grounded for a year when she was 15 because her parents wrongly believed she was sexually active – and the conversation they have, however excruciating, is also revelatory. It made her angry afterwards, she says, “because it was like: ‘If you really thought this, why didn’t you say this for years? We wouldn’t be having this conversation; I wouldn’t be filming this documentary. I probably would have been a really different person.’”
At the beginning, Biala was vague with her mother about the subject of the film, but it represents another step away from childhood expectations – the decision to go on Love Island in 2019 was perhaps the first. As a child she had wanted to be an actor or TV presenter, but she felt the expectations of her family to have a more academic and professional career (it’s no surprise her younger siblings are similarly high-achieving in medicine and software engineering). She became a biotechnologist, working in vaccine development. On paper, she says, she looked like “the perfect child. I went to university at 16, first-class degree at 20, vaccine specialist by 23 and I had a master’s. I remember sitting in the canteen one day at work and everyone was talking about all these experiences they had in life, and I just didn’t have that because I’ve never done anything for myself.”
The chance to go on Love Island seemed fun – for someone who’d had such strict ideas about sex instilled in her, it must have felt rebellious too. In the famously sexed-up programme, people compete to win the show – and prize money – by becoming a couple. Biala says her father was furious, but to her it was a show not about sex but dating. “Not many of the cast members actually do have sex. It never once crossed my mind – I knew I was never going to have sex [in the show]. People on the show were sexualised because of how they looked, but I didn’t think it was a sexual show. If anything, it’s a show about finding love and friendship.”
There is, despite the sex-positive movement, still so much stigma about women having too much sex or enjoying it. “You’re shamed if you have sex with too many people, but then how are you supposed to figure out what you like and what you don’t like if you’re not having sex?” But it’s confusing because there’s also shame about not having sex or orgasms. “Everyone looks at you like you’re an absolute weirdo,” says Biala. “Like, what the hell have you been doing?”
When she put a post on Instagram for the documentary, saying she’d never had an orgasm – she has more than 676,000 followers, including old colleagues, church leaders and her mother – her nervousness about it made the experience so excruciating that she turned her phone off for the day. But plenty of women got in touch to say it was the same for them. “I was like: ‘I’m not the problem – there’s other people.’ It felt comforting, and like I’m not a weirdo. I had never met anyone like me, so I just felt this was my problem.”
How did it feel to meet women who were very sexually liberated? “It was eye-opening,” says Biala. She visits a sex club, goes shopping for sex toys and takes a masturbation class with a woman Biala says she is grateful to for showing self-pleasure in such a positive light “for people who are watching this, who maybe feel a bit dirty when it comes to masturbation or feel they should not do it or talk about it”.
It led to strange and awkward conversations. “We would finish filming on a Friday and have a group chat, and people would check up on me and be like: ‘How are you? Have you masturbated yet?’” She laughs. “Oh my god, this is so much pressure. I had the toys and had done all these classes and spoken to all these people, and I’ve been trying to get through my mental and emotional blocks – [but] I felt like I was on a schedule.”
These days Biala has a much healthier attitude towards sex, having had some therapy sessions. “There’s no shame in starting your journey, no matter how old you are, and finding out what those blocks are and working through them,” she says. Making the film has changed her. “I have unlearned a lot of the things I thought about sex, all the toxic attitudes. I felt like I was getting to know myself in this documentary and leaving all that shame behind.”
Secrets of the Female Orgasm is on Channel 4 on 31 August at 10pm.
