About 10 minutes into the new Channel 4 documentary Secrets of the Female Orgasm, the presenter, Yewande Biala, settles down to watch a video on a sex education website about how to masturbate. “Oh my God,” she gasps as the demonstrator appears. “Why is she naked?” If I hadn’t already pledged my undying devotion to Biala, this would have been the deciding moment.
Somebody somewhere must have been seized with joy when they realised what televisual gold they had in Biala. She is a 26-year-old biochemist, brought up in Ireland since the age of three by her Nigerian parents, both practising Catholics, a former Love Island contestant and – crucially, here – has never had an orgasm. Not during sex (she has had a couple of boyfriends) and she has never taken matters into her own hands either. In fact, until about five years ago she wasn’t aware that women could come. Absolute commissioning catnip, even before you add in the fact that she is funny, articulate, frank and a gift to the camera. If you do not instantly love a woman who, when forced to take up a handmirror and reluctantly regard her ladyparts for the first time, summarises the situation as, “It looks like a squashed lettuce”, the fault very much lies with you.
The documentary hits most of the expected beats. After the self-examination (overseen, of course, by an American “sex and pleasure coach” with a striking haircut, called Lacey Haynes) comes the medical one, to assure her and us that there is no physical reason why Biala should not be able to come if and when the time is right. Then there are the meetings with women with similar experiences (or lack thereof), the mandatory scouring of a sex-toy shop under an expert’s guidance, the testing behind closed doors, a visit to a sex club, a return to Lacey for a live demo that gives a whole new meaning to “Haynes manual” and a lab visit to measure her body’s responses to sexual images. Eventually, there is a conversation with Biala’s mother to try to unpack the legacy of a strict religious upbringing and the unrelenting message that anything to do with your squashed lettuce was a shameful business indeed.
But thanks to Biala, it all has a wholly unexpected freshness. Her practical realism (“The trouble is,” she points out when the doctor sends her away to have a crack at masturbating, “I genuinely don’t know where to start”) and disinclination to play into the usual optimistic tropes or show the usual enthusiasm on which such documentaries of self-discovery generally run is a beautiful thing. “It’s so complicated,” she sighs wearily, after the expert has bouncily listed the pros and cons of various devices in the sex shop. And, after she diligently tests them all behind closed doors, they do not have the desired effect either. When she is shown pornography in the lab that measures sexual stimulation, they have to remind her to keep her eyes on the screen – and her readouts measure almost nothing. When Haynes does her soft-voiced sex and pleasure coach thing (“Yooou are an orgaaasmic woman”), our heroine nearly laughs her leg off. Attagirl.
At the same time, serious points are made – although they are not as fully developed as you might hope. A programme fronted by someone as perfect for the job and as good at it as Biala could have borne the weight of more overt interrogation of such matters as how a society succeeds in keeping the news, even from intelligent women such as Biala with plenty of female friends, that women as well as men can have orgasms? Does her lack of interest in porn mark her out as unusual or tell us something about others in a porn-saturated culture? When she asks her – rather magnificent, rather terrifying – mother, Biliki, at the end why she never told her about any of the good things about sex, Biliki replies laughing: “Oh, come ON, Yewande!” But what, exactly, is she laughing about? The idea of talking about it? Or the idea that such things could exist? Suffusing the whole programme is the idea of feeling safe and secure enough to enjoy yourself and how fragile and easily destroyed – if it is even built in the first place – that feeling is for women.
Still, it remains a rewarding watch, despite – or maybe because – it doesn’t reach the … God, sorry … climax you expect. It stays honest and is content to let its conclusion be that the mind, body and the social messages and toxicities absorbed by both are a complex business that doesn’t respond to the demands of a shooting schedule any more than Biala’s lettuce responds to the wand. It is a genuinely intimate hour – doubtless aided by the fact that it was filmed, produced and directed by the same person, Sally Rose Griffiths – in a way you almost thought had fallen out of fashion for ever.
• Secrets of the Female Orgasm was on Channel 4 and is on demand now.
