good girls don't want things like that

For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me. Not because of anything I had done but because of what I wanted. I craved sex. I craved desire. The tension between two people, the pull of wanting and being wanted, felt so visceral and so alive in me that it terrified me. Because wanting it that much felt inherently wrong. Shameful. Like I was secretly a freak hiding something filthy underneath the good girl surface I showed everyone.

And I know where that feeling came from. Because as a Black woman, the options I was given for how to exist sexually were binary. On one end you have the pure woman. Tems, who has spoken openly about waiting until marriage. Yvonne Orji, who built her whole public identity around celibacy and faith. Women who are celebrated, pedestalized, held up as examples of virtue and self-respect. And on the other end you have the hypersexualized woman, the IG baddie, oiled up, unapologetically sexual, celebrated until she does something men don’t like and then weaponized against.

Both are pedestalized. Both are eventually torn down. Neither version protects you. Neither version is allowed to just be complex. And neither leaves any room for the woman who is somewhere in between.

I grew up in a Ghanaian household where image was everything. My family presented as picture perfect. Private school, good grades, well spoken, respectful. A strong Black immigrant family unit. And my mother would constantly remind me: be careful what you’re doing, people are watching you. Any behavior that disrupted the image my parents wanted was treated like a future punishment waiting to happen. If you don’t present yourself the right way, you won’t end up with the right man. So you cook. You’re respectful. You’re sweet. You’re submissive. I absorbed all of it. And when I went into relationships, I seemed like the perfect girlfriend. Soft. Sweet. A listener. Funny. The perfect package. And it worked, until it didn’t.

Men push you to let your guard down. They push you to open up, to be soft, to be vulnerable, to trust them, which isn’t particularly easy for me to do. But eventually I would give in. And the second I did, the second I let my guard down and had a genuinely human moment, a bad day, got a little snappy, a moment of frustration, something real slipping through, I could feel the change. Instantly.

I went from the dream girl to something they didn’t quite know what to do with. Something lesser in their eyes. It wasn’t always overt. It was subtle. They stopped apologizing as much. They became more dismissive. Less warmth and affection. Less present. And it was always right after a human moment. So I would rebuild. I would pour goodness and perfection back into the relationship. Performing enough sweetness and softness to earn back what I had lost. Until I had another human moment. And the cycle would start again.

Ultimately so much of this comes down to fear. The fear of being fully seen. For a lot of my life I didn’t have the confidence or certainty that if men saw the full version of me they would still choose me. And I had evidence of that every single time I had a human moment. Every time I showed something real I was punished for it in some way. And that reinforces the idea: you don’t get to be real. You don’t get to show your full self. This is not the place where you do that.

It went into the bedroom too. I wanted to explore, to push further, to play in ways that had nothing to do with porn and everything to do with genuine erotic curiosity. But I felt deeply uncomfortable expressing any of that. Because the good girl doesn’t want things like that. She performs. She centers his pleasure. She makes it good for him. She is only allowed to be sexually voracious in the moments he wants her to be. And she definitely doesn’t have her own set of fantasies.

Because when you actually have specific desires and fantasies that are truly yours, not based off of what men presume about women’s sexuality, not in the prepackaged box of what a good woman’s sexuality is supposed to look like, there’s something that washes over men’s faces. A level of disgust. Maybe a little bit of curiosity. But mostly the discomfort of realizing that you have your own sexual desires that don’t center them. So instead I decided that if I could be perfect enough, soft enough, pleasing enough, uncomplicated enough, I would be safe. I would be kept. Perfection was the only protection I knew. But perfection won’t save you.

I had pedestalized sex as this sacred, pure act. I had been planning on saving myself for marriage. And then I was assaulted and that was stripped from me. That assault made me feel like the good girl was gone forever. So I clung to it harder in every relationship afterward. Including the one where I was assaulted. Fighting so hard to still hold on to that image. Because the assault made me feel like I had a layer of filth on my body. Like I had done something wrong. Like I had broken a covenant with God, even though it wasn’t my choice.

And then I continued to have sex after that. I didn’t stop. I enjoyed it. And I felt so conflicted by that. How can I sit here and enjoy sex after what happened to me? It felt inherently wrong. And because so much of my initial relationship with sex was built around saving myself for marriage and it being something you do with someone you are deeply in love with, so the idea of simply wanting someone because you desire them viscerally, because you want to enjoy them and explore each other, felt wrong. Because it went against everything I had been taught.

There is an assumption that women only have sex when they’re in love. So when men I had been with found out I was seeing someone new shortly after, I could see it wash over their faces. As if I had tricked them. I think about one ex specifically. When he realized I had actually moved on, that someone else was holding my attention, something shifted in him. He treated me like I was hiding something. Like I owed him details. Like he was entitled to understand how I could want someone new when I was supposed to still be in love with him. He hyperfixated on it. How could I move on so quickly? What was happening with this other person? For the rest of the time we tried to remain cordial it felt like a constant low hum of accusation. And I felt it. The shame. Am I doing something wrong? Am I disgusting? I had committed no crime except moving on. Except wanting someone new. Except being a woman whose desire didn’t wait for his permission.

What I know now is that I don’t want to perform anymore. Not in relationships. Not in bed. Not in the way I present myself to the world. So much of my life has been performance. It has been suffocating. I have been drowning under the image. The one my family curated, my community reinforced, media amplified. A box that never fit and that I kept trying to squeeze myself into anyway.

And I won’t lie and say it doesn’t terrify me sometimes. I lay awake at 2am thinking about the fact that I talk about sex and desire openly on the internet with my face attached to it. Considering where I come from. The community I grew up in. It haunts me. But I’d rather live in my authenticity than continue to hide in the shadows and carry my shame for the comfort of other people. I’m tired of hiding. I’m tired of shame.

But what does authenticity actually cost?

Your comfort zone. You have to reconcile with the fact that you might disappoint your family. People in your community are going to judge you. You will be misunderstood. You will no longer be the good girl or the good daughter. You will lose access to the types of people who only ever wanted the performance. But here's what I know now: the mask is going to fall eventually. And you don't want to spend your life surrounded by people who love the performance of you rather than you in your fullness. A person who can only love the curated version of you isn't capable of actually loving you at all.

---

💐 want more?

TikTok: @musingsofjanice

Pinterest: @musingsofjanice

Letterboxd: @janiceobudai

Spotify: janice

---