It’s the middle of the day, and Yewande Biala is sitting on the floor, watching the woman in front of her masturbate. “I’ve got my hands down, and right away my pussy is coming online,” the woman (who is a sex therapist) tells Biala, who’s sitting at her side. And then she proceeds to do much what you’d expect.
If you’re wondering whether you’ve stumbled into some sort of soft-porn parallel universe, rest easy: Channel 4’s latest documentary is an educational look at something society still doesn’t talk too much about. That is, the female orgasm, and those who struggle to achieve one.
Our guide on this journey is Biala, who you might recognise from the 2019 season of Love Island. These days, she has quite a sizeable Instagram following, and as she explains in the opening scenes of the documentary, “at the age of 26, I’ve still not managed to cum”.
This is her attempt to rectify that situation, using both science and therapy to help her understand why.
All in a day’s work – if it’s not clear from the above (or indeed the name), Secrets of the Female Orgasm falls firmly into the NSFW category. Over the course of an hour, we see Biala attend sex parties, use a mirror to examine her vulva and attempt to masturbate with a variety of different sex toys, all in the aim of achieving the elusive orgasm for the first time.
With material as sensitive as this, the documentary could really have gone one of two ways. That it succeeds as well as it does is down to how engaging Biala is as a host: articulate, enthusiastic and endearingly awkward.
During one scene, where she’s hooked up to a probe that measures her state of arousal via her “vaginal pulse”, she is made to watch porn and can’t stop laughing. In another, she researches methods of manual masturbation, only for her (and the viewer) to be greeted with a full-frontal video of those techniques in action. “Why is she naked?” Biala squeals. Why indeed.
Of course, there is a serious point to all this toe-curling fun. As we’re told, one in eight women have never had an orgasm, while an estimated 10 to 15 per cent of the female population have anorgasmia; that is, difficulty reaching climax.
That’s a lot of people; Biala deserves credit for being brave enough to put herself out there and normalise something that’s still seen as pretty taboo. And we get glimpses (though never really more than that) at why the same might be true for her, too: her religious upbringing in Ireland, where masturbation was deeply peer-shamed; previous relationships she’s been in, where sex “didn’t set my world on fire”, and even her relationship with her family.
The last one is maybe the most interesting; the scene where Biala attempts to interview her mother about why sex was talked about so little is one of the episode’s closing scenes, and one of its most powerful; despite Biala’s attempts to get her to open up, she is shut down.
“It’s such a huge thing,” she says tearfully at the end of her journey. That it is – and proof that there is still plenty of work to do when it comes to shedding light on this little-understood topic.
