Sex Me Bad: Nollywood and ‘the Fairer Sex’.

Sex Me Bad by Violet Omojan Okokor

Forget the godawful title trying to be all Color Me Badd ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’, I think this book could make for interesting reading.

As someone who pulls her hair out at how BADLY Nollywood treats women (see here), it is refreshing to see that not only does someone else feel the way I do, but she has gone ahead to write a book about it! With facts! And stuff!

I’m still baffled as to why it came up in a search for Zulu Sofola’s works on Amazon – I had to go back and type the name of the book to get a clean link for you guys to click through to – but I am chalking this one up to fate today. I’ll let you know if it’s any good. There are no reviews on the Amazon at present so I am buying blind.

Does Nollywood hate women?

We’ve all seen the movies. If you haven’t, I can tell you right now: It’s mostly always the woman.

It doesn’t matter what the film is; Action, Drama, Comedy, Thriller, Horror…it’s the woman.

Let’s consider this scenario: Boy and girl have been going out for years, boy gets rich and dumps girl in the most humiliating way possible, girl – previously spending all her finances on boy – becomes destitute. Girl turns to her late father’s brother – who incidentally ‘inherited’ all her father’s property because there is no heir – for help, uncle rejects her, girl lives on the street. After a while, girl gets rescued by random guy who takes her in and gives her everything, random guy proposes to girl after she scrubs the grime off her face in popular Cinderella move and reveals herself to be beautiful (even though at the time she was supposed to be living on the streets, she still had a french manicure which cost her N3,000 and it’s a nail wrap so there is NO WAY she was going to take them off just to shoot a stupid street scene. After all she has just agreed to lie down in a pile of rubbish and should that not be enough? Mr Director biko shoot around it now.)

Just as girl is getting used to the idea of spending the rest of her life with random guy, just as she is learning to love him, boy comes back with his tail between his legs after losing his fortunes to gold digger chick , begs her forgiveness for being a total cad, girl falls back into his arms. (Parts 1-4)

Boy dies and leaves girl (now woman) a widow with three children and she has to go through cruel widowhood rites, her daughter is almost raped by Uncle and her son joins a gang of marauders and is shot, and woman in addition to losing her husband is arrested on charges of prostitution and sent to court. (Parts 5 – 8)