sex under patriarchy: obligations, norms & intimacy starvation

The Feminist Bar Podcast · Jul 10, 2026 · 1h 6m

Host Tinatswe Mhaka sits down with two guests speaking anonymously to talk about sex as duty. Marriage teaches women that their bodies are owed to someone else on schedule, and this episode goes after what that actually does to a person over years. The guests name intimacy starvation directly: the exhaustion of being sexually active and still hungry for something real, because what’s on offer is obligation dressed up as intimacy. They pull apart the religious scripts, the legal architecture of marriage, and the tired myth that women simply want less sex, all of which work together to keep…