In recent years, conversations about rape have surged across Nigerian digital spaces. Social media timelines cycle through allegations, outrage, denial, think pieces, and counter-accusations with alarming regularity. Yet even beyond the spectacular cases that trend for a week and then recede, something more insidious persists and it is the everyday language that renders sexual violence imaginable, negotiable, and—disturbingly—normal. Contrary to many opinions, rape culture is not sustained only by perpetrators. It is reinforced through jokes, lyrics, casual commentary, and the subtle permissions embedded in how we frame desire, masculinity, and women’s bodies. These micro-permissions (think: phrases that eroticise resistance, frame aggression as passion, or convert fear into titillation) create the discursive conditions in which violence becomes legible as pleasure.
Art does not emerge in a vacuum. We often describe “good art” as mimetic: it mirrors the social world from which it springs. If rape culture circulates in everyday speech, it is hardly surprising that it also surfaces across the art forms that shape pop culture. Literature, film, and music do not merely reflect reality. They rehearse it, stylise it, and sometimes sanitise it although this is not the purpose of art. For years, Nigerian literature has been criticised for being overly trauma-centric, accused of dwelling too insistently on pain. Among the recurring complaints is that writers render rape too graphically, as though the problem lies in narration rather than in prevalence. Such criticism is laughable, considering that sexual violence remains a stubborn feature of our social landscape. To demand that art look away is to demand a silence that reality itself does not grant. Still, the more urgent question is not whether rape appears in literature, but how it appears.
In Lagos Noir’s “What They Did That Night”, A strikingly disturbing scene stays with the reader:, two men are robbing a house on Lagos Island. One of them, Scorpion, is distracted by a “nasal female voice.” Her screams do not register as terror but as stimulus. Those screams do something to him:
“Scorpion felt the meat between his thighs stir, as if it was a man in coma, shocked back to consciousness, some larva from the underworld crossing back into life… Her scream excited Scorpion all the more; made warm blood gush down to his penis. As the horror-stricken woman backed away into a room, he dropped his knife and began to unbutton his jeans.”
Recently, yet another rape case has made its way to the internet. There is always “another,” a new name, a new thread, a new wave of outrage. But what is particularly disturbing about this case is the perpetrator’s sickening message to his victim. He wrote: “…seeing you mumbling and that little tears that rolled down you eyes when you gave up and stayed still was soo satisfying…”
The language is disturbingly similar to the one from “What They Did That Night”. In both instances—the first from literature and the second from lived reality—the source of pleasure is not even the sex. It is surrender. When one interrogates the source of the rapist’s pleasure, it becomes clear that it lies in the woman’s vulnerability. The softness of the scream. The “little tears.” These are not incidental details. The pleasure is located in domination; it becomes a performance of masculinity staged upon a woman’s body. How does masculinity become so tethered to conquest? To answer this, we must move beyond isolated cases and examine the ecosystem that sustains them because rape does not exist in a vacuum. It is cultivated through culture.
Away from literature, another way to examine how micro permission operates in pop culture is through music. Sometime in the last quarter of 2025, a phrase sprang up on X. Users began commenting “Meatpie” under women’s pictures. Soon, it became linked to Mavo’s song with CKay, “Body,” particularly the line: “Your body na meatpie.” It is yet another Afrobeats track that openly objectifies a woman’s body. What is even more unsettling was the response from girls who sang it casually: “It’s not that deep.” But it is. It always is. To describe a woman’s body as “meatpie” is not just a playful metaphor. It frames the body as edible, available, and divisible. In the same song, Mavo continues: “Touch your body, otilo / Me I want your body, I want my cut.” The word “cut” suggests entitlement. As though masculinity confers ownership. As though desire automatically generates rights.
To suggest that this dynamic is new, however, would be incorrect. Nigerian pop music has long reproduced the language of possession and presumption, though not always in the same register. What has changed in recent years is not the presence of entitlement, but its brazenness. An artiste such as Odumodublvck exemplifies this escalation. While he is not the first to foreground sexual aggression in mainstream music (Naira Marley had a similar notoriety) Odumodublvck’s lyrics are marked by a more explicit fusion of sexuality and menace. In the controversial song “Cast” with Shallipopi, he raps: “Big Kala, I need your bunda, mama / If she no fuck o, if she no suck / Who go pay for her wig and handbag?” Here, sexual access is framed as a transactional obligation. The rhetorical question positions financial provision as conditional upon sexual compliance. This is not desire but an entitlement that thrives on coercion, where refusal carries implied material consequence. Odumodublvck’s lyrics are a reflection of his mentality of the woman such that in reality, he has been tagged as a misogynist– a title he doesn’t deny but rather continues to solidify in more song releases. The artists themselves are not singular villains. They operate within an ecosystem that already rewards these tropes. Popular music reflects dominant social fantasies even as it amplifies them. The issue, then, is not one problematic lyric, but a patterned vocabulary that recurs across songs and seeps into everyday interaction.
The perception that a man has a license to a woman’s body is deeply entrenched. Nowhere is it more visible than in public spaces. Markets. Danfo buses. University campuses. Streets at dusk. I remember a particular incident where a random man grabbed my hand at Yaba market. He was not selling anything nor was he asking for directions. He was simply holding me. When I yanked my hand away and insulted him, he responded: “Why I no go touch you, no be man go still marry you?” In that statement lies an entire ideology: a woman is is imagined as inevitably belonging to a man.
During a discussion I once initiated about catcalling as a form of harassment, an acquaintance recounted an incident he had witnessed. A soldier was catcalling a student from Queen’s College. The girl, perhaps out of habit or self-preservation, did not turn around. She ignored him. Her refusal to acknowledge the call was interpreted as provocation. The soldier approached her and began to rain insults on her in response. Catcalling is often defended as harmless banter, but embedded within it is an expectation of response. When that expectation is denied, hostility follows. In this instance, the uniform amplified the imbalance. A figure institutionally positioned as a protector of citizens reacted to indifference as though it were an affront. It is difficult not to consider the implications. If public space and onlookers were enough to limit the response to verbal abuse, what might have occurred in private? The question is uncomfortable, but it reveals the underlying structure: entitlement begins with the assumption that a woman owes engagement. When that imagined debt is unpaid, aggression becomes, in the perpetrator’s mind, justified.
This logic extends beyond individual men. It seeps into institutions. A Nigerian tertiary institution once trended because female students were reportedly “checked” by security personnel for evidence of wearing brassieres before entering examination halls. One must pause and ask: what is the epistemological link between undergarments and academic integrity? Dress codes overwhelmingly police female bodies. Length of skirt. Visibility of cleavage. Tightness of trousers. The underlying assumption is that the female body is inherently disruptive and must be regulated to prevent male distraction or destruction. The burden of male self-control is transferred onto women and girls. And so when sexual violence occurs, the question is rarely “Why did he?” It is “What was she wearing?” “Why was she there?” “Why did she stay?”
This pattern of blame is not uniquely Nigerian, but it manifests with particular force here. Consider the case of Iniobong Umoren who was lured under the guise of a job interview and murdered. While people mourned the loss, there were still questions of “ Why did she go alone?” It is as though women must continuously justify their right to exist or take certain actions.
The logic that the woman owes the man attention is dangerous because it frames refusal as an affront. We see milder forms of this entitlement daily. At a restaurant, a man buys a woman a drink and expects conversation. He sends her money and expects her to “come over.” When his expectation meets resistance, resentment brews. Popular culture also reinforces this view. Films often portray persistence as romance where the man who refuses to take no for an answer is eventually rewarded and the woman who initially resists eventually “falls.” Saying no either means coyness or arrogance rather than boundary.
Online, the situation grows more complex. Social media has amplified both activism and misogyny. In the aftermath of rape allegations, there are usually two sides. One side demands justice. The other demands proof. In the most recent rape case, YabaLeft, a blog notorious for reposting controversial content, reposted a “social media activist ” who released an eleven-minute video attempting to debunk the victim’s story. There were people like him who insisted that the inconsistencies in the story points at its fabrication, possibly for clout. What this reveals is a cultural discomfort with acknowledging rape as grevious. It is easier to believe a woman lies than to accept that men rape. Even homophobia found its way into the discourse. A user claimed the victim was a lesbian, as though sexuality could invalidate violation.
And yet, amid the noise, there are voices of resistance. At the time of writing this, the hashtags are trending, advocating the elimination of rape. But I fear that these digital outrage risks becoming ritualistic. We perform grief and solidarity and then we scroll while the root remains untouched.
Rape culture is sustained by everyday micro-permissions and progress against this culture requires more than hashtags. It requires teaching men that rejection is not humiliation; that desire does not generate rights; that power is not proven through domination. Until we dismantle the underlying ideology, especially the belief that somewhere, somehow, a man has a share in a woman’s body or her attention, we will continue to treat symptoms and ignore causes.
Evidence Egwuono is a Lagos-based essayist, critic and journalist whose writing moves between literature, culture and contemporary life. Her work is attentive to nuance, language and the subtle firces that shape our interpretation of the world. She is drawn to public conversations and events, finding in them an ever-expanding horizon of people, ideas and lived experiences. She is also a fashion enthusiast who’s interested in how colours and outfits influence perception, identity and social meaning.
0 Comments
Add your own hot takes