In one of the scenes of Zikoko’s Siraam, the female lead, Siraam can be seen crying during sex with Zubee. He stops, slightly irritated, and asks why she is crying, worried that someone might think he hurt her. Siraam tells him that it was too good, and he laughs and asks if she’ll stop crying if they go again.
But Siraam, looking distraught, whispers, “Maybe if we use a condom, it won’t be so messy.”
“You know that I don’t like condoms,” he says, going on to suggest that if he used one, she wouldn’t enjoy it as much.
This conversation is painfully familiar for young sexually active women. The world seems to have evolved, with more young women openly talking about their bodies and how much sex they have. Amidst this landscape shift and growth, we are still missing conversations on healthy and safe sexual habits, behaviours, or what it means to advocate for ourselves when the conditions of that sex don’t feel right.
That is what Siraam, a short film starring Genoveva Umeh (Siraam), Shawn Faqua (Zubee), Amara Nnanna (Chidalu), and Natse Jemide (Olisa), does particularly well. It explores sex, sexual agency, and reproductive health without turning it into a moral tale.
Siraam is a young creative woman dealing with the ordinary frustrations of adulthood. She is struggling to make sales in her business, not getting callbacks from auditions, and in a situationship with a man who doesn’t love her back. Sex becomes one of the ways she navigates this complicated relationship and her own desires. She enjoys sex, but as the film progresses, we see that enjoying sex and having agency within it are not necessarily the same thing.
When Siraam wants to use a condom, Zubee doesn’t. And his preference becomes the condition under which they have sex until she said, “Condoms and commitment or nothing.” Sadly, Siraam’s experience isn’t unique.
Siraam offers us a useful distinction between consent and sexual agency. Consent asks whether you agree to sex. Sexual agency asks a broader set of questions: Do you know what you want? Can you communicate it? Can you negotiate the conditions under which you have sex? Can you hold your boundary when the person you’re attracted to doesn’t like it?
We see Siraam as she struggles to advocate for herself and ensure that the sex she chooses is both pleasurable and safe for her.
Young women have learnt that they are free to want sex and explore their sexuality, but what comes next: knowing what they want, making choices about how they experience sex, and feeling confident enough to speak up when something doesn’t feel right aren’t exactly accessible, as shame remains deeply entwined with how women are told to perceive themselves or their wants or needs.
Sexual agency means knowing you are allowed to have boundaries in the first place. You can laugh with someone, flirt with them, have slept with them before, or even agree to spend time alone with them without agreeing to anything that follows.
Yet even when women know their boundaries, communicating them can be difficult.
One of Siraam’s funniest scenes occurs when she invites a man over for casual sex and is surprised by the size of his penis. Instead of saying anything to him, she later tells her friend Chidalu that she didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
For long, women have internalized the idea that they must cater to or center male pleasure, comfort, or feelings.
These fears reveal something bigger about how young women are socialised around sex. Women are taught to be desirable, accommodating, and careful not to bruise a man’s ego. So when something doesn’t feel right, they become more concerned with how the man feels than how comfortable they are.
Sexual agency also requires sexual health knowledge. After her relationship with Zubee ends, Siraam has more unprotected sexual encounters while trying to move on. Her choices show that having multiple sexual partners isn’t inherently reckless, but it becomes a problem if she lacks the knowledge and tools to make informed decisions about her sexual health. Research on sexual health literacy similarly links knowledge and access to information with young people’s ability to make informed decisions about contraception, STI prevention, and sexual relationships.
The film is also refreshing in how it handles shame. When Siraam tells her friends that she has an STI, they don’t turn her sexual history into a morality lesson. They supported her through it, showing that a positive approach to conversation of this nature is possible.
That matters because sexual agency doesn’t end when things go one’s way. It also means being able to seek testing, treatment, information, and support without feeling that you have failed as a woman. Young women should be able to admit that they had unprotected sex, ask questions about their bodies or seek treatment for STIs without having their sexual history weaponised against them.
But if Siraam teaches us that women need to become better advocates for themselves, some women also reveal the limits of that responsibility. Like twenty-six-year-old Binta, who speaks to me of an encounter from when she was twenty-one; where after she had asked a man she was seeing at the time to use a condom, he reluctantly agreed but during sex, however, he removed the condom without her knowledge.
Stealthing is the non-consensual removal of a condom during sex after a partner has agreed to use one. Although stealthing is not currently defined as a distinct criminal offence under Nigerian law, it raises an important question about consent: if someone agrees to sex on the condition that a condom is used, what happens to that consent when the condition is deliberately breached?
When Binta realised what had happened, she left. This matters because telling women to speak up assumes that being clear about a boundary is enough to keep them safe. Binta’s experience shows that it isn’t. Sometimes a woman can communicate exactly what she wants and still have someone choose to violate it.
This points to a larger issue. In Agency, Responsibility, and the Limits of Sexual Consent, Caleb Ward argues that consent can be complicated by the gendered power structures in which sexual decisions are made. When women are socialised to accommodate men’s desires, treating consent as a simple matter of individual choice can obscure the pressures that shape what women feel able to negotiate in the first place.
This makes Siraam’s final scene significant. When Olisa tells her how he feels, she tells him she isn’t looking to date, and he respects her choice. It captures something the film has been building towards: Siraam is able to state what she wants without having to negotiate away her own boundaries, and Olisa is able to accept her answer without trying to change it.
Maybe that is the kind of sexual agency we need to make room for, the freedom to communicate what we want and the expectation that it will be taken seriously.
Precious Obiabunmo is a passionate Nigerian journalist and creative writer covering women’s issues. Her work has earned her fellowship such as the 2025 Naija Feminist Media Editorial Fellowship, and bylines in leading media outlets
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