She Earned It. Yet, They Said She Slept For It.

Women are breaking ceilings across every profession in Nigeria. The response from society, especially men, is not admiration, not acknowledgement, not professional respect. It is a question about who she slept with to get there. This has been the pattern, chalking up many women’s success to how she slept her way to the top, because men have decided that a woman on her own cannot possibly succeed without a man bankrolling her or her body doing the negotiating. 

It is deeply derogatory to disregard a woman’s efforts and reduce them to her sexual prowess simply because she is ahead of you. Women in the culinary, financial, entertainment, hospitality, and real estate industries are routinely slut-shamed and have their competence questioned for the singular offence of being a woman who is good at what she does. Ask yourself this: if a man and a woman build the same business from scratch with the same resources, why is only one of them asked how she really got there?

This pattern runs across every profession, and men feel entitled to disrespect women because in their imagination, women exist primarily as sexual objects for male gratification. Nowhere was this demonstrated more shamelessly than when Brymo publicly admitted on X that he had conditioned a music collaboration on sex with Simi, a woman who built her career on nothing but talent, hard work, and artistic integrity, and dressed his demand up as a creative process. 

Her body was the price of admission to his studio. She refused. He then revealed, without shame, that he had not known she was dating Adekunle Gold at the time, as though that detail explained anything, as though a woman is only deserving of professional respect when she is the property of a man who has already staked his claim. That is the cross of being a Nigerian woman in any industry. You are disrespected and slut-shamed for your success, because to men like Brymo, only a man is inherently deserving of anything good, including professional recognition.

In the culinary and service industry, this dehumanisation takes a particularly vile form. The viral conversation about home chefs being referred to as “food after the food” reduces a woman’s culinary expertise to her being the next item on the menu, a body to be consumed by male clients after she has finished serving them. Women in the baking industry have faced the same slander, their professional reputation soiled by insinuations that their client base was built not on their skill but on sexual access. These are women who built their expertise with their heads, their hands, their sweat, their tears, and their money, and all of that is invisible to men who cannot engage with a woman in a professional context without sexualising her presence in it. When did a woman’s skill become insufficient evidence of her competence, and who decided that her body was always the more convincing explanation?

This piece was triggered by an X post about women in real estate in Abuja, where a woman’s professional interest in property listings was immediately reframed as evidence that she cannot be a serious person. The reduction of women’s presence in any career to a sexual explanation is not just disrespectful to women; it is an offence against humanity. You cannot disrespect a woman and believe you deserve respect in return because you are a man. Respect does not work that way. Many men do not see their female colleagues as colleagues at all but as sexual objects to be conquered, and this says far more about the poverty of men’s professional orientation than it will ever say about the women they are attempting to diminish.

The double standard at the heart of all of this is worrisome. A male fitness trainer with female clients is a professional. A female fitness trainer with male clients is a prostitute. A man in finance is ambitious. A woman in finance slept her way up. A man in real estate is building wealth. A woman following land listings in Abuja is looking for a husband. This sickening perception must end. A woman is more than her body, and her value is inherent in her humanity, not contingent on male approval or male access. Reducing women’s efforts and successes to a transaction conducted in a bedroom is not only an insult to every woman who has ever worked for anything, it is an indictment of the men doing the reducing, because it tells us plainly that these are men who cannot engage with women in any professional context without seeking access to her body, exactly as Brymo demonstrated for all of us to see. 

The problem was never the women. It has always been the men who cannot imagine a world in which a woman’s excellence belongs entirely to her. So here is the final question worth sitting with: if you have spent more energy speculating about how a woman got to the top than celebrating what she built when she got there, what does that tell you about how you actually see women?