'My very personal journey to having my first orgasm'

Yewande Biala thought only men orgasmed... then that she was the only woman who couldn't. She tells Katie Rosseinsky about faith, shame and the one in eight women just like her

- Katie Rosseinsky

“Yewande, you are an orgasmic woman!” In a scene from Channel 4’s new documentary Secrets of the Female Orgasm, sex coach Lacey Haynes crouches on the floor of her studio, whispering this mantra to a recumbent Yewande Biala. The former Love Island contestant can’t help but dissolve in laughter.

Her giggles are one part awkwardness, one part cynicism. “It’s funny because I don’t believe it,” she tells Haynes.

Biala, 28, is a trained biochemist who appeared on the ITV dating show in 2019 and has since written an essay collection, Reclaiming, which tackles subjects such as colourism, mental health and social media. She is also among the estimated one in eight women who have never been able to climax, and in this one-off programme, her first foray into TV presenting, she embarks on “a very personal journey” in an “attempt to enjoy my first ever orgasm”, she explains at the start of the show.

That “journey” involves attending one of Haynes’s “pussy gazing” workshops, an experience which Biala describes in one scene as “quite frankly mortifying”. When we chat over Zoom, her camera is turned off after a long day of press, but it’s not hard to imagine her face consumed by retroactive embarrassment when she discusses some of those more outthere filming experiences: the show also sees her meeting with researchers at the University of Essex in an attempt to map her libido, and getting a crash course in sex toys. Perhaps it’s because we watched her dating travails in the villa for weeks on end (“I was always a little bit timid,” she says of her