rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Sisterly love
“Normal sex.” Clear what it is, right?
Think again.
India, Ghana, Tunisia, Mali…dozens of countries, hundreds of cultures, and everywhere I go, people are curious.
“What do they wear in Ladakh?” they ask.
“What’s the food like in Ghana?”
“What do they do for fun in Suriname?”
Just one thing they never ask—because they figure sex is the same everywhere.
I know better…
I learned about weird sex at Harvard University. Not from a dirty old professor or horny undergrad, but from Tozzer, the Harvard Anthropology Library. I sat, drowsy and bored in the dim, silent Tozzer Reading Room. What demon convinced me to take anthropology? Pentadactylism…avunculocal…durophagy… Who makes up this crap?
Suddenly, my eyes shot open.
Hey, I’m from New Jersey. I know about weird sex. But…
Husbands who fret if their wives don’t have enough lovers…? Teenagers required to take as many sex partners as possible…? Societies where all agree that every man should have a male lover…?
It was a goldmine of screwball sex, flipped-out mating. All hidden under stodgy anthropology garble.
It became a hobby. Fascinating, hilarious, astounding and—let’s face it—weird sex and gender rules and roles around the world. I could send people into hysterics, shock the most jaded, amaze the sophisticates.
“You’re kidding!” friends would scream. “I don’t believe it! They couldn’t!”
But they could. They did. They do.
Sure, sometimes it seemed too much. But I don’t relish eating insects either, though millions of people love them. For me, the lesson was: no one way works for everyone—even for sex. If it doesn’t harm or endanger anyone, no need to adopt the differences, but do respect them. Just be smart. It really does take a village to raise a child.
So if your lover complains your sex-play should be in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not...
Your mom reveals her stash of kinky sex toys…
Dad’s been modeling your favorite dress…
Rejoice!
There are places in this world where your most depraved fantasies would be considered tame. Where Grandma’s idea of normal would drive the neighbors wild. Where your most wanton desires are simply part of daily life.
When it comes to sex, our human family is endlessly inventive. So celebrate! Make your own best rules. How about this one: Sex is fun!
I headed to India as a student in the ’70s. The sexual revolution had declared victory back home in Boston. Sleeping with an attractive stranger was de rigueur. Living with your lover was expected. Sex before marriage the rule. They were the innocent days before HIV/AIDS.
Never before more than two hundred miles from home, I flew from Boston to Athens, crossed Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India by motor boat, ferry, train, bus, and hippie van. A free spirit!
My first bias, and the most wrong-headed, was that people everywhere are pretty much the same. I wasn’t a total fool. I knew some things would be different, like what you ate and how you dressed. I knew dating was forbidden in most countries. Parents arranged marriages, rarely with a woman’s input or assent.
I knew I’d have to adjust. Just not how much.
Early on, near the Red Sea, I took refuge from the sun beneath the canopy of a Moroccan family’s tent. I spoke no Arabic and they no English, so I held sketchy conversations with the mother in my shaky French. I must have made a good impression, because she soon asked how they could contact my parents. She announced—with an indulgent smile—that she and her husband decided to marry her son to me. Sitting nearby, he flushed, astonished. Obviously, no one had consulted him. The bride-price, she declared confidently: eighteen camels and six goats. Surely my parents couldn’t refuse.
I stuttered in fractured French: It was very generous of her, and of course I was delighted. But I—not my parents—would decide whom I’d marry. Although I liked her very much and thought her son quite handsome (I could say nothing of his intelligence and wit, as he’d been mute the entire afternoon), I was not prepared to marry him or anyone else.
She was patently skeptical.
The next day, I was pleased with my skillful handling of another culture. It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t have a clue. The extremes I was about to experience—in every direction—would enrage, awe, humble, and sometimes terrify me.
Weeks later, in Afghanistan, I entered another world. Even pre-Taliban, the women were specters eclipsed in full-length black cloth, their eyes trapped behind dark grilles. Despite the glaring heat, I had dressed carefully in a dark, shapeless, long-sleeved shirt, a loose, black, ankle-length skirt, and a scarf covering my hair. I was as sexy as a sack of rice.
Much good it did. When the public bus from Kandahar to Kabul stopped so we passengers could relieve ourselves, I followed the local custom and found a boulder that I could squat behind in “private.”
The man who jumped me was sure that I wouldn’t scream, and, even if I did, no one would respond. When I jabbed an elbow into his chest he dropped his hold, more out of astonishment than pain, as if, about to bite into a potato, it had shoved him away. I ran.
It was my first gut-level experience of women’s subjugation to men, but not my last. That many men expect, and get, utter compliance, was no great shock—except to my self-assurance.
Equally astonishing, and far happier, were the opposite experiences. They transformed everything I “knew” about women and men. Women ruling the seduction game, aggressively wooing coquettish men, setting (and resetting) the terms of marriage—were a revelation. “Normal” mating took on a whole new meaning as I came to know my neighbors around the globe.
Is that a vibrator in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?
Who’s more obsessed with sex, men or women? Now there’s a no-brainer, declare the Biwat of Papua New Guinea: Women!
Women, they explain, are ruled by uncontrollable lust. No normal woman can smother her incessant, raging desire for sex…much less wait for marriage.
Papua New Guinea is crazy diverse, with over 850
