“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 totally different societies in a country the size of California. The Biwat live deep in PNG’s rainforest and swamps, in tiny villages along the fertile banks of the Yuat River. The main crop is betel, a lovely little drug plant that gives a nice buzz, boosts energy, and enjoys a thriving market in towns. The Biwat themselves don’t use betel much. They have better things to do.
Though the men claim to want only virgins, young Biwat women polish their skin with oil, dress in their sexiest grass skirts, and are constantly cruising for new lovers—even after they are engaged to be married. See someone cute in his flying foxskin loincloth nicely decorated with shells? Getting to know him well enough for a roll in the woods takes about three seconds. As long as she’s even the slightest bit discreet, everyone happily ignores her little lapses.
Want to know which guy got lucky? Easy. Fresh bite wounds around the neck, ripped clothes, face and arms scratched and bleeding.
The Biwat easily explain a woman’s wild sexual antics: “Has she not a vulva?”
BIWAT OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Make love, not war
In Mangaian legend, the first human rose from a hole in the center of this lovely green Polynesian Island. Mangaia (A’ua’u Enua), which means “peace,” is lush with tropical fruit, has plentiful, clean water, and no poisonous snakes or dangerous insects.
Mangaians learn early that life is sweet. Best of all, as they grow older, kids realize they have the world’s greatest built-in entertainment: their genitals. No Mangaian would be so stupid as to call them “private” parts. All good parents encourage their growing kids to take advantage of the gifts nature gave them and masturbate.
Societies create lots of words for things they think important. Mangaians enjoy a wide vocabulary for the aesthetics of the clitoris: how large, pointed, pendulous, protruding, sharp, straight, and so on. The typical Mangaian male knows more about female genitals than most Western doctors.
Mangaians believe anything worth doing is worth learning to do well. As a boy enters mid-teens, he gets a tutor—an older, experienced woman, who teaches him a wide variety of positions, coaches him on how to use oral sex for best effect, and trains him in the skills that will arouse his partner and drown her in pleasure. His goal: to bring his partner to orgasm as many times as possible.
Mid-teen girls also receive a proper education. Their training focuses on how to have multiple intense orgasms. Needless to say, all Mangaian women are orgasmic.
Women score their lovers and broadcast which guy has good technique. One test is whether he can bring her to orgasm