Posted by Ryan on September 6, 2005, 9:11 am, in reply to "Part 8: The foreign culture: its different concept of bodily decorum" When I got a week off, I went with D—— on the little trip around the countryside we had talked about taking. We stayed in the homes of friends and relatives of his, going around seeing the sights, meeting a lot of people, swimming in the lakes and rivers in the tropical heat wherever we’d go, and having an enjoyable time. One time when the group of us were standing around one place talking, about to eat, I took a few steps a few feet away to look down at the river through the tropical foliage. There was a person—I didn’t even realize at first that it was a girl, because she had her hair pulled back behind her head—standing in the river at a washbasin that was there at the river’s edge, holding in front of her chest a garment that she had been washing. She looked up at me with a demure and vulnerable look on her face. I still hadn’t even realized yet that it was a girl. As if resigning herself to being seen, since I was continuing to stand there, she put the garment down in the washbasin, revealing that she was in the river bare-chested. “Oh,” I gasped, and suddenly turned away. She was a girl, and those were her bare breasts! “I’m sorry,” I heard myself saying aloud in their language after I had turned away, but I was too far from her to be heard. ‘Poor thing,’ I thought. As if saying it to her, I was thinking, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to poke in on your privacy like that.’ Then I thought to myself, ‘Are they that careless about it—that they do their washing bare-chested in the river, when they know men could come by and see them?’ Women didn’t normally go around bare-breasted, but in some situations, such as when young mothers had to breastfeed their babies, they would just move their garments aside and bare them whenever the baby happened to start crying, seemingly oblivious to the question of whether there were men around who would be able to see them that way. They would cover their breasts normally, in most situations in life, but making sure they were covered just didn’t seem to be quite as high a priority to them as our women would consider it. As in the city, the peasant men in the country just casually urinated outside whenever they had to, wherever there happened to be a corner or a wall or some bushes or something to urinate into. A few times I even saw policemen walking by, right when they were doing it—when there were women and girls walking by too, who could have seen them if only they had looked. And did the police act like they cared any? No, just a pleasant little smile on their faces and a pleasant return of the greeting to whoever was there: “Oh, good afternoon, Officer....” “Oh, good afternoon....” Once when we were standing around in a mixed group in one town, one guy just turned his back and started peeing, and I noticed the girls just demurely looked down, acting as if there were nothing unusual about it. Once when we were in a tiny little town, sitting on the wooden bench waiting for the long-distance bus to come, I had to urinate. There was a little opening between the bushes where some girls had been coming out. I looked back at it. I told D——, “I’ll be back in a little bit.” He nodded casually and sat there. I went into the little trailway and walked along it for a little bit, taking a look around for where I was going to urinate. (And somewhere in the back of my mind, I detected myself half wishing that a girl might, perhaps, come by—and, at the same time, a little more consciously, was hoping one wouldn’t.) I found a place, stopped, took it out, and it stood up so erect that when I started going, the urine was squirting up about five feet in the air. I wasn’t turned against the edge of the bushes; I was turned parallel to them. If a girl had come, the entire thing, erection and all, would have been in her view. It wasn’t any kinky thing about urine; that was just the excuse for having the thing out—which apparently, in this culture, you could do in public. (But it WAS a kinky thing about half-hoping a girl might come walking by when I did.) It squirting so high reminded me of some graffiti that had been written on the bathroom wall in front of the urinal in high school. There was a line drawn and it said: “Take your aptitude test! Learn your vocation! If you can pee above this line, you should be a fireman....” I finished, and taking a tissue out of my pocket and wiping off the tip of my still-erect penis, I put it away, and then stood there for a moment. I thought I heard someone coming, along the trail. I thought maybe it might be a girl. I stood waiting. It was put away and all zipped up now. No one came along, except a pig. The pig stopped, looked up at me, snorted, then went on. I started to leave, then stopped and thought: In the United States, you don’t just see pigs walking along streets. Dogs and cats, yes, sometimes—but not pigs. Anyway, I went back, sat down on the bench with D—— and waited for the bus to come. Here we were dealing with one of the paradoxes of life—the thought started going through my head as we were sitting there—or at least as I had always considered it to be. Back home we had always just thought, you know, the things people normally want the most in life are just the things people can’t have in life. Everyone would like a billion dollars, many people more than anything else, right? Well then, everybody just can’t HAVE a billion dollars—or even a million, or any great amount. Period. So face it. That’s life on planet earth. If something is that desirable, then it’s out of reach. But don’t get upset about it and take it personally, I would always say, because it’s the same for everybody. We used to talk about that when were adolescents or at pre-adolescent age. When we found ourselves feeling the sexual craving to see the girls’ private parts, but never being able to, we’d ask each other, when we were alone in our tree-houses or camps or little forts we had built: “Why is it that the parts of them you want to see the most are the parts they go to the most trouble to keep all covered up so you can’t? Even when you walk by the girls’ dressing room, you can’t see inside....” And of course, you couldn’t go in and see them. “Yeah. We can see their hands and their arms and their faces and their feet and things all we want, but so what? Those aren’t the parts that, you know, you want to see the MOST....” That was the way we thought at that age. It seemed as if things you wanted were dangled on a string in front of you, and when you reached out your hand to take them, you’d get them yanked away from you by some evil creature or critter, and you’d hear a mean voice going, “Nyah-nyah, nyah nyah-nyah! Can’t have it! Hah-hah, hah-hah....” Makes you want to smack him one. And likewise with vice-versa, I found out later. In my teenage years when that mutated craving started taking shape in me, not just to see the girls, but to be seen by them as well, it didn’t take me long to figure out that you can’t do that either. You get authorities told on you, and you start getting in LOTS of trouble. So then it was starting to baffle me, now that I was there, how there could be a place that just went against the paradoxes of life like that. I mean, the men were just pulling out their penises right where the women and girls could see them—even when the police were walking right by them—and they weren’t even getting arrested or getting in any trouble for it. How could it be? If it was something you wanted that badly, then you weren’t supposed to be able to have it—or, if you ever did succeed at getting it, you really had to fight hard and do a lot of tricky and highly skilled maneuvering all through and around all of society’s barriers and booby traps that surrounded it, just to get a tiny little taste of it. Ask me—about trying to find ways to get the thing into view in front of girls in public somewhere, back home in the U.S., and get away with it. The guy in the shoe-store in the news article? Yeah, he got videotaped, caught, hauled before a jury and his case published in the newspaper. Yeah, try something—it’s not so easy! —On the OTHER hand, I was also trying to remind myself of how this old pattern was something I didn’t desire anymore. I was being cured from that perversion now, wasn’t I? Yes, so it was assumed, but the thought of the Law of the Paradoxes of Life being so flagrantly violated there still wasn’t going to escape my notice. After the little trip around the region was over and I was back at headquarters, that evening after I had gone to bed, I had to urinate, so I got up, put my shoes on, but went downstairs and out the door. I walked around the block. I just decided I’d pee out in the street somewhere. Nothing wrong with the toilet, I just felt like going outside. It was a quiet night. I saw in a second-story window, through the translucent curtain, the figure of a female form inside the house. I stopped, unzipped my pants and took it out. It stood up erect. I started peeing. When it made the sound of water hitting the dirt, I saw the silhouette of the woman come to the window and stand there with her head at the side of it. I couldn’t really tell if she was peeking out the curtain at me or not. I finished, wiped it off and put it away, then went back in. I never really knew for sure if I had had a female spectator that night or not. Link: Post a response
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(Originally posted November 7, 2003, 6:53 pm)
