Sex Talk: Where does this leave the brain?

Either I am growing too old, or the world around me is getting crazier.

Otherwise, why do I feel the urge to tug down the skirt or pull up the neckline of every young woman I pass by? Does that officially qualify me for old age? Sigh!

When I first started writing this column, I remember one of the first articles I wrote was a speculation as to why the West is so quick to throw in the towel and get divorced, while Africa seemed to be where marital sanity still reigned.

My argument back then: in Africa and Uganda in particular, our body parts are still a mystery. A woman merely flashing her ‘yellow’ thigh at an interested man was enough to run him nuts as his imagination flew all over the room. The same applied to men and how they dressed.

There was a lot of room for the biggest sexual organ – the brain – to be stimulated long before any clothes were torn off any body. I argued that the West and its civilization, and to an extent their weather, dictated that during the warm seasons, women walked around almost naked, wearing patra pants or flowing silk skirts without petticoats – leaving little to imagination.

Heck, I had been on a bus in Europe one summer, where a man boarded wearing just briefs, slides on his feet, shades, and a beach bag. He proceeded to stand in the aisle next to my seat, because the bus was rather packed, and I remember how I struggled with where to look!

I argued in that article, the reason why marriages were still respected in Uganda (that was in the noughties) was because sex and our bodies were considered sacred in the way we approached and treated both. I look back now and harrumph. Alas!

The ‘civilisation’ has since caught up with us in these short twenty years. I see the way young women dress up today and laugh at the contents of my own article back in the day.

Because now, you could ask a teenager what a petticoat is, and she will not have an idea. Clothes that conceal our legs/thighs? Huh! What thighs! In fact, gone are the days when an African woman’s calves looked darker than her thighs, because the latter rarely saw the sun. Today?

Uniform complexion from head to toe. There is nothing tantalizing or teasing anymore about a peeping thigh, because your man possibly rode home staring at an exposed pair next to him in the taxi; or he shared a boda boda with a total stranger, squeezed between her exposed thighs as they weaved through traffic; or he attended a concert where a musician on stage showed the ten thousand fans in attendance her entire koochie… And don’t get me started on the way men now wear those sweatpants without underwear, and if we wanted, we could bring out a foot ruler and take some measurements!

If they are not swinging loose in those ridiculous sweatpants, they are squeezing everything tight in undersize trousers.

Anyway, the Carol of yesteryears apologises to the Carol of today; she spoke too soon and out of turn. There is absolutely nothing sacred about the African body anymore; no wonder everything else that comes with ‘civilisation’ has also caught up with our lives: little or no interest in marriage, high divorce rates, people having sex in the most public of places…name it.

caronakazibwe@gmail.com