taureg sex

Sex With A Taureg

As a teenager during the 60s sexual revolution, I fantasized about a sort of sexual, Junior Year Abroad as a prostitute in Amsterdam - where prostitution was legal, government regulated, and relatively safe (in those days before AIDS). I thought it would be cool to enjoy my designated sex object role by dominating society with it - like that New York madam who wrote the book. Unfortunately, even the thought of being kissed by strangers made me sick. But I figured it was an adult thing and I’d grow into it. All I had to do was wait.

At twenty-five, I was still waiting. By that time, my sex life had displayed all the excitement of your average soap dish. But I didn’t give up hope. Surely my great sex conversion was just around the corner.

Then, I went on a trip to the Sahara. This included a landrover drive over road-less desert between the towns of Tamanrasset and Djanet. Several Taureg men served as our guides, drivers, cooks and all round caretakers.

Tauregs were a tribe of warriors - the scourge of the desert. They charged camels across the sand: swords or rifles raised, blue and white robes billowing, romantic dark eyes flashing. When camel wars became unpopular, many Tauregs turned to the tourist trade.

On our fourth day out, we stopped under a stark granite ridge. My eyes burned with the clarity of ragged rocks hunched reptilian against an infinitely blue sky. So, as everyone chattered and milled around, I wandered off to look at samples with my geology hand-lens.

I’d spent a lot of the trip talking to a guide named Embarek. He was funny and intelligent with a strong, aristocratic face like carved and polished wood. Embarek joined me as I walked. We stared at rock pieces on the ground.

Then he said, "Sex is good with a Taureg," and a radiant smile bared his brown and broken teeth.

All the Tauregs had rotten teeth. So I guess kissing wouldn’t have been a major part of that good sex, yet here was my big chance. Sex with one of the warrior Tauregs - now that qualified as adventure!

“Oh,” I cried, “look at this rock!” I scooped a rock off the ground. “Are those feldspar crystals?”

"You must try sex with a Taureg," Embarek said.

I flipped a rock over with the toe of my boot then bent to pick it up. I held it to my face and examined it through the lens. "This doesn't have any feldspar," I said.

And so our conversation continued.

When we got back to the landrovers, Embarek leaned to whisper in my ear, “Tomorrow in Djanet, I’ll take you to a dance.”

“I have to stay with my mother,” I mumbled, turning my head away.

Now, that is not as lame an excuse as it sounds because good women in Moslem countries do not stray from the embrace of family. But still, what did it say about me that I needed it?

When the tour stopped for lunch, Embarek showed me pictures of tourist women he had "given pleasure to". One was a leggy blond: German or Swedish or Swiss. She leaned gracefully against a landrover in khaki skirt and romantic, wide-brimmed hat. I looked through the pictures and handed them back to him. He wasn’t going to sway me, even with such excellent references.

Because it wasn’t that kind of problem.

I only wished I could be like the leggy German and have sex with a Taureg purely for the adventure of it. But wishing didn’t change anything.

From then on I avoided Embarek. Not because he was unpleasant - in fact he was sweet and incessantly polite. But his attention made my future so painfully, irrefutably clear. I would have to live my life as The Woman Who Could Not Have Sex With A Taureg. Because, when it came to sex, I was a hopeless prude - and always would be.

In today’s world – when a third of adults have HIV in parts of Africa - I suppose I ought to be grateful, but it seemed a dreadful hard realization at the time.

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