God Damn them, the Catholics here have gone soft

Let me tell you a little something about Peruvian media... on the back page of every major newspaper (or at least the tabloidy ones I see at news stands) you will find a full-page picture of a topless woman. Are you reading me?!?! A picture of a naked woman, with her... well you know... OK I'll say it, her breasts! Dirty, filthy, nasty breasts! You women should be ashamed of yourself! Clothe those things! Put cloth on them! What's more, prophylactics are readily available at any corner drug store, and as a test I bought some, and they DID NOT check my ID, which leads me to conclude that they would be available to anyone! Which, of course, is why Peru has a problem with teen pregnancies and AIDS. Because we encourage sex by making condoms available. I mean, condoms? They're friggin weird! Have we forgotten what the Pope said? Yeah? The Word of God? The guy in the hat? We don't listen to him anymore? Is that it? Disgraceful... OK, so the feminist in me cries foul at the images of naked women in newspapers, but at least Peruvians are ready to admit that sex exists, unlike in the US where we have Abercrombie ads with super-sexy 16 years olds, and Maxim and FHM (we buy it for the articles, right?). We fetishize youth and sex, but so much of sex IS a fetish, and not just a healthy part of daily lives. Yes it's one sided (although I think that the reason for that is that publishers don't think that half-naked Latino men would sell more papers), but at least Peruvian men don't have to pretend like they don't like seeing women naked. In America we tend to keep those kinds of things in special stores with boarded-up windows, stores that have their own special stigma attached to them. Either that or we publicize it in the most crass of ways. I guess it seems like identical images are publicly acceptable in a lot of places but deviant in the US, eg a topless woman on the street where a child might see it! And find out that women have breasts! Help me out here, because I'm not able to put it into words the way I want to, but it definitely seems like a lot of other cultures, in one way or another, make sex much more public than we do in America, and in a more authentic way. Thailand has prostitutes (and it's socially acceptable for Thai men to visit, and Thai women to be prostitutes - except in the North-East), England has the same kind of strategy as Peru putting topless girls in newspapers, also in Peru public displays of affection seem to be the norm... the only country I've been to where sexuality is more repressed than the US is India, and if I had to pick two words to describe my impression of Indian sexuality, keeping in mind that all of language is only an attempt to relay our thoughts and feelings in a way that is intrinsically inaccurate, those two words would be: fucked up. I mean a country where it's so important to have a boy that girls are aborted, where some states have more men than women, so they buy 'wives' from states with 'extra' women (did I say women? Let's call a spade a spade and say girls. And let's also say sex slaves). I know it's not India (but it used to be), but there's a reason that Grameen bank, founder of the micro-credit movement, originated in a culture like that. Grameen lends almost exclusively to women, a segment of the population who are traditionally denied access to credit or treated as if they can't handle scary business decisions. You know, ones that involve counting and ideas and stuff. Like the talking Barbie said, 'Math is hard!' See how much the US and India have in common? It's so much more than our love of nukes!

Is this really the guy that you want to let make decisions about your body? Sorry Catholics, I have respect for dedicating your life to fighting malnutrition in urban slums, but not ruling your own multi-billion dollar city-state dictatorship telling people 'God doesn't like condoms, and he loves you but won't hesitate to send you to an eternity of torture for wearing one' while Kenya alone has 3 million AIDS orphans. In my opinion, not supporting access to and education about birth control and safer sex is not only anti-sex, it's anti-woman and anti-life too.