5 Cultural Practices That Are Clearly Just the Plots of Sex Comedies
When anthropologists observe some previously uncontacted tribe, they carefully note every detail they see. Then, once they’ve gained some confidence, they’ll approach one local and say, “Tell me. How do you guys fuck?”
Sometimes, the tribe will troll the explorer by telling some absurd story. But the diligent anthropologist will seek to verify it, and while some such stories end up debunked, the following ones are true. And the true stories sometimes do turn out to be just as odd as anything someone could invent.
The Penis Smashers
Some cultures have a tradition of cutting off the foreskin of each male baby’s penis. This began as a purely religious custom, a way to show dedication to God, but practitioners now claim that this offers medical benefits whether you believe it’s your holy duty or not.
Don't Miss
What’s that you say — you already know all about circumcision? Okay. Let’s talk about a version that kicks it up a notch. Though, if you have a penis, or know someone who does, you might want to skip over the rest of this section, to avoid giving yourself nightmares.
In the Unambal tribe in Australia, they have the tradition of circumcision, and they later follow that up with something called subincision. This means they split the penis in two, vertically. The ceremony involves a stone knife. They perform it on a rock, so they can further flatten the split penis. This all has nothing to do with religion but simply aims to make the penis look better.
You have to imagine the occasional skeptic in this tribe, who wishes to remain intact and asks, “Are you sure my dick will look better split in two? Better to whom? Have we asked any of the women about this?”
“That’s the funny thing,” says one elder. “Every time we ask, they lie and say they prefer the penis unsevered. We don’t know why they keep lying, but see in this a lesson. Women are not to be trusted.”
The Monogamy Punishers
In the Muria tribe in India, teens stay in dorms, where boys and girls live together. A boy might be spotted sleeping with a girl once, and he’ll face no consequences for this. If they sleep together a second time, this similarly leads to no punishment. But with some of these dorms, if the tribe determines that the couple have had sex on three consecutive nights, this is a crime on the part of the boy.
The logic here isn’t some sort of three-strikes-you’re-out rule, meant to punish repeat offenders. The offense here isn’t repeated fornication. The offense is that he slept with the same girl on three consecutive nights. Some segments of the Muria don't approve of monogamy, so they prohibit it.
Naturally, thrust into this situation, we have to imagine one couple who are secretly in love and want no one else. To appease the tribe, each has to periodically have sex with an opposite-sex friend, in some public place.
Do the original couple make it work? Does each instead end up falling for their friend? Do the two sidekicks discover they’re secretly meant to be together? All of these plots sound promising, and all would offend polyamorous viewers who are convinced the traditional Muria are the ones who have things figured out.
The Naked Bull Run
Imagine a story where our hero has successfully ingratiated himself with the Hamar people of Ethiopia. He now learns that he must undertake their coming-of-age ceremony, and he prepares himself for a hunt or something. Then he learns of exactly what happens during the ceremony known as Ukuli Bula.
The tribe brings together 15 bulls, placing them side-by-side. The entrant in this ceremony has to run on the tops of the bulls, going from one all the way to the other without falling off. With luck, the bulls will remain still throughout, providing a surface that’s at least stationary, if uneven. But they may also move, providing an additional challenge. Before the run, the boy receives a stick that represents his penis, and he passes it among the girls, who kiss it for good luck. If he succeeds at the run, he gains the rights of an adult. If he doesn’t, he’ll have to wait a year to try again.
Also, he must do the run naked. “Naked?” he asks. “Oh. Is it because all the Hamar will be naked?”
“Of course not,” says the organizer. “Only you will be.”
The prospect of falling off those bulls and landing in reach of their hooves suddenly feels a lot more dangerous. As does slipping off while next to one’s head, leading to the wrong part of the body coming into contact with those horns. This could leave his genitals so torn-up that he’d be welcomed by the Unambal tribe.
On the bright side, this fear may lead to so much shrinkage that the horns will find themselves with a tiny target. Plus, the shrinkage will make the sight of him extra funny to onlookers, so it's a win-win situation.
Father Mixing
It didn’t take very long for humans to discover that a couple needs to have sex for a woman to become pregnant. Observation also suggested early on that a child takes on characteristics from each parent. Even so, the exact mechanists of two gametes fusing to form a zygote remained unknown for a long time, and other theories existed.
In Venezuela, the Barí people believe in a concept called partible paternity. This means that a man who has sex with a woman does pass traits along to the child she bears, but if additional men have sex with her as well, they pass along traits of their own. A child has not one father but rather is the offspring of all the men his mother was sleeping with at the time. A pregnant Barí mother seeks to sleep with many men, so that the child may inherit the best characteristics from each.
You might wonder, under this theory, what ensures that each father’s best characteristics go to the child, rather than the worst. That’s the question bothering the heroine of the Barí movie we’re imagining. She has picked out a series of partners, and only while in the middle of sex with each does she realize that they all have some disgusting flaw.
Of course, this all ends with the epiphany that flaws are what make us human, and she happily gives birth to a son that really is a mixture of all his fathers, warts and all.
The Donkey Eaters
If you visit Colombia, you will most likely never encounter the men known as comeburras. The word translates as “donkey eaters.”
The men do not eat donkeys. The men fuck donkeys. But “donkey fuckers” sounds like an insult rather than a direct description of what anyone does, so people needed to assign these guys a more poetic name.
The reason for the tradition, say the comeburras, is that having sex with donkeys makes your penis larger. No science appears to back up this claim, but then, no science backs up any other supposed methods for penis enlargement.
We now imagine one Colombian youngster who has heard of the ways of the comeburras and follows in their footsteps for an extended period of time. Finally, he goes up to one of the older guys and says, “I’ve been having sex with donkeys for like a year now. My dick isn’t any bigger than it was to begin with!”
The older guy looks in both directions to make sure no one overhears them and then leans in close. “Yo,” he says. “You know fucking a donkey doesn’t actually make your dick bigger, right? That’s just something we say as an excuse for why we do it. We do it because we just really like screwing donkeys. Frankly, a bigger penis just means more problems. It makes the donkeys skittish.”
“Oh my god!” exclaims the boy. “You people are crazy!”
“Son. You’re the one who spent a year having sex with donkeys and not enjoying it. And you call us crazy?”
Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.
