Sexual Liberation

Saturday, November 17, 2001

In Mazar-i-Sharif, the end of the Taliban rule means many things: music can be played again, people can walk in the streets, men can shave their beards, and women can throw off their head-to-toe burqas. But for the men, the departure of the strict Sunni Muslim militia has also gripped the city for a much more personal reason: girls.

Najib, 20, is waiting for his one great love, Shabnam, to return from Uzbekistan to the north where her family fled in 1997 when the Taliban first attempted to take the city. At the time Najib was 16 and Shabnam was 15. She's not from a very good family; in fact Najib considers most of them pretty scurrilous types. But with Shabnam it was love at first sight. "I went to her house and because I came from an important family, her mother told me that she would be happy to have me as her son-in-law," he says. "I laughed, and they took me inside and there were all the unmarried women in the family just sitting around topless. (In Afghanistan, "topless" means the very top of the dress is missing.) They were very impolite people and I did not like any of them. But my girl was wearing a very nice dress, she was all covered, and I liked her right away."

[an error occurred while processing this directive]The pair used to meet regularly, sometimes holding hands, and once just before the Taliban came Shabnam spent the night with Najib at his home. "She wanted to have extremist relations," he explains. "But I controlled myself. I told her I was not ready. She was very upset, but then I pampered her and she began to smile again. In the end, we just embraced." He muses over Shabnam's voracious sexual appetite. "Women are very strange -- you cannot understand them." When they meet, Najib says, they would just look at each other and shake hands. "Islam does not permit kissing," he pauses, "but maybe I won't be so holy one day." Najib claims such relationships, however chaste, went a long way to satisfy men's needs. After the Taliban arrived, he says Mazar became a city of serial masturbators. "All the men do that. It is a very serious problem. They cannot walk properly. It is very bad for you. It makes you very weak."

The trouble is, the Taliban left just a week before the start of Ramadan. All the men are busy shaving to look younger, but this is a time when no one is even supposed to think about anything so wicked as courting a woman. Any reunions are destined to be somewhat stifled as both sides try to contain their frustrations for one more month. Najib keeps thinking about all the weddings he has been to. "At weddings, women wear very sexy dresses," he says. "They want to show off their bodies, to show how attractive they are." The ideal figure, he says, is "fairly fat." "Not thin legs, and big breasts, like pomegranates, that stand out." Others have altogether more exotic fantasies. "I would like to kiss negros," says Wasiq, 37. "That would be very interesting for me." Mohamad Naim, a burly bearded pilot who is repairing two helicopters abandoned by the Taliban, has a burning question: "I have a strange request," he says, giggling and beckoning. "We have heard Japanese girls have no hair, you know, on their (whispers behind cupped hands, the other pointing to his crotch) vulva. Is it true? Can it be true? That would be amazing."