Mercedes Sayagu’s Body Language I have discovered the new erogenous zone for the new millennium. I am embarrassed it took me so long. But I may be excused: I hit the party circuit only a few months ago, when my last lover dumped me. In more than one way, I was a casualty of the election in Zimbabwe. Those were electric, super-charged weeks. My neighbour, a bachelor in his late 20s, works for a South African oil company. Zim’s fuel crisis stressed him, and everybody else. As did the forex crisis, the farms crisis, the violence crisis. I mean, the whole country was under stress. To decompress, my neighbour announced a party every Wednesday until the election, and a let-your-hair-down bash afterwards. If you can’t beat them, join them. So I did, every Wednesday night, after filing my stories for the Mail & Guardian. Rocky Horror Show was the first party’s theme. The men were having a ball in fishnets and corsets, and spiked high heels were soon kicked off. The women looked like Morticia Adams or Dracula’s friends, shrouded in black, baring little. I was definitively Ms Drab in my warm, woolly writing clothes. The few men in civvies were soon shirtless. Mind, winter nights are cold in Harare. Maybe this is why women were wearing long sleeves.
We were dancing to the hit: “You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do in the Discovery Channel.” Suddenly I noticed that, at eye level, all I could see around me were male nipples. Male breasts wiggling like a Senegalese dancer shakes her hips or a stripper shows off her tits. All around, it was pecs, pecs and pecs. Men strutting their pecs. What was I supposed to do about these hairless/hairy sweaty pecs at nose level? Lick the nipple? Pant with desire? Faint in immediate orgasm? I racked my head. I don’t watch the Discovery Channel but I know what mammals do. What baffled me is what humans do. What does erotic etiquette prescribe these days? Thus goes every party, albeit not in Rocky Horror Show garb. People arrive straight from work around 8pm. Dancing soon begins, men take off their shirts: pec parade is on. Women don’t take their clothes off. They are voluntarily unsexy. The men are wild, oversexed, over the top. Wiser now, I look around. Pecs are all over glossy mags, ads and fashion shoots. I ask around. “Pecs are sexy. It means a man takes care of himself,” says a 28-year-old Aussie, Zimbabwe’s lone tourist of the season.
Over moccacino, women describe last night’s date as having “good pecs”, not unlike men noting a “great bum”. Mothers say their teenage boys spend hours bare-chested in front of a mirror. “It’s the gym culture,” says an editor. “No pecs, no sex,” is the buzzword in American gyms. In a New Yorker cartoon, a thin, stylish woman tells a well-built guy: “Yes, let’s do drinks if your breasts promise not to attack me.” Vanity and body obsession have become trans-gendered. Will male pedicures be the next niche market? Male anorexia on radio talk shows? And all this time I had not noticed pec- mania. I must have been very taken up with my last lover to miss this insight into the erotic zeitgeist. I thank the election for it and for a series of cool parties. The turmoil, however, cost me both my townhouse and my lover.
For the first, my landlord’s farm was invaded and they needed the townhouse.
For the second, this is what prompted our demise. I arrived home one day after interviewing torture survivors for five hours. On e-mail from Cape Town, lover boy waxed lyrical about “drumming up the late evening stars”, flowing into heavenly ecstasies, and ended: “I hear bad news about Zimbabwe on the news. Is it flavour of the month among South African media or is some horrible calamity really happening there?”
I hit reply, and cut and pasted some quotes from my story-in-progress. Beginning with a man who had a bicycle spoke thrust into his anus and penis, and ending with “Wake up to reality. It is uglier than you think.” That was the last I heard of him. He never replied. I didn’t insist. I guess we both felt we live in different worlds. Here in Harare I am dealing with the likes of Dr. Chenjerai Hitler Hunzvi while he is in Cape Town meditating with the likes of Guru Maharaj Ji. That relationship never had a future. Easy come, easy go. But now that I think about it, he did have good pecs. Pity the parties were not on then, he would have been a hit.