The Asymmetrical Muslim Woman

Maybe I’d seen it fifty times and just hadn’t noticed. But how could I have missed it, what with the several times I’ve been in Indonesia, and several more times in Malaysia? But then there’s the outside chance—not
a very good one—that it’s a rather rare phenomenon, a kind of curious contradiction, and I just happened to have seen three examples of it in the course of four days, and to my surprise in Myanmar.

I’m referring to the fact of having seen three sets of hands on young women, all in their twenties, and all three of them wearing what everyone would agree is Western dress: slacks, tight short-shorts, skin-tight blouses, and flattering
sandals. Two of the young women were wearing lipstick, and all three wore earrings. And all three of them had long painted nails on their left hands, while their right hands had all the nails clipped short and there was no trace of nail polish
on them. Both hands on these women were, well, attractive.

They were all Muslims, and they were clearly clinging to a Muslim tradition with regard to eating. They eat with their right hand and stay with tradition, and they let their Western ways go as far as their imaginations and money will allow
when it comes to their left hand.

Neat, I thought on seeing this and realizing what was going on. And then wondering how widespread it really is?

I couldn’t and can’t imagine the full range of ways in which these women or any of us use our hands all the time; but my mind did go to something that is not exactly polite dinner table talk with men of stature in their starched
shirts and bow ties and women from the local church who are active participants in the P.T.A.

I once got into a conversation with a man about the ultimate male orgasm, a man of considerable worldly experience and someone who had been with hundreds of women, by his modest estimate. He was of the opinion that nothing topped having a
woman massage your prostate with one of her fingers while she was giving you a blowjob. The shot, the feeling, he claimed, was like nothing he’d ever experienced. There were problems, however. A surprising number of women just were not
willing to stick a finger up a man’s ass, even when told that she need not worry about cleanliness, and that were she willing to take the cum shot in the mouth, as most women will not, he claimed, she might not be able to deal with the
“orgasmic lurch” that might occur because the man might not be in control, as he more or less might be were he not so stimulated. The other problem, and not an inconsiderable one, is that a lot of women have genuine fingernails;
they are not clipped short in the same way that so many men keep their nails. No man wants to see blood, or have a bleeding prostate, and so it is imperative to ask the woman to cut her nail on the finger she will use. But this can be more than
a little inconvenient because one nail of ten—assuming the woman is fastidious about her nails—will be quite different than the other nine. How many women will be willing to make this concession? And when you do the simple multiplicative
math—willingness to do it times the willingness to give a blowjob and take a shot or two or three in the mouth and times the willingness to cut one nail to avoid scratching the prostate, the odds of finding the woman, and with all the other
attributes that one finds desirable or needs, are not good.

But back to these young Muslim women that I saw in all places, very Buddhist Myanmar. From all that I have heard, Muslim women can be as free and unrestrained in bed as women of any other faith, or lack thereof. So in principle one should
not have a lower probability of getting the ultimate orgasm with a Muslim woman, perhaps even a high probability since many keep their nails short on both hands, and have not gone to using nail polish or keeping their nails long. And yet upon
brief reflection it would seem that the probability of getting one of these asymmetrically handed women to use one of the short-nail fingers on her right hand may simply not be very good. After all, this is the hand for eating, the reason for
keeping the hand so clean: no nail polish and short nails. The hand for washing one’s ass is, of course, the left hand, and the hand with the fingers that would seem to have no objection to traveling up a man’s ass—no objection
were they to have a mind of their own—just won’t work. They won’t work because all the fingers have long nails, and all those nails can mean real trouble for a man’s prostate when he jumps and shakes with orgasmic pleasure,
or the woman is inattentive to what she is doing. So here, it would seem, we have one of those small but revealing conundrums or contradictions that one finds in the transition from traditional to modern. On the one hand, you have a young Muslim
woman signaling by the way she dresses and manicures her left hand (and often feet too—both of them, of course) that she is as “modern” as she is signaling. And yet there are some things she is not willing to change—yet:
the familiar unevenness that one sees in so many kinds of cultural change, in the often difficult transition from traditional to modern. But then the question here is an empirical one, and it is this: Does the young Muslim woman who has decided
to take on some of the trappings of the West, in particular in the way she looks and perhaps behaves, also willing to behave in an apparently contradictory way, by, shall we say, partitioning off the sexual side of her life—in the way a
liberated European woman might do—from that tied to an eating and cleanliness tradition that is deeply ingrained in the Islamic world? Perhaps when in bed she can “think” like her left hand “thinks” and thereby
use her right hand with the short nail to give a man that one of a kind pleasure that some men claim cannot be bested?

As a final note, I suppose one might attempt to do a rigorous survey on the questions I have raised, but this assumes that one could get an adequate sample for so delicate a question—not at all easy, I would imagine. And further that
one could trust what these young Westernized Muslim women would say in a survey, as opposed to what they in fact have done or will do in the moment of truth: when they find themselves using that clean hand with the trimmed nails that feeds their
mouth entering a man’s shithole, exactly as their religious beliefs have so firmly instructed them is a categorical no-entry zone? Or has it, the Koran after all not addressing the question I have raised? I would guess. I suppose that if
the question were sufficiently and narrowly defined there might not be a problem at all as I have suggested. What woman, Muslim or otherwise, would not do anything in the name of love, or first love, especially if she has closed the bedroom curtains
so that Allah cannot see what she is doing? Or if not for love, then for money; after all, to many a poor Muslim woman, no matter how deeply religious, and just like non-Muslim women everywhere, money, or the right amount of money, will overcome
any traditional barrier. Even defilement of the hand that feeds the mouth.

Stickman's thoughts:

I have often said that the women of the south make a better wife than a woman from other parts of the country. Southern women differ from their counterparts elsewhere in the country in that they tend to be more frank and more honest and it is my personal observation that they are harder working and are true to their culture and don't twist things when it suits them to. You get very few women from the south working in bars…and it's the south where many Muslims are found in Thailand.