RANSVESTIA

the older ladies in the group. The peculiar geological feature of having a layer of hard rock over the softer volcanic tuff meant that the soft mate- rial was eroded by wind and water much faster than the cap rock. Thus a piece of hard rock was left on top of a column of soft, and yet the rains managed to erode these pieces into cones. Thus we had a valley of rigid vertical penises sticking up all over. It bugged some of the old gals all right. I bought the postcard reproduced here before we actually went to the valley. I showed it to one of the Jewish men in the group and he looked at it, smiled and said, "What do you know, they are all Jewish”-meaning circumcised.

The town of Goreme is quite small and the hotel rather primitive, but after dinner the waiters, room boys and townspeople came and met in a big gathering room in the basement where we were treated to Turkish entertainment of singing, dancing by the men and music. Then they had one of the mixed folk dancing things where the men went into the au- dience and picked women to come out and join the circle. I was the only one in our group to join in. So later when they had a little free couple danc- ing the same guy came and asked me to dance, which I did, and again I was the only woman in our tour group who was asked. This served to raise my femininity a few points to compensate for my relatively unfeminine activities of climbing to the tops of ruins carrying heavy bags, jumping from rock to rock and going up on deck in the gale. Being feminine enough to interest a man proved that I wasn't entirely a tomboy and I re- gained a little feminine respect, or perhaps I was treated with a little more respect since I made some of them jealous by being chosen over them. Anyway it was all good fun. However, this guy began to get suggestive with a sort of "your place or mine” kind of attitude, so I had to plead an early bed because of an early departure next morning to escape from him and back to the group. I learned that Turkish men are a bit wild over for- eign women because they are forced to treat their own women very, very circumspectly. A woman has to be a virgin at marriage or else. Thus any male who deprives a female of her virginity before marriage stands a good chance of being banished or maybe killed or imprisoned. They are very tough on this subject and women are protected very sternly in the villages. Of course, in Ankara and Istanbul and other larger cities the European influence is strong, and women don't wear long black dresses or go veiled and be chaperoned, etc. There it is heels, miniskirts, drinking, smoking and considerable carrying on. Yet even so the sexual restraint is very strong. But it is because of this that European women are fair game to Turkish men, and any woman who has felt forgotten at home could cer- tainly get what she was looking for in Turkey.

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