It was summer when I arrived in South America and it was warm and romantic. The air was thick and the kids were out of school and everywhere I looked there were the most beautiful women I'd ever seen. This was Buenos Aires and I could feel the sensuality in the pores of my skin. Nakedness and beers sweating through the dull afternoon hours. Busty women in high heels and bright tight colors and eyes unashamed in their looking. Mouths moist and welcoming. Radios blaring and people speaking at the front of their mouths in melodic urgency.

There were kids at each other during all hours. Public benches seemed somehow too public. Groping hands, flesh becoming flushed, and rebellious tongues fingering their way to new continents. But it wasn't only the youth. There were people on people of all ages and at all hours and in all corners and in all positions. I might go for a run and return to the same couple exchanging saliva an hour later.  It's just how things are done and I couldn't help but notice the extraordinary amount of pregnant women. Might the two be related?

The pervading theory among my friends is that the public exposure of it all has to do with children remaining at home late into their twenties and even thirties. Kids just don't move away from home. Unbelievable to us who've learned to ache for independence since we were 12 and saw the potential of separation at every dinner table. And for those brought up in a strict Catholic upbringing maybe the streets provide the only way to release an energy and a sensuality made intolerantly impatient by the summer and by the romantic language which is somehow always talking about sex, the tongue always tantalizingly close to escape. 

Maybe this is the reason prostitution is so pervasive. On every street corner boys as young as 6 and granpas bordering on obsoletism hand out fliers the size of business cards with grainy pictures of naked women, girls really. 30 pesos. Dark alleyways and seedy looking apartment buildings. It's not illegal but it's unspoken and unseen. 

 There are anonymous buildings around the city called telos. Their front doors are usually unmarked and with a tree or some awkwardly large plant obscuring the people going in and out. For 40 pesos you can get 2 hours. For 90 a full night. Some are seedy some are reminiscent of 70s porn. Mirrors on the ceiling, glass showers, techno-colored condom dispensers, rows of dildos, vibrating beds, the works. A voice over the intercome: diez minutos mas. And the moment you leave a clean-up crew raring to go. weird. unsettling. But what other option is there when tradition dictates sex as something to be done outside the house?

anyway, it's winter now and stateside and people are cloaked up in black and hardly venture into the street at all, sexuality is locked way away inside sext messages and apartment buildings and the television screen, hardly practiced but watched instead. 

Take it to the streets