Let's add one more colour to this topic palette. Besides those living in the Italian side, Swiss women are vastly the most sexually repressed, and depressed in Europe. I had 3 experiences with Swiss women, and they all pointed to the same conclusion, with an almost perfect overlap.
I had my first experience with a Swiss when I was 21 and leading up the news section of a local radio station. We had the "honour" of having some people over from the Zurich chapter of Radio RAI, the main Italian radio broadcaster, to run a feature about the beach culture of Apulia (now we know where Jersey Shore got the idea from!
). One of the hosts was Karen, this tall, dark blonde, not so good looking but somewhat "scruffy sexy" young woman. She was 27 at the time, if I remember well. She couldn't speak good Italian but we managed to get by with our English and spent 3 evenings together, both extremely eager to get as much honest insight as possible on each other culture, something that to each of us was fascinatingly unknown and apparently irreconcilable. It didn't take long for our conversations to become more intimate.
That's when Karen told me that I and my Italian friends had been treating her in a far better and warmer way than her 7-year boyfriend. Said boyfriend wouldn't even want to have any physical contact apart from a kiss on the cheek now and then. Despite living together, they would only communicate about practical daily stuff - what food to eat, bills to pay, etc. At some point she also confessed me she hadn't had sex for more than a year, and couldn't remember the last time she had an orgasm. I hugged her out of true sympathy, and that hug became a kiss. I brought her to my basement "entertainment room" (every Southern Italian home has one!) and duly provided some entertainment. I never told my radio mates about this...yet apart from the elusive pleasure with a girl I didn't even fancy that much, I got a hard imprinting about the social situation in Switzerland. That episode basically defined my opinion on Switzerland for the rest of my life, leading me to steer away of it, unless strictly required for business or tourism.
The second experience was with a Swiss-Polish girl living in Geneva, called Kasia, who I met when visiting my cousin who moved there for a ride on the Erasmus programme. She was much more attractive than Karen, albeit shorter. She was actually born in Switzerland, but due to her traditional family upbringing she felt much more aligned to her native culture than the Swiss one. Unfortunately (for me!) she had just found a boyfriend from Lugano, still very warm and interested in quenching my curiosity about another bout of Swiss horror stories. The daughter of a retired policeman and a housewife, she sat quite perfectly on the "upper working class" rung of society. And boy, wasn't she feeling all the pain of that. During all of our (two) conversations she kept her head down, speaking slowly as if nobody and nothing could ever change her status. Words like "margin, edge, rejected, outcast" were uttered too often to make her argument come across as a labour of fantasy. One episode struck me in particular: she once went out clubbing with some of her "friends", a group of at least 15 people. She mentioned how metro trains in Zurich are spotless clean, very cheap and run all night long. Then she told me that, at the gates of the club, she realised she was a few francs short of the entrance ticket, and no ATM were in sight. She obviously asked her friends to top up. Nobody chipped in a single franc. Not one "friend". She ended up waiting outside for an hour and then went back home. This happened a few months back, and involved young women and men in their mid twenties, not kids who never keep extra cash.
The third experience was with Erika, a young woman I met in Bali at the airport in November 2011. We were supposed to leave in the afternoon but, due to some diplomatic staff leaving Bali (after that famous ASEAN conference with Obama) on priority, a our flight and a few more were cancelled. We were all offered a hotel night somewhere in Bali and booked on another flight to Kuala Lumpur. We spent a few idling hours in KL airport, talking and eating together. She had just quit her well paid but boring job at PWC in Geneva and was just back from a 4 month trip of Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Most of our conversation revolved around her waxing lyrical about her new Cambodian boyfriend: how intelligent, smart and good looking he was, how she finally felt taken care of and enjoying sex. The curious thing is, I saw this boyfriend on photo and he looked short and pretty plain, while she was quite cute, white blond blue eyes and nice big breasts. She was also worried that her half-German parents would never accept a poor Asian boyfriend who spoke no English and had no expendable skills in Switzerland. As she flooded my ears with words, two recurrent thoughts crossed my mind: fondling her big jugs (again, not relevant
) and how desperate for any form of genuine human contact she might have been, to basically fall in love with her Cambodian tour guide a mere 2 days into her trip! It might have well been real love, who knows, yet I couldn't help noticing how "emotionally starved" she sounded like. It occurred to me that thats, after all, the destiny of Swiss men and women alike - a life trapped in a lattice of efficient, formal and ice-cold human interactions. Luckily for her, her Asian trip and boyfriend manage to disconnect her from that matrix and give her a refreshing bite of human nature hooked to real feelings and what matters the most.
p
