Butter Bride: The ritual for a bride is very involved. Her entire body is buttered and covered with ochre clay. She must stay in this condition in her husband’s family’s hut for one month, or until she has her period. This tribe will not allow marriage unless they are sure the husband will be the father of the wife’s children. I did not understand this dynamic on my first trip to the Omo valley, but once I learned that these tribes have a sexual “acting out” period it became more clear. A man is bethrothed to a woman and then they will both spend the next two years or so having sex with everyone except the one they will marry. Once the woman comes to the man’s hut and they are formally married, they are supposed to only have sex with each other. But in many cases the boyfriends and girlfriends from the previous two years are a much stronger draw than their arranged marriage, so they will continue to not only have relations with these boyfriends but they will also sometimes coordinate sex in such a way that their boyfriends are the fathers of their children instead of their husbands from the arranged marriage.
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