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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
As the sexual floodgates open in China, the biggest taboo left is talking about sex.
Dec 2, 2003 | Even in China, sex sells.
Li Li, a 25-year-old aspiring writer from Guangzhou, probably realized as much in June when launching her weblog, "Love Letters Before Dying." Under the pen name Muzimei ("Wooden Beauty"), Li Li provided lurid details of her unusually hyperactive sex life, naming names -- some of them famous. China's titillated netizens lapped it up, and by November the blog was receiving more than 100,000 visitors a day. It was also attracting less enthusiastic attention. The state-owned press excoriated the blog as pornographic and corrupting, denouncing the author's disillusionment with love and marriage. The growing furor got Li Li fired from her magazine job, and in late November she shut down the blog.
Since Muzimei was removed from the site, scores of imitators have taken her place. The most popular of these, a blogger calling herself Lady Cat, tells of her emotional and sexual voyage through an early marriage, hasty divorce and subsequent casual dalliances -- with a sprinkling of racy Calvin Klein ads and essays like "An orgasm a day," which discusses her discovery of masturbation and pornography. Meanwhile, "Love Letters Before Dying" came out in book form only to be banned after a few days, but it will probably enjoy the same fate as China's previously banned risqué books: translation and brisk international sales.
What upsets China's censors is not so much Li Li's promiscuity as her openness. While still in the minority, many young urban Chinese engage in casual bed hopping. Seeking guidance from "Sex and the City" and "Friends," they pick up partners in bars, nightclubs, teahouses and on the Internet, albeit rarely with the frequency that Li Li boasted of.
Expanding personal and economic freedoms, coupled with a deification of money and a heady infusion of Western pop culture, have opened China's sexual floodgates. The Communist Party and mainstream society still staunchly advocate the norm of a married couple with one child, but even marriage -- faced with a daunting array of flashy competitors -- is undergoing a process of reevaluation and redefinition in both the law and the public imagination. Government and society are increasingly willing to ignore, if not tolerate, the expansion of formerly taboo practices like premarital sex, cohabitation, homosexuality, adultery, divorce, concubinage, pornography, prostitution and beauty pageants. Pretty much the only sexual behavior still uncommon in China is talking about sex: people's behaviors are increasingly open, but their attitudes are not. Girls like Muzimei can sleep around all they want, but discussing it publicly reveals that China's current social experiment is far less controlled than people like to believe.
The standard in China remains the Confucian ideal of "four generations under one roof." But now with later marriages and lower birthrates the reality is more likely three generations. Young people usually live with their parents until they are married. After they have their one child, either one set of parents will move in with them to provide day care, or the child will live with its grandparents on weekdays. Marriage is the main rite of passage into adulthood for Chinese, and unmarried family members usually continue to receive "hongbao" -- red envelopes containing cash given to small children and the elderly at holidays -- regardless of their age and income level.
While arranged and forced marriages were eliminated long ago and love is considered necessary, few are willing to marry against their parents' wishes, and most are very pragmatic in their choice of spouse. Women want husbands who are older and either rich or with the potential to become so, and their ability to vie for the prime candidates is based on youth, attractiveness and stability. Most women marry in their mid-20s, and men in their late 20s; remaining single for much longer attracts negative attention from one's friends and family. Marriage remains an obligation to one's parents, by continuing the family name and creating a stable home they can move into when older. Romance is found elsewhere; with most couples, after the obligatory child is born and shipped off to the grandparents, one or both partners will start having affairs.
"China has not always been so conservative," Liu Dalin, a sociology professor at Shanghai University and the owner of the Sex Culture Museum, is quick to clarify. He has cases of thousand-year-old dildos to prove it. Liu explains that up to the Tang Dynasty (618-906 A.D.), women were free, marriage was personal, and divorce was common, but society declined into the rigid traditionalism of the recent Ming and Qing eras (1368-1911). "During those periods of feudal decline, the government feared chaos and thus feared sex and didn't trust the common people."
This attitude lasted until the 20th century, which brought the end of the dynastic system; then the Communists banned polygamy and promoted equality between the sexes. Says Liu: "Freedom of marriage was a big improvement, but it only went so far because feudal influences remained and for 30 years the Communist Party's leftist ideals did not value individual happiness, and pursuit of it was criticized. There was a saying, 'Personal matters, even the biggest, are still small; political matters, even the smallest, are still big.' Basic needs come first. When people are cold and hungry, sex is not their top priority. Only now, 20 years into modernization, are people's basic needs met, their living standards up, so they're looking for more satisfaction in love, marriage and sex."
