Feminism and China’s New Sexual Energy : PERSONAL VOICES Chinese Women in the 1980s<i> by Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter (Stanford University Press: $42.50</i> ,<i> cloth</i> ;<i> $12.95</i> ,<i> paper; 387 pp.)</i>
In the ‘70s, as China opened up to Western contact, foreign visitors were invariably impressed, if not always pleased, with the puritanical attitudes toward sex they found among the Chinese people, who were still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution.
“What if a boy and a girl want to . . . ?” asked actress Candice Bergen, skeptical of the lecture she had received on the standards of chaste courtship and the ideals of “class friendship.” “They don’t,” came the firm reply from her guide.
Bergen writes that after three weeks in China, she was convinced. “There was an absolute absence of sexual energy. I felt like I had been neutered. The very idea of sex was redolent of bourgeois self-indulgence,” she insisted.
That was in 1979. Chinese youth are no longer indoctrinated to believe that romantic love and sex are distractions unworthy of revolutionaries single-mindedly engaged in building socialism. A decade ago, young men and women contemplating marriage were encouraged to minimize all considerations except ideological integrity in selecting their partners. Only unreconstructed reactionaries wallowed in the “bourgeois mud pit of courtship.”
Indicative of the changes wrought by the 1980s is a recent survey in which half of the university student responded that traditional sexual morality was stifling; only one-quarter asserted that it was immoral to cohabit before marriage in the context of an established relationship.
The authors of “Personal Voices” report that it has become common in university dormitories for roommates to vacate rooms on weekends to accommodate their romantically inclined classmates. In other cases several couples will occupy the same dormitory room at the same time. Given the fact that university dormitories in China are woefully overcrowded, this kind of arrangement cannot be entirely felicitous even with the use of mosquito nets, which provide a “modicum of privacy” in the summertime.
For all the liberalization that has occurred, male-female relations in China are, of course, not to be compared with those in the hedonistic West. Chinese newspaper advice columnists regularly remind readers that folks in the West switch partners “like cats and dogs” and throw “people away like plates, razor blades or old cars.”
Pursuing more than one sweetheart at once is specifically enjoined for Chinese. One young rake was publicly rebuked in the advice columns for revealing that he had courted six women and for likening himself to a scientist conducting experiments--one could not hope for success on the first try, he pleaded. His effort to apply rules of the laboratory to matters of the heart was rejected. It was wrong to accumulate experience or affairs as one might accumulate capital, he was advised.
Nor do the authorities turn an indifferent eye to excessive public displays of affection. Honig and Hershatter write that city parks have become the “main combat zones” in which state authority meets youthful ardor--most commonly behind the bushes or under raincoats.
The magazine Yuelao Bao (Matchmaker News) cautioned its readers that nighttime trysts in the park posed hazards to unsuspecting lovers. Not, as Western readers might anticipate, from muggers, though police patrols do spend a fair amount of time hauling in voyeurs. Instead, readers were warned that the body’s resistance to disease is lower after 10 o’clock at night and that colds and headaches might ensue.
If that prospect was not scary enough, Matchmaker News pulled out all the scientific stops by arguing that lying in the grass for long periods was harmful because plants could not conduct photosynthesis at night and the carbon dioxide they emitted could be toxic. And if readers were still not daunted, they were reminded of agonizing mosquito bites. And what about joints turned painfully rheumatic by prolonged contact with the wet grass, the article asked. In what one suspects was an exercise in the gratuitous, Matchmaker News advised its amorous readers to escape these hazards by alternating periods of sitting and walking around.
“Personal Voices” is a first-rate study of rapidly changing attitudes regarding sexuality, love, courtship, marriage relations, divorce, gender inequality and the role of women in contemporary China. It is also, as the authors promise in their introduction, a book “about the excitement, confusion and concern that Chinese people express as they contemplate the future of their society and women’s place in it.” Honig and Hershatter, historians at Yale University and Williams College, fulfill that promise in a book that meets the most demanding scholarly standards and yet remains lively and engaging.
“Personal Voices” has an especially authentic quality to it because approximately one-quarter of the book is devoted to translations of a fascinating array of selections from the Chinese press, official and unofficial, concerning issues that touch the lives of women. Many of these issues--domestic violence, pornography, discrimination in the workplace and conflict between career and housework--echo universal feminist concerns. Others, however, are more specifically Chinese: female infanticide, parental interference in marriage, and traumatic wedding nights in a society where tradition holds that couples “first get married and then fall in love.”
While in most respects, women’s lives in the 1980s have been radically improved compared to the pre-liberation era, numerous feminist concerns for China remain. At the root of these concerns lies the age-old assumption that men are superior to women, an assumption that is not withering away, the authors conclude. One thing leads to another. As long as that assumption remains intact, Chinese families will continue to prefer sons to daughters, and as long as that preference holds, China’s efforts to limit population growth will be imperiled. And finally, a failure to control China’s numbers will jeopardize the entire modernization effort.
Nevertheless, it is a measure of the ferment occurring in China that the press is being used to seek help, voice complaints and expose injustices with more vigor than ever. “Personal Voices” is a highly informed overview of these developments.