A Study of Sexual Perceptions in China

Feb 2015 · sex research, sociology

Disclaimer: This post was originally written in Chinese and translated into English by GPT-5.2.

Introduction

Explanation of the Topic

In ancient China there was the study of punctuation and pausing, teaching people how to segment sentences—within a sentence, a passage, or an article—to make clear where the pauses are and where the meaning lies. Now there is no need for such trouble. Yet in the past there was also once popular a kind of “punctuation study” with a “rather large amount of information”: within a sentence that has only one full stop there could be several different layers of meaning, and each layer was very clear—what is called double entendre comes close to it. For example, “There is a kind of feeling called love” has two ways of reading it, obvious at a glance. “Inquiry-based learning” is exactly this type of topic. However, its hidden meaning is not limited to two layers.

Sex is a very, very big topic. The “sex” of this “research” is in a narrow sense, referring specifically to the social concepts of sex that are universally present. But this is still a very big topic. In the field of sex research, depending on differences in method, one can draw on ethics, psychology, the study of ideas, biology, statistics, history, even international relations, etc.; depending on differences in angle, one can also展开 from sex and politics, society, institutions, culture, economics, geography, etc.—not to mention the many items refined from these methods and angles.

However, this “research,” in the final analysis, is only a kind of “learning.” Since it is learning, that indicates the immaturity of the content; even if it is big and empty, it is not impossible to understand. This kind of learning, though the topic is sensitive—saying what others have not said, what others dare not say, what others cannot say—still, the “spirit of learning” it displays is undoubtedly worthy of commendation.

Of course, what is called sensitive is also relative. In fact, sex research has long ceased to be any big deal. Saying the topic is sensitive should be considered within a specific context. That is to say, if this unprecedented—or perhaps never-to-be-repeated—middle-school student project research of mine is viewed in the specific context of middle-school education, then it is too bold. Actually, anyone who has received even a little sex knowledge or sex education would not find this astonishing, and would even think I write very naively, because after putting down the pen, I have precisely this sigh.

I believe this “research” has the following characteristics: ambitious and far-reaching yet supported by citations; not bound by convention yet striking out on a new path; heterodox yet opening a new trend; a one-sentence hall yet solidly in the right; handled personally yet one against ten; what the crowd deems offensive, yet I go alone.

As for why I locked onto this topic, the reason is simple: entirely because others neither do it nor say it, offering neither constructive contributions nor constructive proposals; the author had no choice but to come as interest leads, as nature leads—unexpectedly, with a clever mouth, I obtained it.

Why Speak of Sex

Although I said it came as interest leads and as nature leads, this interest and sex are not accidental.

Food and sex are of human nature: every day when you eat, drink water, breathe in and out, you are in “food”; every day when the three urgent calls press you to go to the toilet, pull down your pants and relieve yourself, “sex” has been giving you impressions in the dark all along—its effect surpasses advertising. So the issue of sex, or what is called sexuality, you cannot avoid; if you avoid it, it will come looking for you—its barbarity, only politics can rival.

What is called barbarity actually refers to instinct, instinctual impulse. According to Freud’s theory, the fundamental driving force of life is libido, that is to say, what governs you is sexual energy, sexual impulse, and nothing else has “decisiveness”; under the governance of sex, sexual satisfaction in life is divided into six stages, namely the oral stage, the anal stage, the pregenital stage, the latency stage, the postgenital stage, and sexual life①. Sexual satisfaction obtains pleasurable satisfaction by stimulating different positions of erogenous zones, thereby satisfying sexual desire. In other words, crudely speaking, when you feel great, it is actually sexual desire that has been satisfied. Why say this? Because Freud thought the antonym of civilization is instinct; the function of civilization is to repress instinct; and the only instinct that can escape death and cannot be completely killed off is sex—so a person’s life is spent in the contradiction between sexual repression and sexual impulse. This view is indeed biased; for example, there are many unclear and inexplicable places, and there is suspicion of defining sex too broadly; but it also has highlights not without merit: First, it explains the relationship between civilization and instinct—this relationship had in fact already been demonstrated in the book Xunzi②. Their bias lies in not seeing clearly the essence of civilization: mediation, even at the cost of barbarous mediation—repression is also mediation. Second, it fully elevates the status of sex in life and caused the world’s attention to “sex,” bringing wave after wave of discussion and controversy.

Another “not accidental” reason lies in the author’s own interest and the broad masses’ sex interest. Whether interest or sex interest, neither can conceal this reality: their source is society, and they are being teased up earlier and earlier in the hearts of the masses, unable to remain latent—our masses are becoming sexually mature earlier and earlier—of course, this precocity is also widely manifested physiologically. Another reality is: our masses cannot keep up with their own precocity in terms of sex knowledge and sex education. Thus, more and more are sexually repressed or even die of sexual suffocation; more and more erotic jokes, books, and anime; “Aruba” escalating; in private “Have you jerked off yet” increasingly tending to replace “Have you eaten yet”…… And there are those who bring up sex at the drop of a hat; men and women together talking about “Teacher Sora”; those who, upon saying “foundation,” must extend it to the level of “chicken” and then “prostitute”; those who, upon saying pen cap, must associate it with “your cunt” “your condom”; those who, upon saying holiday, think of menstruation; those who, upon saying phonics, think of genitals…….. “sao-nyouth” rather than youth, “big wet chest” rather than big senior brother, “chest weapon” rather than deadly weapon; among gay bros and besties, not a few are homosexual; GV (gay video) more popular than AV; upon seeing photos of partial nudity such as bare arms, cleavage, even male compatriots’ bare upper bodies, they jokingly shout to leave seeds; and there are also obscure internet slang such as comrades, lilies, chrysanthemums, and the Arabic numeral 3…… Social mores are like this—at least the younger generation is already like this—but in fact, so-called adults are no better—at least the younger generation mostly are “transmitting but not creating” “Confucius sages,” while adults are practitioners who both say and do, or even only do and do not say—there are those who hide at home, hide in public offices, or even openly watch porn on buses; there are those who patronize prostitutes, solicit sex, sexually assault young children, female students, female subordinates, send “sister flowers,” even store sex slaves; there are those who fake sodomize and sodomize humans, truly sodomize and sodomize beasts; there are those who go deep into women’s private parts to give psychological treatment and catch ghosts…… This is no longer a matter of a minority or of generalizing from the particular; one can say these are all representative, undeniable, telling facts. But our social mores also make us “impotent” and unable to speak when we talk about sex publicly, so these realities indicate both some progress and some problem. As in modern sex history: sexual awakening has come, but it does not amount to sexual liberation; further sexual enlightenment is still needed③.

Precisely for this reason, as a rational person, I have long deeply felt the importance and necessity of writing about sex. This topic of sex must be straightened out a bit; without straightening it out, how could one be rational?

How to Write and What to Write

I am probably a skeptic; I do not much believe in any essence. I think that essence is often unreliable; the only reliable thing is real phenomena and existence.

There is a phenomenon worth deep thought: those who flaunt essence often decline; those who reveal phenomena often remain evergreen. Strictly speaking, the word essence does not make sense, because essence cannot be explained; and according to essentialists, there is nothing that cannot be explained. To step back, essence is a summary or presupposition (needing no proof) of some eternal phenomenon. That is to say, the “essence” of “essence” is in fact phenomenon. However, this essence is only an explanation of the phenomenon. For the sake of smoothness, explanations often do not hesitate to “selectively express” phenomena by keeping one eye open and one eye shut—is this what is called “essence”? Before long they will blush as they discover their system is outdated and disconnected, yet the phenomena are still unchanged. Since the phenomena are unchanged, then the essence they spoke of is still right, so they brazenly use imagination to continue flaunting essence, with the result being covering up errors and glossing over faults. Materialists also cannot avoid—indeed, are even the most—insincere to the point of idealism; the reason lies here. Here, I would rather reveal. As long as what is revealed can stand, then although explanations vary with a person’s level, they will not differ too far.

Those with self-knowledge never flaunt any essence. Bohr’s famous principle of complementarity profoundly points out that people know one thing at the cost of not knowing certain other things; people can never know everything at the same time④. I think: if it is a phenomenon, it is not accidental. Everyone in the country says we are poor, yet you use a set of ghostly doctrines to achieve spiritual victory, explaining that we are not poor—what kind of essentialism is this? Phenomena are like light, casting sheen on all things; whether through diffuse reflection or specular reflection, they can give the eyes brightness.

In order to strive for a good revelation of phenomena, naturally one needs to grasp the laws of phenomena, ensuring the reliability of the phenomena; otherwise the argument will be unstable. This involves a view of history. In this text, I emphasize two points of my view of history: first, history is not entirely reliable. Second, history is not entirely to be read straightforwardly from books; sometimes it must be read in reverse. These two views of history will be embodied in the writing below.

What I now want to write is mainly to take history as warp, narrating by chapters, merely borrowing the exterior of a paper; in writing, I also take sex as weft, touching lightly like a dragonfly skimming water, adopting the interior of phenomena. The length of each chapter is not limited, adapting to circumstances; the issues brought in are not without selection, using the topic to expound. In short, everything within the warp-and-weft network serves the text; there is no nonsense—those seemingly idle chats are also relevant and justified, handling the heavy as though light. My purpose is only to write about sex through history, especially reflecting, through people of each period, the characteristics of social sexual concepts of that time as different from other periods, telling those who live in the modern era yet—whether big head or little head, brain or dick, metaphysical or physical—cannot keep up with the development of the times, that sex is something everywhere, at all times, nothing more normal.

According to my plan, I will not give the text large-scale discussion. Therefore, under my conclusions, what occupies the主体 is often the process of demonstration, namely the organization and laying-out of phenomena, rather than results.

For the convenience of demonstration and limited by the defects of the author’s knowledge, in demonstration I will often borrow some public opinions that need no further proof. Although not very rigorous, at places where I am clear-minded and firm, I must carefully examine public opinion and strive for rigor.

Descartes’ famous saying “I think, therefore I am” (I think，therefore I am) is often misunderstood and forcibly attached to the idealist theory that “consciousness determines matter”; this is wrong, because its original meaning is “when I am thinking, the only existence I can be certain of is myself.” Therefore he must discard all preconceptions and, from the indisputable proposition “I am” (I am), deduce his philosophical system; this is neither materialist nor idealist. But Descartes’ “universal doubt,” doubting all public opinions, is also wrong, because a person cannot doubt everything at the same time, just as a person cannot know everything at the same time.

I have the spiritual temperament of agnosticism, with unreliable doubts about existence; but I also have the theoretical character of a knowability theorist: phenomena can still explain existence.

Content Overview

When I read sex histories written by foreigners, they talk about European and American countries—there is no China. There are not many works in the field of sex research in China; if there are, most also borrow Western theories to talk about sex and sexual life. In short, there are not many who research and write a Chinese sex history. This causes the author, when writing sex history, to have little reference to speak of. Chinese sex history is not so easy to write; even so, my broad direction still speaks about China, with no harm in mixing in foreign examples as supporting evidence.

History is also a very big topic. Therefore, when writing, I aim to start with the big aspects, with no intention of refusing to let go of small places. Matters in small places are too delicate, too cumbersome, too complex—beyond the author’s ability, and also not what I wish. What the author can do is naturally to set out from literature and history, adopting various views to benefit my own. But if there are those who can see the big from the small, of course those must also be discussed.

Finally, let me state one sentence: the author does not wish to wade into this river of right and wrong; I do not wish, in ignorance, to make value judgments involving sex, because people’s sexual concepts truly have no one who is higher and no one who is lower; they are all merely products of reality. If one really must distinguish who is good and who is bad, like falsification theory, we can only confirm which kind of sexual concept is not good, and cannot prove which kind of sexual concept is correct. Even so, I do not wish to make such judgments consciously.

The following is the content overview:

According to the characteristics of social sexual concepts, I have divided human history since there are traces into three periods: sexual worship in the prehistoric period; openness and conservatism from the Xia dynasty up to before the founding of New China in 1949; and “sexlessness” and “sexuality” from New China to the present.

Sexual Worship

Before prehistoric society formed and the state was built, China, like all peoples of the world, universally worshiped sex; this worship is what is now called “sexual worship.” This worship lasted a long time; even now, our every gesture still bears its shadow. Though the time is remote, we may not necessarily know the origin of this worship (for example, whether because productivity was extremely low at the time, people shifted from worship of reproduction to worship of sex; or because people’s intelligence was not yet opened, psychologically, a sense of worship arose spontaneously from the pleasure produced by sex, or from the mystery of sex), yet one cannot deny the fact of sexual worship.

Openness and Conservatism

When society first formed and the state was already built (below I take the Xia dynasty as the boundary, to distinguish from prehistory), being not far from remote antiquity, the legacy of sexual worship was still very obvious. Manifested in people was the openness of sexual concepts and the openness of social mores—of course, these are said with today’s eyes. This openness also persisted for quite a long time (no settled conclusion, but it certainly existed); compared with ancient Greece, it was not inferior. This perhaps is also where world cultures share “commonality.”

But later, when political power became increasingly centralized and the morality attached to politics became increasingly influential, the degree of sexual openness also became worse with each generation; there may also have been other reasons, such as people’s sense of privacy becoming stronger, etc. But in any case, at this time people’s sexual concepts began to become conservative, and the sense of shame toward sex became increasingly strong. This influence still exists to this day; one cannot say there is no traditional influence. Even so, at the level of the whole society, China historically never had a Western-like age of abstinence; although ritual teaching ate people, it was still not that fierce. But this neither denies the existence of extreme ritualists, nor denies the fact that under the sexual repression of ritual teaching, many victims of ritual teaching were produced. It is only to say that, in general, Chinese people at that time—like later Chinese people—also were not without flexibility in this aspect of sexual concepts; they were not absolutely extreme.

“Sexlessness” and “Sexuality”

Shame toward sex, in the first 30-plus years after the founding of New China, was brought to an extreme in a disguised way, to the point that the entire society ignored sex; sex seemed to have evaporated, and the whole society presented a state of having only politics and no “individuality.” On the one hand, this also came from the influence of traditional factors, but to a large extent it should be attributed to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party’s left-leaning thought at that time.

After Reform and Opening Up, as a kind of correction of past thinking and concepts, sex slowly began to be no big deal. That is to say, it is in the 30-plus years after this period that, in sharp contrast to the past society, sex could be paid attention to in society. Society did not ignore sex; individuals were also paying attention to sex. Moreover, from this period of political and economic reform, social sexual problems also correspondingly and inevitably appeared.

But we should see that the Chinese Communist Party’s attitude toward sex has always been serious. This seriousness is biased toward the negative. That is to say, once sex is mentioned, in ideology what is usually associated with it is negative things. So, in the era of left-leaning thought and politics-in-command, this negative attitude would bring about society’s ignoring of sex; in the era of correction and seeking truth from facts, gradually, this serious attitude would not avoid certain unavoidable social sexual problems. But in any case, within this attitude, sex generally would not be publicly placed in a position of considerable importance.

Because the division standard is the characteristics of large-scale social phenomena as a whole, at first glance the division standards seem different.

Strictly speaking, in the time of prehistoric sexual worship, society and state did not yet exist—this is different from later. But sexual worship really cannot be said to be unique to prehistory. In fact, sexual worship as a profound worship still exists to this day—this is what has been the same all along. And for example, the conservatism and shame of social sexual concepts still exist quite a lot even now.

Therefore, if one uses a unified standard for comparison over time, there is not much comparability. Even if such comparability exists, it is again exceedingly fine and exceedingly detailed. That is why I said this “research” aims to start from the big place, and does not cling to the small place.

Summary

When writing, the author faced problems of selection and omission; taking and discarding, it became this not-very-standard, perhaps improperly chosen “research.” At the same time, I deeply know my limitations in age, experience, and knowledge, as well as practical considerations; I am still not qualified to point fingers at certain issues, so I leave them aside. There are many imperfect places, which is only natural. But the literary talent and comparatively solid writing style that are revealed within can still withstand examination.

Notes

①This is Freud’s famous theory of personality development, also called the theory of psychosexual stage development. This theory includes the first five stages, that is, these five stages from birth to adulthood (oral stage, anal stage, pregenital stage, latency stage, postgenital stage). His basis is precisely the erogenous zones that can satisfy sexual desire; these erogenous zones are spread all over the human body, and as age develops, the mainstream differs, hence the names. As for after adulthood, naturally one should add a “sexual life” for him. In Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society, the author was influenced by Freud and “divides the child’s development into four periods (infancy, early childhood, childhood, adolescence)” (see “Translator’s Preface”), which can be consulted.

②Xunzi · Human Nature Is Evil: “As for what is called nature, it is what Heaven has completed; it cannot be learned, it cannot be worked at. As for ritual and propriety, they are what sages produced; people can learn them and be able, work at them and accomplish them. What cannot be learned and cannot be worked at yet is in people is called nature; what can be learned and be able, can be worked at and be accomplished and is in people is called artifice.” This shows that “nature” is instinct, while civilization is “artifice” (from ‘person’ and ‘do’: what people do is called artifice). Nature and artifice conflict from the beginning, therefore he thought human nature is evil (“human nature is evil; its goodness is artifice”), and the function of the sage lies in “transforming nature and raising artifice; for this he produces ritual and propriety; when ritual and righteousness are produced, they regulate laws and standards.” Also, Correct Naming: “That by which life is so is called nature.” Although Xunzi’s premise in discussing nature is not without nonsense, what he calls “nature and artifice” in fact coincides with “instinct and civilization.”

③Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History, “Introduction”: “…….but the belief that modernization in some way ‘liberated’ sex has proved to be a stubborn idea……. While old forms of constraint have undoubtedly been replaced, new forms of repression have also appeared. Therefore, this book is not a ‘progress’ history.” The author may be called a knowing sexual person indeed!

④The everyday habitual usage of “essence” is different from the “essence” spoken of here. I do not oppose speaking of some essence for reasons of habit and convenience; but to insist that something is essence, either is too ignorant or has ulterior motives. Bohr has the principle of complementarity; not by coincidence, Heisenberg also has an “uncertainty principle,” saying that human knowledge and objective reality differ in substance and cannot be measured precisely. Even as learned as Marx, he had to admit to Engels in person: “All I know is that I am not a Marxist!” His self-knowledge is self-evident.

I. Prehistory: Sexual Worship

Hu Shi, in writing Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy, broke new ground by cutting off the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors without discussing them, starting directly from the Spring and Autumn Hundred Schools; later it formed a fashion, and no one talked about the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors anymore. But I am willing to roughly talk about a brief prehistory, to display my view of history from it, and by the way lay down a tone for the entire historical narrative.

So-called prehistory here generally goes up to the Xia dynasty.

<1> A Brief Prehistory

Human life in remote antiquity is no longer verifiable; the bits and pieces dug out of the ground are obviously not enough to recreate the scene of that time. This remote, blank history can only be patched up by means of conjecture and imagination, from the currently so-called scientific perspective.

What can now provide materials for these conjectures and imaginations is nothing more than three major routes: archaeology, scientific investigation, and reference: archaeology of things underground; scientific investigation of primitive tribes; reference to ancient documents. Although we have good reason to believe in the scientific conjectures and imaginations we make, no one can guarantee them, because even science has not yet probed to the end a series of bizarre yet clue-rich mysteries, such as the existence of phenomena of super-civilizations like the Eighth Continent Mother Continent 10,000 years ago, Atlantis, and the like—let alone the fact that piles of historical relics often instead become obstacles to explaining certain historical facts.

—Time can sometimes explain many things, but at the same time, time also washes away many things so that later they cannot be restored. This is not specifically about prehistoric civilizations. In fact, even when humans have learned to establish a complete archiving mechanism, with differing times and changing events, time and space both changing, how could we restore the truth from history where true and false are hard to distinguish and where there are gains and losses? History is only a documentary of time; within this short documentary, you can find the glimmer of history, but you can never reproduce it. From a philosophical point of view, written history and real history are absolutely not the same, because one is subjective and one is objective, and subjective and objective cannot be completely unified. —

Science, before time, may ultimately be powerless and pale, at least with respect to the past that science can no longer salvage. Therefore, we are left only with scientific conjecture and imagination, as science’s salute to time:

When we discuss history, for convenience and some purpose, we like to segment history and draw lines—for example, the history of the earth can be divided into the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, and Phanerozoic; within the Phanerozoic it is divided into several “eras,” within each “era” it is divided into several “periods,” within each “period” it is divided into several “epochs.” But historical segments and boundaries are often unclear, because history is continuous; this kind of division is fixed—divide it larger and it can only be rougher and less accurate. Their basis is merely the achievements of existing archaeology and geological scientific investigation, with the help of scientific analysis; if Heaven has consciousness and underground unfortunately is dug out with some evidence sufficient to refresh these achievements, then history should again be rewritten.

Scientists roughly divide the history of life on earth into the Sinian, Cambrian, all the way to the Jurassic, Cretaceous, Tertiary, Quaternary, but the time ranges of these periods can only be said in broad terms; our existing achievements in archaeology and geological scientific investigation can only support to this point—if one speaks more finely, one can only stare blankly. As for places that archaeology and geological scientific investigation still cannot support, one can only conjecture, imagine, or even dispute and argue. For example, the earliest appearance of ape fossils is 8 million years ago, but the 4 million years from 4 million to 8 million years ago is a blank in human history, until more than 3 million years ago, when human fossils again appear. Concerning that 4 million-year blank, scientists, besides staring blankly, can only propose the aquatic ape hypothesis, namely that humans lived in the sea for those 4 million years. The evidence includes: in the places where ancient apes lived, prehistoric shell middens were found (shell animals living in the deep sea); a series of physiological characteristics of modern humans differ from all terrestrial mammals, yet resemble aquatic beasts①.

Human history is truly too unreliable. When we discuss the history of humanity developing into humans in the modern sense, the mainstream opinion is that humans respectively went through the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic; the basis is clear: production tools. But this is not entirely reliable either. Not to mention that geographical differences lead to differences in the degree of human evolution and differences in the time experienced in the Stone Age; just speaking of whether there was a Stone Age is uncertain—many regions cannot find traces of stone tool use; some regions simply have no stone tools that can be used! Like the Eskimos living in polar high-cold regions: before being invaded by civilization, what they used all along were wooden tools, and they had no conditions to use stone tools—and this is precisely not just a special case.

We set aside these unnecessary disputes and speak of reliable things—then sexual worship is a very reliable historical fact.

<2> Sexual Worship

From mythological stories, the progenitors of the Chinese nation Fuxi and Nüwa, brother and sister, committed incest; Japan’s progenitors Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, committed incest②; the Western progenitors Adam and Eve, committed incest; in Greek mythology, the earth goddess Gaea and her son Uranus, committed incest; in García Márquez’s allegorical novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, there is incest everywhere; in the myths of many peoples there are records similar to a “Great Flood,” with only the “Noah’s Ark” family surviving the calamity—without incest, how could it work?

From remote ancient relics and existing primitive tribes: in the 8th grotto of the Jianchuan Grottoes in Jianchuan County, Dali Prefecture, Yunnan, there is a female vulva stone carving over one meter tall; in the Wusitai Gully and Table Mountain rock paintings of the Yin Mountains in Inner Mongolia there are many graphic shapes of male and female genitalia; in Tibet there are exaggerated female breasts and vulva; on Dongshan Island, more than 100 li south of Zhangzhou, Fujian, there is a huge vulva stone; the Paiwan people, an indigenous group in central Taiwan, have a conspicuously prominent phallic stone pillar “diao god”; many backward peoples in the world still retain dances and rituals symbolizing sexual intercourse (examples mainly see Liu Dalin’s Illustrated Guide to Chinese Sexual History)

These show that our ancestors had very obvious sexual worship.

In Liu Dalin’s Illustrated Guide to Chinese Sexual History, Chapter 2 “Ancient Sexual Worship” specifies sexual worship as “genital worship, intercourse worship, and fertility worship,” which is very insightful. He gives very rich and detailed examples in the book to explain these three types of sexual worship respectively; one may consult it. Here I casually cite a few examples; the time limits of the examples are not confined to prehistory, nor limited to those cited in the book:

Genital worship: there are phallic worship and vulva worship. Phallic symbols mainly symbolize testicles, semen, the whole penis; for example: birds (bird head like glans, bird egg like testicles, egg white like semen, the sprinting power of the black bird comparable to the sprinting power of the glans), snakes, gourds, zu (stone zu, wood zu, jade zu, pottery zu), hu. Vulva symbols: hole-shaped objects (pottery rings, stone rings), jade bi-discs, fish (double fish, like labia; hoping to reproduce like fish!), shell patterns (shell motifs. Early humans chose shells as a general equivalent, not unrelated to sexual worship), flowers (Buddhist scripture: “Vajra Division enters Lotus Division; that is the great bliss affair”; forceful intercourse is called “directly doing the flower heart”; patronizing virgin prostitutes is called “opening the bud.” There is a joke: a widow remarries, people send a couplet: “The flower path once was swept for guests; the thatched gate now begins to open for you,” where “thatched gate” is the vulva; this couplet is a dirty joke.) In ancient times there was a certain woman who wrapped both hands around and used her feet to clamp a tall pillar; someone scolded her for being indecent, but she pointed at the “little dick” and said: “Emperors and generals all come from this!”
Intercourse worship. The Helan Mountains rock painting “copulation diagram.” In Kushuigou, Table Mountain, Inner Mongolia, a frog-shaped woman’s lower body is inserted by a phallus. In the Hutubi rock paintings about 75 kilometers southwest of Hutubi County town in Xinjiang’s Tianshan Mountains, there are many rock paintings reflecting sexual intercourse. Among the Yi people of Yunnan, adult men, on festivals, hang a wooden phallus at the waist and dance, reveling in intercourse-like gestures.
Fertility worship. Fertility worship objects include frogs (see Mo Yan’s novel Frog, Part Four, Section Two, Paragraph Twenty-Three’s description of frogs), toads, pomegranates, fish; the symbolic meaning is many children. Folk customs of seeking children in various places. Folk legends of “Qilin delivers a son” and “Guanyin delivers a son.” In ancient bridal chambers a basin of jujubes was placed, meaning “may you soon give birth to a noble son.” The ancient admonition “Of the three unfilial acts, having no heir is the greatest.” Pottery figurines shaped like pregnant women.

Examples of sexual worship are extremely widespread— not only not limited to prehistory, also not limited to China—already deeply entering our later customs and habits, language and writing, art and architecture. Here are a few more examples:

Customs and habits. Last time online there spread a “breast-groping festival”; later, after confirmation by relevant departments, it was “a rumor,” “completely distorted by some men of letters”—at least such corrupting things have long since not existed now. But we can be sure the breast-groping festival should indeed have existed; that it no longer exists now should also be true. At the beginning of the founding of New China, the state once devoted itself to eliminating some minorities’ custom of “fangliao” (nicely put, relics of matrilineal clan society; bluntly put, chaotic incest), but to this day there are still remnants. Customs and habits always consciously or unconsciously display sexual worship in obvious and hidden ways; this is not strange. Last year the author became a “little uncle-in-law,” and saw family members use an iron kettle to hold pig intestines, with the pig intestines extending to the spout, and on both sides of the spout connected a pair of longan fruits threaded with string—clearly the shape of male genitalia; I asked family members, and indeed it is used to attract a male! In addition, there was another bag of flowers; family members also did not know what it referred to, but from the custom it is so. Yet flowers symbolize the vulva; it should indicate giving birth to a girl.
Language and writing. Every country’s “national curse” is suspected of “sexual assault” (see Feng Youlan’s “National Curse” and “Further On ‘National Curse’”). In oracle bone script, “且” and “圭” look like a penis; even in simplified characters, one can intuit it. The left side of “祖” and “祝” is the character “示”; one says it indicates worship, that is worship of the penis—today, ancestor worship of tombstones and ancestral tablets is this imagery; one says it means vulva; one says it is an inverted penis, as if in Wang Xiaobo’s famous poem “walking in silence walking in the sky and the penis hanging upside down.” The ancient seal script of “妣” (pìn) and “也” resembles the labia majora, labia minora, and clitoris. Zhao Shimin’s book Sex, Painful Yet Happy: Dr. Tang’s Sex Psychology Clinic gives new interpretations of the characters “家” and “淫.” Why is there a pig under “home,” not other livestock? Because pigs are prolific. “淫” can be拆 as water, grab (i.e., claw), and ren-tu (壬), where ren-tu is human yin (heaven is yang, earth is yin)—that is, genitalia; the whole character means using the hand to grab the genitalia to make it flow with water, wet (male ejaculation; female full高潮 flowing out Zhang Jingsheng’s “third kind of water” or “Bartholin’s fluid”). This resembles the character “寺.” In ancient China, the “great temple person” referred to eunuchs, because “寺” is from earth and inch: earth indicates genitalia, inch indicates a hand holding a knife to cut; thus “寺” means cutting genitalia. Of course, the “寺” in “great temple person” is passive voice.

Art and architecture. Pagoda spires and stone pillars—anything尖, and anything concave—are hard to say have no hidden meaning of genitalia③. Last time online there spread a copulating Buddha statue, condemned as indecent; in fact this is rather an elegant matter! Li Ao has written不少 this kind of article, such as “Joyful Buddha,” and also Liu Dalin’s Illustrated Guide to Chinese Sexual History, Chapter 8 “Religion and Sex,” with “Esoteric Buddhism and Joyful Buddha,” all provide sufficient references. Some pottery figurines, stone carvings, woodcuts that deliberately exaggerate genitalia and breasts. In Wang Qingyu’s book Amulets, in the appendix, among the more than one hundred pictures of Khitan amulets, the vast majority have this kind of exaggeration.

<3> Why Sexual Worship

Sexual worship and making love are inseparable; people must make love, and then there is sexual worship—this is beyond doubt.

Humans are different from “beasts.” Beasts have fixed estrus periods; during estrus their genitalia undergo changes such as redness and swelling, thickening, etc.—they must go make love to “reduce inflammation and relieve itching.” Humans’ brains are highly developed; they have no fixed estrus period and can do so “selectively.” But humans are also beasts: humans also have high-incidence periods of springtime yearning, and also have physiological changes similar to beasts. It can be seen that, regressing to the “human beast” of millions of years ago, there would not be much difference; it would likely be like beasts now. From this angle, making love truly is to satisfy psychological pleasure.

According to Liu Dalin’s division method of sexual worship, then when primitive productivity was extremely backward, for survival one had to have sufficient labor power, and the production of labor power could only come from reproduction. To put it popularly: in order to live, you must make love. From recognizing the difference in genitalia, to making love producing new labor power, to linking reproduction with producing new labor power, the ancestors would naturally develop sexual worship characterized by genital worship, intercourse worship, and fertility worship. From this angle, making love truly is because of the level of development of productivity.

Of course, productivity and human psychological mechanisms cannot be discussed separately; that is to say: for survival, people must increase labor power and reproduce through sex and love; at the same time, sex and love is also a matter as the ancients said, “Why is that concave, and I convex? Using convex to test concave, it feels very beautiful and pleasant,” stimulating people again and again. Likewise, if there were no pleasure to urge people to make love, it seems that no matter how high productivity development is, there would still be old virgins; it seems that no matter how high productivity is, it would have nothing to do with the lovemaking of birds and beasts!

Sex is truly a mysterious thing. We can only affirm that sex is instinctual impulse, is a source of creation, can produce pleasure, can make people happy; beyond that, we know nothing. Perhaps this mystery is the fundamental reason for sexual worship, and also the fundamental reason why prehistoric humans worshiped ancestors and heroes, worshiped wind, rain, thunder, and lightning, worshiped birds and beasts, etc. Driven by this mystery, in myth and legend, although humanity’s progenitors all commit incest, when it comes to later sages and holy maidens, these guys are all not born at all; even if they are born, they usually still have some unusual “auspicious signs”! Sexual worship reaching this point can be called transcending into sanctity, godlike and mysterious!

—Do not think that with productivity and science developed to today, sex is no longer mysterious. Do not think that the smarter people are, the less they worship sex. Li Ao counts as an expert in the field of sex research; on Weibo he has public texts of sexual worship:

Forty years ago, in the toilet, Liu Jiachang, while urinating, lowered his head and muttered. He said: “Dick! Everything I suffer, damn it, is for you!” I laughed loudly when I heard it. I said: “Dick is actually a true man. Can bend and can伸, can be soft and can be hard, can use soft-hard together, can be hard within softness. The thing I worship most in my life is this big dick of mine. Although it has brought me many troubles, it is all worth it!”

But perhaps the inscription of the Paiwan “diao god” in central Taiwan is the most plain and true psychological realism of sexual worship; yet aside from that, we still know nothing:

Mighty Diao God, the flower of humankind. By nature gentle, seeing sex then stands. A romantic figure, the root of calamity. Passing on the lineage, without me it will not work. Men and women infertile, please seek this lord. Fitting to enjoy offerings forever, to hang down through ten thousand generations in lasting glory.

Notes

①For example, physiological phenomena such as human tear glands secreting tears to排出 salt, human skin being裸露, humans having thick subcutaneous fat, the position of fetal lanugo in human fetuses, are close to aquatic beasts and are different from all terrestrial mammals. Aquatic beasts refers to aquatic mammals. But strangely, a human embryo at week 8 is extremely similar to a turtle at week 6, a dog at week 6, and a chicken at day 5. Therefore, relying on physiological characteristics to explain certain issues is unreliable. As for prehistoric shell middens, they are also not very reliable. The above discussion benefited greatly from the “Conjecture Series” books published by Chengdu Map Publishing House in 2004, especially Recalling Remote Antiquity, Life演绎, Human Evolution these three books. The examples cited here almost all come from them.

②According to Hao Yong’s You Should Have Read Japan This Way, Chapter 1 “Mythological Age”: the two siblings hold the “Heavenly Jeweled Spear” bestowed by the gods of heaven to stir the “milky sea.” The author says: “‘The Heavenly Jeweled Spear’ symbolizes the male genitalia, while the milky sea into which it is inserted and stirred represents the female genitalia; the whole process can be regarded as an implicit description of reproduction by ancient Japanese.”

③In Illustrated Guide to Chinese Sexual History, the book cites a passage from American historian Weiler’s Sex Worship: “Our towers and spires of various shapes and sizes have all consciously or unconsciously preserved the upright form of the original male genital stone pillars…… In fact, there is no region in the world without stone pillars or towers shaped like male genitalia.” In Liu Dalin’s Illustrations of World Sexual Culture, in the text under the front plates there is such a passage: “Church spires are all symbols of the penis; olive-shaped windows and doors are all symbols of the vulva, that is, the ‘gate of life’.” Laozi, Chapter 6: “The valley spirit never dies; this is called the mysterious female. The gate of the mysterious female is called the root of heaven and earth. It seems to exist continuously; use it without exhaustion.” The “root” and “gate” spoken of in Laozi seem both to refer to genitalia, symbolizing the generation of life, endlessly. Freud’s psychoanalysis, in interpreting dreams, believes that in dreams, protruding things are almost all related to the penis; concave things are all related to the vulva. And as I said in the “Introduction,” every day we receive the advertisement of our own genitalia—how could it not leave a deep impression? It can be seen that genital worship has a long origin and still does not die out today; it can simply be said to have already penetrated into the marrow of humankind, turned into genes passed down, existing in the collective unconscious in the human brain!

Ancient China here generally refers to the history from after the Xia dynasty up to the founding of New China in 1949.The Xia dynasty was the formation of society, the initial founding period of the state; taking it as the beginning is a way to distinguish it from the prehistoric period. From the Xia dynasty to New China spans more than 4,000 years; to people today, it all seems very ancient. Moreover, in my view, modern China, in terms of sexual concepts, seems in the general phenomena not very different from the somewhat older feudal era, so I have included modern China as well. That is to say, the method of periodization here is by no means determined according to the replacement of social systems, although I do not deny the tremendous impact that changes in social systems have on people’s conceptions; we also know that even if the social system changes, in the early stage of that change people’s conceptions to a large extent remain as before, for varying lengths of time—after all, people walk out of the “old society”; the body can remain in the “new society” while the head stays in the “old society.” This is the relative independence of culture.

For example: from after the Opium War to the founding of the Republic of China and then to the founding of New China—in between, although China experienced a “change unseen in a thousand years,” the shock of that change to old, big China was limited; to a large extent, it really was only the signboard that changed while the content remained the same (Lu Xun). For instance, it was only twenty years after the Opium War that China began the Self-Strengthening Movement; even people at the top in China were so conservative—one can imagine the situation of the most numerous small peasants at the bottom (Jiang Tingfu, Modern History of China). Even with the founding of the Republic and the New Culture Movement, when free love and marital autonomy began to be advocated, sexual literature could be published openly, and women began to enter schools and factories and even take charge of state and social affairs, due to the extreme instability of the domestic political situation these still did not, in a short time and on the whole, form a major trend; not without some contemporaries despairing and thinking the Republic was nominal but not real. In short, these “small shoots” as causes should have borne fruit after the founding of New China; although this fruit, for various reasons, was given a new look for quite a long period after the founding of the state, the remote cause had already been planted, and when the time was ripe this fruit would after all still grow out—there was no stopping it. This is the trend presented in recent years.

However, this kind of periodization is of course not rigorous enough; after all, social conceptions are hard to demarcate. This may be a deficiency of my knowledge, and partly for the sake of narrative simplicity so I can be a bit lazy, but for now I can only write it this way. In any case, I am speaking in broad terms; if one were to go into painstaking detail, then in fact almost every topic explored in this “study” could produce a monograph for discussion, which is obviously unnecessary.

During this period, China’s ancient sexual concepts mainly presented two forms: first a period when sexual concepts were relatively open, and later a period when sexual concepts were relatively conservative.

, A period when sexual concepts were relatively open

We know that prehistoric people, almost without exception, had very profound sex worship, to the extent that even now this worship cannot be completely erased from people. Then, as a legacy of sex worship, for a long period after the Xia dynasty—when it was not yet very far from prehistory—people’s minds were still very “simple,” and thus they naturally did not treat sex as something shameful. Reflected in people’s understanding and behavior, this was openness in sexual concepts and openness in social atmosphere, although this “openness” was not the same as openness in the strict sense today—because it was merely an unconscious, most normal manifestation.

This “true temperament” of the ancients may make modern people sigh that they cannot measure up; this psychology is like people with bad intentions envying the emperor for having the chance to “travel across more than half of China to sleep with you.” But from the perspective of the whole grand history, this is also perfectly normal. Qian Zhongshu “occasionally flipped through Aesop’s Fables and was prompted” to some “thoughts,” which can serve as an apt annotation here:

“Looking at the whole of history, antiquity corresponds to humanity’s childhood period. At first it is immature; after several thousand hundred years of growth, it gradually reaches modern times. The more ancient the era, the more at the front, the shorter its history; the more the era is at the back, the deeper the experience it has accumulated, the more its age. So we, on the contrary, are the old generation of our grandfathers; the Three Dynasties of high antiquity are, on the contrary, not as long, enduring, and ancient as the modern. In this way, our attitude of believing in and loving antiquity then takes on a new meaning. Our yearning for antiquity does not necessarily mean respect for ancestors; perhaps we simply like children. It is not necessarily for respecting the old; perhaps it is rather selling old age. No old man is willing to admit that he is decayed and stubborn, so we also believe that everything modern, in value and in character, has progressed beyond antiquity.”

Before these words, Chen Hengzhe in her guide to her Western History also said something similar:

“The conduct of adults can by no means be the same as that of children; we have never mocked a child’s suckling because an adult does not suckle. History is the same…… This is the proper attitude for studying history.”

Comparing antiquity to the “children” of the whole of human history is thought-provoking; but to say modern people are “adults” or “old men” is clearly an overestimation—we should admit that the modern is still an immature period, because in a mature period every person is a thoroughly independent individual, not infringing on one another, not needing—or at least not needing—strict moral and political systems to maintain social order and ethical order, able to follow what one desires yet not overstep the bounds. In other words, the modern should be an immature “youth period.” Young people, having received education, on the surface do not dare to point and comment on this minefield of sex; yet privately they prize talking about sex, and as soon as a sensitive word is involved, they shift into the topic of sex. And also because of the education they have received, their understanding of sex is truly worrying, so they are immature.

Shishuo Xinyu records the saying: “The highest forgets feelings; the lowest does not reach feelings; where feelings lie is precisely among our kind!” In fact, “the highest” has no modern sexual troubles; “the lowest” does not have modern sexual troubles; modern sexual troubles are precisely among our kind!

If we view it with this kind of perspective, the people of that time were instead “children.” Children do not understand things and everywhere reveal true temperament, and this is instead the most normal state. Just as poets and philosophers say, truth is there with children.

This is only theory, but the facts do not seem to contradict this theory:

**a, The Book of Changes and sex and its influence—before the Zhou dynasty**

Sex worship is undoubtedly worldwide. In the “Five Kinds of World Classical Sexology” edited by Han Chuanz i, we can see: Heaven-Born尤物—ancient Greece; The Art of Love—ancient Rome; Kama Sutra—ancient India; Boating on the Sea of Love—ancient India; The Fragrant Garden—ancient Arabia. In these five classic masterpieces, there are discussions of prostitutes, homosexuality, object fetishism, how men please women, how to have sex, what kind of sex is beneficial, women’s sensitive parts…… From this, we can believe that each people in earlier times inevitably left written products of sex worship. Therefore, sex worship is of course also national:

The Book of Changes is publicly recognized as the source of Chinese traditional culture. It was compiled relatively early; judging from various legends, at least by the Zhou dynasty it had already been compiled (according to Liang Qichao, it was in Confucius’s time; see his book Confucius). Later, part of it was lost, mainly leaving the book Zhouyi. As everyone knows, in the realm of Chinese classical studies it occupies a pivotal position. But this strange book with a mysterious tint takes mysterious sex as its warp and weft and expounds the principles of all things and human affairs. In Liu Dalin’s Illustrated Guide to the History of Chinese Sex: Religion and Sex, in “The Mysteries in the Eight Trigrams,” he says: “The yin-yang culture represented by the Book of Changes systematically embodies reproductive culture, and elevates reproductive culture to a new stage. When expounding the philosophical concepts of yin-yang changes, the Book of Changes uses many terms for sexual organs and sexual behavior, profoundly reflecting the content of reproductive culture.” That hits the nail on the head. Then, grasping the “reproductive culture” of the Book of Changes undoubtedly can promote understanding of Chinese sexual concepts:

In the Book of Changes, we can first see the ancients’ emphasis on reproduction; this is what is meant by “The great virtue of Heaven and Earth is called life.”:

With Heaven and Earth, then there are the ten thousand things; with the ten thousand things, then there are male and female; with male and female, then there are husband and wife; with husband and wife, then there are father and son; with father and son, then there are ruler and minister; with ruler and minister, then there are above and below; with above and below, then ritual and righteousness have their arrangement. (Book of Changes, Xu Gua Zhuan) Heaven and Earth’s union, the ten thousand things transform and become rich; male and female combine essence, the ten thousand things transform and are born. (Xi Ci Zhuan) Heaven and Earth respond, and the ten thousand things transform and are born. (Xian) Clouds move and rain is bestowed; the myriad things take form. (Qian) Returning Maiden is the great meaning of Heaven and Earth. If Heaven and Earth do not unite, the ten thousand things do not arise. Returning Maiden is the beginning and end of humans. (Gui Mei. Gui Mei means marrying off a daughter.) Male and female being correct is the great meaning of Heaven and Earth. (Jia Ren) Heaven and Earth unite: Tai. (Tai) Heaven and Earth do not unite: Pi. (Pi. Later, the “Pi” and “Tai” in “When Pi reaches its extreme, Tai comes” originate from this, so Pi is a bad thing and Tai is a good thing. The standard is whether there is union or not!)

Reproduction has since ancient times been an important link in Chinese culture; the best example is linking whether one has children with whether one is filial—the so-called “Among the three unfilial acts, having no heir is the greatest.” Reproduction occupies such a large position in the Book of Changes; isn’t it appropriate to say it represents “reproductive culture”? But the reproduction mentioned in the Book of Changes is not like later times, avoiding sex as taboo; for example, it uses “clouds move and rain is bestowed,” “respond,” “unite,” “combine essence” to describe the state of sexual intercourse. And sexual intercourse (or reproduction) ranks very high, with very high status, on par with the “ten thousand things,” counting as the “great meaning of Heaven and Earth,” so what even are “ritual and righteousness”!

Reproduction and sex cannot be separated. Taking reproduction as the starting point, then naturally sex becomes the fulcrum. In the Xi Ci Zhuan, the Book of Changes plainly writes:

The Master said: “Qian and Kun—are they not the gate of the Changes?” Qian is a yang thing; Kun is a yin thing. Yin and yang unite in virtue, and the hard and soft have form. With this, one embodies the compositions of Heaven and Earth, and connects to the virtues of the spirits and brilliance.

Qian is six yang lines arranged from top to bottom, Kun is six yin lines arranged from top to bottom—clearly symbols of male and female genitalia (yang thing, yin thing)! As for the remaining sixty-four hexagrams, they are merely permutations and combinations of yang lines and yin lines, equivalent to speaking of matters by borrowing sex in a veiled way. In 1923, Qian Xuantong said: “I think the original Yi trigrams were things of genital worship; the Qian and Kun trigrams are precisely the marks of the genitalia of the two sexes.” In 1927 Zhou Yutong, 1928 Guo Moruo, and 1958 Li Ao (see Li Ao, Research on Chinese Sex, Part One) all published the same view. Among them, Guo Moruo said: “In the roots of the eight trigrams we can very clearly see remnants of ancient genital worship. A single line depicts the male organ; split into two depicts the female vulva; thus from this develop the concepts of male and female, father and mother, yin and yang, hard and soft, Heaven and Earth. The ancients’ numerical concept took three as the greatest, three as the most mysterious; from one yin and one yang, a line interwoven becomes three, and it just so can yield eight different forms.” (If each hexagram contains six lines, then permutations and combinations can yield sixty-four different forms.) This sentence can obtain theoretical support from Laozi, Chapter 42 as well: “The Dao gives birth to one; one gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; three gives birth to the ten thousand things.” How does “three” give birth to the ten thousand things? It turns out this “three” denotes the combination of a yang line and a yin line, namely the coupling of a yang thing and a yin thing, hence “three gives birth to the ten thousand things”! So according to today’s joke, one plus one really is three!

From exalting reproduction to speaking of affairs by borrowing sex is similar to shifting from reproduction worship to sex worship, and accords with the laws of human cognition.

From the Book of Changes, we can also find evidence of this speaking of affairs by borrowing sex. Besides the words yin and yang, other high-frequency words in the Book of Changes include hard and soft. As the name suggests, hard and soft belong respectively to yang and yin, and are symbolic objects of male and female genitalia. When we see “Hard and soft begin to unite, and difficulty is born” (Tun), we can associate it with using the pain during sex to explain the principle that good things arise from crisis; and in Sui “the hard comes and is below the soft,” in Gu “the hard is above and the soft below”—isn’t this plainly speaking of affairs in terms of sexual positions? In the 61st hexagram Xian, it even more plainly describes the foreplay of sexual intercourse:

“Xian means response. The soft rises and the hard descends; the two qi respond and join with each other; still yet delighted; the man below the woman (note “below”), thus ‘smooth, beneficial to rectitude; taking a woman is auspicious’ (marrying a woman is very auspicious.)” “Responding at the great toe (touch her toes), responding at the calf (touch her lower leg), responding at the thigh, responding at the back, responding at the cheeks and tongue (kiss her mouth, face, tongue).”

Other instances of speaking of affairs by borrowing sex include:

Though yin has beauty, it contains it and follows the king’s affairs, not daring to accomplish on its own. This is the way of Earth, the way of the wife, the way of the minister; the way of Earth has no accomplishment yet replaces with completion. (Kun. Meaning: Although yin is beautiful and has always had great effect, it does not claim credit; isn’t this what the wife’s way and minister’s way are like!)

It can be seen that speaking of affairs by borrowing sex is very much part of Chinese traditional culture! Or, the so-called “reproductive culture” is an important component of Chinese traditional culture!

As everyone knows, the Book of Changes was by no means written by one person, but rather gathers the wisdom of times before the Zhou dynasty, and is highly representative. This reproductive culture of the Book of Changes easily brings to mind the female shamans of the Yin-Shang, and Yin-Shang female shamans are usually associated with sacred prostitutes—sex worship with religious coloration①. By referencing the two together, we can somewhat unravel the mysterious coloration, with sex as warp and weft, represented by the Book of Changes.

As everyone knows, this reproductive culture profoundly influenced later culture and conceptions; therefore, later Chinese sexual concepts all contain a considerable openness, and this is not unrelated to it. Moreover, from the Book of Changes also arose yin-yang studies; from yin-yang theory also arose the ancient theory of bedroom arts, which is equivalent to the ancients’ sex education reader—thus we can see its profound influence on Chinese sexual concepts. In addition, the folk superstitions and Chinese medicine that still exist today cannot be said to be without this influence.

This influence is also expressed in the strange-recording novels and notebooks of successive dynasties. For example, in some bizarre stories of In Search of the Supernatural, whenever there are stories of people turning into animals or animals turning into people, it is said to be an omen of political upheaval, and the Book of Changes is used as the theoretical basis. The culmination of this influence is none other than Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.

Beyond this, Confucius also rated the Book of Changes very highly; he said: “Give me a few more years; at fifty to study the Changes, I may be without great faults.” Records of the Grand Historian also records that Confucius’s leather thongs were broken three times, the result of diligently studying the Changes without fatigue. When Dong Zhongshu promoted “banishing the hundred schools and honoring Confucianism alone,” yin-yang studies were merged into Confucianism. Thus Confucianism carries the coloration of yin-yang studies; and Confucianism is an important component of traditional culture, so the whole of Chinese traditional culture also carries the coloration of yin-yang studies.

Moreover, this influence has long since “gone out,” showing signs of being carried forward and developed by others; for example, a decade or two ago the Japanese writer Baku Yumemakura became famous with several volumes of Onmyoji②.

In short, from sex worship and then speaking of affairs by borrowing sex to the self-contained system of yin-yang studies, traces of sex worship began to be gradually concealed, but its essence is truly sex worship, representing open sexual concepts.

**b, From the Book of Documents to the Book of Songs—before the Spring and Autumn period**

In Investiture of the Gods, descriptions of the Forest of Meat and Pool of Wine (the “meat” includes human flesh) are used to depict the tyranny and licentiousness of Jie and Zhou. In fact, this “licentiousness,” as the social atmosphere of the time, is also possible.

The Book of Documents, Instructions of Yi records: “Dare there be constant dancing in the palace, drunken singing in the chambers—this is called the shamanic wind. Dare there be devotion to goods and beauty, constancy in roaming and hunting—this is called the licentious wind. Dare there be insulting holy words, opposing the loyal and upright, keeping far from elder virtue, being close to stubborn boys (that is homosexuality; China has always been very tolerant of this)—this is called the chaotic wind.” It can be seen that the social atmosphere at the time, in terms of sexual concepts, was quite open and even “licentious.” Of course, this passage is also not credible. Because the Book of Documents itself has been accused of being a forgery, and that passage in particular has been said to be fabricated nonsense. In short, time is too remote and no one can say clearly. However, comparing the depiction in the ancient Greek book Heaven-Born尤物 of similarly “licentious” social atmosphere at that time (likewise many brothels, casual hookups, homosexuality not prohibited), I think that passage, even if fabricated, should still reflect the social atmosphere of the time.

But even if forged, its time was only the Han dynasty; from “After Cheng Tang died, in the first year of Taijia” it was only a bit more than a thousand years away (social progress at that time was not as fast as now; a thousand years is not very long), so it has some credibility. Taking a step back, even if that “licentious” social atmosphere was not of the Xia dynasty, it should still be a reflection of the early Han dynasty (the period when the forged text was completed). Moreover, from the dialogue between King Xuan of Qi and Mencius in the Warring States period we can see: besides King Xuan of Qi liking goods and lusting after sex, the Zhou dynasty likewise had “Gong Liu liked goods” and “Tai Wang lusted after sex”; evidence is recorded in Book of Songs, Daya, Mian, and Mencius only said it was fine, as long as one could share the same likes with the people (Mencius, King Hui of Liang II).

The Book of Songs indeed has much evidence in this regard. The Book of Songs is our country’s earliest poetry collection, collecting hundreds upon hundreds of poems from about five hundred years from the early Western Zhou to the mid–Spring and Autumn period; it is said that Confucius with a sweep of his brush deleted several hundred, leaving the existing 305 poems. These poems include those made by the people—these are the “Airs”; and those made by officials—the “Elegance” and “Hymns.” (People like Deng Zhenduo do not agree with this division; see History of Chinese Literature (Volume 1), but he is somewhat hair-splitting.) I have not studied the Book of Songs in depth, so it is hard to say much; I cannot, like Mencius, see from the Daya that official figures lusted after sex and liked goods. But looking at the folk poems, the “Airs,” we discover that the so-called “licentious wind” and “chaotic wind” have their source. And because the Book of Songs, like the Book of Changes, occupies an important block in Chinese traditional culture, it is necessary to “belabor” it, thereby taking a look at the social atmosphere of the time.

Love is a major theme of these folk songs, and love and sex are inseparable, like Foucault’s so-called relationship between sex and politics—two sides of the same coin. From these love poems, the sexual concepts of the people of the time were still open, a very natural feeling. This openness means that it had not yet been strangled by moral preaching and the like and become conservative.

Here, we can see gentlemen unable to sleep for “the modest and good lady,” “that one I long for,” fantasizing all night; we can see ladies, when they “have seen the gentleman,” so happy like a riot of blossoms, and when they have “not seen the gentleman,” so sad that they wither into last year’s flowers or become as thin as a chrysanthemum. We can see how lovesick men and resentful women think of “being good forever,” “holding hands and growing old together,” how they call out “It’s getting late! It’s getting late! Why don’t you return?” while waiting for their other half amid dew and mud, how they swear, “If you don’t take me, you’ll regret it later,” how they complain, “The woman is not at fault,” but the gentleman “changes his virtue two or three times,” how they lament, with things no longer the same and people no longer there, “In the past when I went, the willows were lush; now when I come back, the rain and snow fall thick.” Of course, these are more negative forms of love, but this negativity is a naturally arising, perfectly normal emotion.

At the same time, we can also see more positive male-female pleasure and love—for example scolding bratty boys, flirting, and trysts—quite contrary to ritual teachings; it can be seen that society at the time was still very good, what moralists call the very ancientness of human hearts. A few examples:

Scolding bratty boys. (Airs of Yong, Crafty Boy): “That crafty boy, he does not speak with me. Because of you, I cannot eat. That crafty boy, he does not eat with me. Because of you, I cannot rest.” (Loose translation: You brat! You won’t talk to me, so I can’t eat! You brat! You won’t eat with me, so I can’t have peace!) (Airs of Yong, Lifting the Skirt): “If you would think of me, lift your skirt and ford the Zhen. If you do not think of me, are there no other men? The mad boy is mad indeed! If you would think of me, lift your skirt and ford the Wei. If you do not think of me, are there no other men? The mad boy is mad indeed!” (Loose translation: If you love me, then cross the river over here—hmph; if you don’t like me, do you think no one loves me? You brat!) (Interestingly, “The mad boy is mad indeed” has been punctuated by Li Ao and others as “The mad boy is mad, qie,” with qie translated by him as “cock,” as vulgar language used when cursing, not a simple sentence-final particle. Some accept this punctuation; but some translate qie as meaning “to hell with you.” Others think crafty boy and mad boy refer to same-sex sexual partners; the Chinese have always been quite open about this.)
Flirting. (Shao Nan, In the Wild There Is a Dead Musk Deer): “In the wild there is a dead musk deer; white cogon grass wraps it. There is a girl with spring in her heart; a fine man tempts her. In the woods there is rough brush; in the wild there is a dead deer. White cogon grass tied in bundles; the girl is like jade. Slowly and gently undress! Don’t touch my sash! Don’t let the dog bark!” (Loose translation from Baidu Baike: In the wild a fragrant musk deer lies dead; wrapped in white cogon grass it looks proper. A maiden’s heart is full of spring; a handsome man skillfully entices, feelings rise. In the woods the brush is ignored; in the wild the dead deer is still treated with ceremony. Wrapped in white cogon grass and buried; the maiden is like jade and yearns for you. Slowly shedding skirt and robe—what is it you seek? Don’t touch my waistband, please. Don’t let the dog keep barking; the maiden will follow you for life.)
Trysts. (Bei Feng, Quiet Girl): “Quiet girl, how fair; she waits for me at the corner of the wall. She hides and cannot be seen; I scratch my head and pace. Quiet girl, how lovely; she gives me a vermilion tube. The vermilion tube is bright; I delight in your beauty. From the pasture she brings back a tender reed; truly beautiful and uncommon. Not that you make it beautiful; it is the gift of the beauty.” (General meaning: A quiet, beautiful girl asks me to meet at the corner of the city wall, but then hides so I can’t see her, making me scratch my head, pacing uncertainly. She gives me a vermilion tube, and also gives me newly sprouted grass from the wild, brimming with affection.) (Airs of Yong, Jiang Zhongzi): “O Zhongzi, do not climb over my neighborhood, do not break my goji trees. How dare I love you? I fear my parents. Zhong is indeed to be cherished; my parents’ words are also to be feared. O Zhongzi, do not climb over my wall, do not break my mulberry trees. How dare I love you? I fear my elder brothers. Zhong is indeed to be cherished; my brothers’ words are also to be feared. O Zhongzi, do not climb over my garden, do not break my sandalwood trees. How dare I love you? I fear the many words of people. Zhong is indeed to be cherished; the many words of people are also to be feared.” (General meaning: Zhongzi, Zhongzi, don’t climb over the wall to come here; there will be so much gossip—people’s words are frightening.)

Confucius’s evaluation of the Book of Songs as “thought without depravity,” “joy but not licentious, sorrow but not injurious” is precisely an annotation to the openness of sexual concepts at the time.

**c, After the Book of Songs—after the Spring and Autumn period**

Besides the Book of Songs, in many literary works and historical materials we can see that the openness of sexual concepts in ancient China continued for quite a long time. The following examples are all somewhat representative; they can reflect the openness of sexual concepts at the time, or at least a lack of resistance to sex and lack of shame, clearly different from later times:

The book Laozi contains terms such as “primal female,” “mysterious female,” “valley spirit,” “gate,” “root,” and the like; it contains reasoning drawn from the phenomenon that an infant does not yet understand what intercourse is, yet the little penis will naturally erect (“Not yet knowing the union of male and female, yet it stands firm—this is the utmost of essence”); it contains lines like “Within it there is essence; its essence is very real,” “The ten thousand things bear yin and embrace yang,” etc. In fact, similar to the Book of Changes, it carries the coloration of “yin-yang culture.”
Even the moralists represented by Confucius never slandered sex as something filthy and unbearable—what’s more, Confucius is rumored to be the product of a wild union (this claim is refuted by Kong Qingdong; see his article describing his own genealogy). In the Confucian understanding, sex is only something a gentleman must not indulge in. Besides, they likewise regard reproduction and human relations as extremely important matters. For example, Confucius would praise the simplicity of male-female relations in the Book of Songs, and would also say words with the coloration of Platonic spiritual love (“The flowers of the tangdi tree, how they lean and turn. How could I not think of you? Only that your home is far.” The Master said: “If one has not thought of it—how far can it be?”).
The table of contents of In Search of the Supernatural: Xuanchao and a goddess become husband and wife; a woman transforms into a man; three men jointly marry one woman; a man transforms into a woman and gives birth; changes in men’s and women’s clothing; a man transforms into a woman; men’s and women’s shoes; one body with male and female in one; a woman transforms into a man but not completely; Ren Qiao’s wife gives birth to conjoined female infants; a woman has a vulva in her belly or on her head; a woman transforms into a silkworm; Huang’s mother transforms into a giant turtle; men and women unite after death; Lu Chong’s hidden marriage; a giant turtle transforms into a wife…… Someone who doesn’t know and sees these titles might think they are modern stories! And then look at the table of contents of Shishuo Xinyu: valuing the worthy and changing one’s lust; Prime Minister Wang makes female entertainers; Ruan Ji bids farewell to his sister-in-law; Ruan drunk with the neighbor’s wife; Wang Hun and wife joke and laugh; Shi Chong drinks and beheads a beauty; Shi Chong sets maidservants and fragrance in the toilet; Wang Anfeng and wife call each other “qingqing”; Jia Chong’s daughter secretly has an affair with Han Shou…… It even specially sets aside a chapter, “Worthy Ladies, Nineteen,” devoted to stories of these extraordinary women. It can be seen that by the Northern and Southern Dynasties, we were still open about sex, or at least did not avoid speaking of it. (Book from Yuelu Publishing House, punctuated and edited by Qian Zhenmin)
In Strategies of the Warring States, Strategies of Han, the Queen Dowager Xuan of Qin uses her own sexual experience to reason with a foreign envoy; in the Han dynasty the earliest spring-palace paintings began to circulate; Liu Bei’s ancestor, Prince Jing of Zhongshan Liu Sheng, designed the earliest extant sex tool in China, and later sex tools emerged one after another; Cao Cao’s will includes “After I am gone for ten thousand years, you all should remarry”; Northern Wei Code: “Men and women who associate not according to ritual all die”; when Wu Zetian’s ministers urged her to “favor” men less, she actually rewarded him; in the Tang dynasty one could openly discuss sexual techniques and sexual literature; Tang Code • Household and Marriage stipulated: if children, without obtaining parents’ consent, had already established a marital relationship, the law recognized it; only minors who did not obey their elders were counted as violating the law; in the Song dynasty one could openly hold women’s nude wrestling (for this point about the Song, see Ge Zhaoguang, “Intellectual History: Doing Both Addition and Subtraction,” Reading magazine, 2003 Issue 1)

d, Summary

From the above, the early openness of sexual concepts, whether in theory or in historical facts, accords with actual circumstances. It is just that from these materials alone, we still cannot see when this openness gradually tended toward conservatism. There is currently no conclusion in academia either—some say as late as the Tang dynasty, some say as late as the Song dynasty; each has its reasons, and opinions differ.

But from my phenomenological perspective, the existence of this openness should be beyond doubt. As for whether the gradual conservatism was in the Tang or the Song, I think this debate has no answer. For example, although the Book of Songs has much open male-female love, it also contains some traces of moral concepts; similar to the Book of Songs, the Three Hundred Yuefu Poems also contains poems like “The Peacock Flies Southeast,” a love tragedy caused by parental interference. Likewise, although the Song dynasty had women’s nude wrestling, this may have been only an “elegant taste” of the “upper class.” The loosening of sexual concepts in the Tang may partly owe to the fact that its ruling class were “barbaric” “Hu people.” And for another example, Cambodia has a famous commodity—virgins. But this cannot represent the openness of Cambodian sexual concepts, because it is precisely these virgins who are despised by relatives and society, no matter how noble their original intentions.

This “study” does not have the ability to participate in such debate, thus it only speaks with phenomena and existence.

Notes

①According to Zhu Yan’s book What on Earth Has Happened, in “Playing England Amidst Powdered Ranks and Flower Thickets,” it says: as early as the Babylonian kingdom in 3000 BC, prostitutes appeared, called “sacred prostitutes.” The great revolutionary mentor Engels pointed out in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “Prostitution for money was originally a religious act; it was performed in the temple of the goddess of love, and the money earned originally all went to the temple treasury…… Temple slaves and…… religious dancing girls were the earliest prostitutes. This self-sacrifice was at first every woman’s duty; later it was carried out only by these nuns and then by all other women.” Regarding “sacred prostitutes,” the ancient Greek historian Herodotus gave a relatively detailed description in Histories: “The Babylonians have the foulest custom: every woman born there must have intercourse with an unknown man near the temple of Aphrodite.” From this we can see the ancient Babylonians’ attitude toward sex as sacred and open had become a custom. Yin-Shang female shamans are similar to this. For another example, in central Java, Indonesia, there is the famous Gunung Kemukus sex mountain; pilgrims must go up the mountain every 35 days to have intercourse with 7 women, a surviving legacy. A few more words—by world convention, sacred prostitutes became more and more lowly in social concepts, becoming the insulting term “prostitute.” Only with the rise of modern feminism did it change to the neutral term “sex worker.” The change in their status is not unrelated to politics. For example, also by world convention, almost at the same time as Guan Zhong, Solon’s reforms also allowed the development of prostitution (see Heaven-Born尤物, “On Professional Prostitutes”); the purpose in both cases was to develop the economy, except the former was “planned” (state-run) and the latter was “market.” Li Ao’s essay “And Let’s View the Green History from the Brothel” attributes the development of prostitution in ancient China to three stages, very insightful: 1. “State-owned enterprise”—to fill state use. 2. Hard to be a “prostitute”—to fill literary use. 3. Inside and outside indistinguishable—to fill household use. From this angle, we can more or less glimpse changes in society’s sexual concepts.

②In the first volume of Onmyoji one can see “The Gardenia Woman”: the gardenia woman has no mouth; she transformed out of a character in the Heart Sutra, the character being the “female” in “受想行识亦复女是.” In antiquity “女” could be used for “如,” but the character 女 lacks a mouth, thus the gardenia woman transformed from 女 has no mouth. This kind of story is very far-fetched, but it shows that yin-yang theory is a systematic doctrine.

A period when sexual concepts were relatively conservative

a, The “conservatism” of moral preaching

Here it is necessary to briefly explore moral preaching:

The emergence of morality originates from the group; one person has no moral problems. Groups naturally arise because humans seek to protect physiological safety and alleviate spiritual loneliness. At the beginning of human group living, when resisting nature, taboos emerged. Taboos refer to things “that must not be done”; having such taboos is nothing more than surviving better. Precisely because taboos can guide people to survive better, feelings of worship also readily arise from them. With the formation of society and the formation of the state, humans become smarter and more powerful in resisting nature. At this time, what people pay more attention to is handling internal order within society and the state, and morality accordingly comes into being. Morality will of course be influenced by taboos, so morality likewise teaches people this “must not do.” But merely “must not do” is not enough; morality will also, according to actual circumstances, issue the voice of “should do this.” That is to say, in any case, morality has always been a reflection of reality, guiding people in dealing with reality. The more complex the actual circumstances, the more complex the content of morality; therefore, with social progress and the perfection of the state apparatus, morality will also form a tight system. As everyone knows, moral preaching to a large extent runs counter to actual circumstances. Put the other way around, actual circumstances often oppose moral preaching. That is, moral preaching has considerable conservatism, so sometimes reading moral history either straightforwardly or inversely, combining both, is practically a history of human nature. We have to make such an estimate.

Morality has distinct transmission characteristics. The feature of moral transmission lies in that it relies on an a priori-style indoctrination into the human brain, deeply rooted within it, making one “unable to stop,” and at this time the brain is unable to make rational judgments and can only be forced to accept. Therefore, its influence is lifelong, and no one can escape. Actual circumstances are diverse due to the influence of multiple factors; it can never be quantitatively covered by conclusions that generalize everything, so social sexual concepts cannot be asserted as one or two on the basis of one or two actual situations; one can only speak from mainstream, surface moral preaching. But because moral preaching has lifelong influence on people, actual circumstances can in turn reflect moral preaching. We have to make such an estimate.

The transmission of morality can become distorted; China has five thousand years of history, and its morality in particular can become distorted. This is formed under the influence of multiple factors and need not be belabored. We have to make such an estimate.

For morality to be transmitted, it must rely on some kind of power, and this power rather depends on political power, because ideology has always been held by political power, and the effectiveness of ideological propaganda is proportional to the degree of political authoritarianism and to social communications and information technology. Therefore, the more time advances and the more history develops, the easier ideology is to be controlled by political power, and the more powerful the effect. And because the unit of political power is people, and people are influenced by moral concepts, morality can also indirectly influence political power. We have to make such an estimate.

The consequence of this is: the original intent of morality is hollowed out, while the rules and frames of morality are left behind. An important work of social psychology, Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd, says: “All institutions are the product of ideas, feelings, and customs, and ideas, feelings, and customs will not be rewritten together just because the code is rewritten,” so he believes that “institutions and governments are the product of the race; they did not create a certain era, but were created by that era.” Based on this, he believes groups are the same: they are often very conservative and not easy to change; they resist everything new, but once they accept it, they need quite a long time before changing again. Isn’t morality also like this? We have to make such an estimate.

Morality arises from the group and acts on the individual; and because it has a tight system, there are unreasonable parts disconnected from reality. Then morality degenerates into the group’s weapon, used to oppress outliers, and the personal tragedies caused are inevitable. Such examples can be seen in the American writer Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes. In the story, an unsociable teenager lives from childhood under the soft-knife bullying of classmates, school, and society’s morality, to the point of developing “post-traumatic stress disorder,” and finally shoots people, causing a case and tragedy. Because of morality’s “conservatism” and weaknesses, it can cause various negative problems. We have to make such an estimate.

Of course, we do not deny the rationality of morality. It can be said that the existence of morality itself is reasonable and necessary. Let us borrow the words that Colverton says in the appendix after The Sociology of the Sexes when criticizing the author Malinowski: “Social thought needs the coercive force of culture. Social thought without the coercive force of culture will lack clues and unity, and be insipid and meaningless.”①

Although the author’s grounding in national learning is very shallow, I can only use the above estimates as a supplement; below is an exploration of mainstream cultural sexual concepts:

As everyone knows, from the beginning of the imperial examination system until its end, and even continuing until before the founding of New China in 1949, Confucian culture in China has always had enormous influence, even serving as the mainstream thought used by officials. Chinese sexual concepts cannot but be connected with Confucian propositions.

In the Analects, we can see sayings such as “value the worthy and change one’s lust,” “the thing to guard against is lust,” “only women and petty people are hard to deal with”; we can see that when “the Master met Nanzi,” and Zilu got angry thinking Confucius had done something bad, Confucius swore to Heaven: “If I have done what I ought not, may Heaven reject me, may Heaven reject me”; we can see Confucius not speaking of “human nature and the Way of Heaven”; we can see: “The people of Qi sent female musicians; Ji Huanzi accepted them; for three days he did not attend court. Confucius left.” These show Confucius’s attitude of keeping away from female beauty, belonging to “what I ought not,” with the implication that those who wish to accomplish great things must not be addicted to women. For another example, Mencius advocated “few desires,” and Xunzi promoted “restraining desires.” Looking at later Confucian scholars’ preaching works, it is nothing more than this.

But Confucianism also has very obvious reproductive worship. Confucianism holds that “food and sex are human nature,” that “having no heir is the greatest,” that “the great virtue of Heaven and Earth is called life,” and that strengthening human relations is strengthening the great relations among humans and is practicing the Duke of Zhou’s rites—these are the best proofs.

In summary, Confucian sexual concepts, in one sentence, should be summarized like this: while acknowledging that “food and sex are human nature,” it also believes that the gentleman “without desire is strong,” and should have few desires and restrain desires, but not abstain.

We know that Confucianism also takes maintaining social order and ethical order as its own mission; “Let the ruler be ruler, the minister minister, the father father, the son son” is the best example. In order to maintain this order, they inherited the preaching of the three bonds and five constants (the doctrine of who listens to whom—especially women listening to men, subordinates listening to superiors) and developed it, and in later history they accommodated the needs of political power. Under this strict order, men could, relatively openly, “say this and that” and sneak around, while women were not allowed to speak, much less do, words or deeds that “harm social mores.” The relationship between superiors and subordinates is similarly like this—the so-called “Only officials may set fires; common people may not light lamps.” So this causes even social sexual concepts to carry class character; and social sexual concepts are determined by the strong or upper classes. Adding the influence of considerable openness or non-abstinence in traditional concepts, this leads me to make this estimate: ancient China could not have a period of abstinence like the religious society of medieval Western Europe; ancient China’s social sexual concepts mainly depended on these male compatriots’ theories, embodied in everyone’s behavioral manifestations.

But reproductive worship and yet using纲常 preaching to maintain social order and ethical order, by world convention, contains a tendency to attempt to deprive people of sexual desire and make people merely sows. Especially when the political power it depends on, in order to better practice autocracy and realize centralization, has no other way, this tendency invariably transforms into distorted ritual teachings that suppress human nature, becoming spiritual shackles. That is to say, though not abstinent, it also has considerable repression of sex.

As everyone knows, from Emperor Wu of Han’s “banishing the hundred schools and honoring Confucianism alone,” when Confucian thought obtained the supreme nature of its traditional status, to the founding of the imperial examination system providing an opportunity to consolidate this status, to after the Tang dynasty (in short, not in the Tang dynasty) when it developed greatly, and finally to its supreme position by the Ming–Qing transition, its dependence on political power and political power’s utilization of it became increasingly unbelievable. The developmental stages of these four periods were almost strengthened as authoritarian power strengthened.So, this shift from fertility worship to the disguised suppression of human nature is especially evident in Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism, and it is also what political power was bound to pursue when it had no other way to better enforce autocracy and realize centralization. “Starving to death is a small matter; losing chastity is a great matter,” “Preserve heavenly principle; destroy human desires,” and “Eliminate all human desires; restore all heavenly principle” are the best proofs of their theory. Moreover, ever since Neo-Confucianism was put to official use, a great mass of chaste and martyred women were correspondingly produced in large quantities. This shows that the suppression of human nature reached its height from this point; “class oppression” (referring to men over women) also reached its height from this point.

But this extreme Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism of “destroying human nature” actually does not accord with the most basic theoretical principles of Confucianism—for example, it is not “the Doctrine of the Mean.” Through these tinted glasses that are not of the Mean, even the Book of Songs praised by Confucius was directly cursed by Zhu Xi as “the music of Zheng and Wei, all lascivious sounds.” Even the “fondness for beauty” that Mencius did not deny was pointed to as “chasing things”——Wang Yangming: “If one loves beauty, then one’s whole mind is on loving beauty; if one loves goods, then one’s whole mind is on loving goods. Can this be being single-minded as the master? This is what is called chasing things; it is not being single-minded as the master. Being single-minded as the master is to focus exclusively on one heavenly principle.”

Yet Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism is not without a more even-handed side. For example, Wang Yangming does not curse the extant Book of Songs, only the portion Confucius deleted. He says: “The Songs, from ‘The Two Nans onward’……. all lascivious, fawning, indulgent, and wanton lines—who knows how many thousands upon hundreds of them……. Confucius deleted them all and set forth the correct; only then did those interpretations come to an end.” (Wang Yangming’s view, see Instructions for Practical Living)

Although the theoretical shackles on sexual concepts had developed to the degree of Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism—almost as if it wished to strip people of sexual desire and make people nothing but sows—it can be seen that Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism only took “destroying human desires” as personal cultivation and the highest realm, distinguishing orthodoxy from heterodoxy, distinguishing the gentleman from the petty man; it did not carry a sense of “must do,” and as for how many sages and gentlemen there were, that is unknown.

As everyone knows, aside from Confucianism, even Daoism and Buddhism, both highly influential, have a similar “ascetic” coloring to Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism, and they raised it even earlier than Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism. But this “asceticism” is nothing more than a kind of “great desire”: giving up the small desires of life (the seven emotions and six desires, and so on) to pursue the great desire of life (sages and immortals, and so on). It is in fact a kind of fishing lure, and is not essentially different from indulgence. (Zhang Songhui, Life: Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Chapter 2, Life Section, “From Asceticism to Indulgence: An ‘Easy’ Leap”) Because philosophically, whether asceticism or indulgence, the essence is desire.

For example, in the story Zhang Songhui quotes from Record of the Dharma Treasure Through the Ages: “Empress Wu consulted the various great virtuosi: ‘Do you, reverends (i.e., monks), have desire or not?’ Shenxiu, Xuanyue, Lao’an, Xuance, and others all said they had no desire. Empress Wu asked Chan Master Shen: ‘Do you, reverend, have desire or not?’ Chan Master Shen… answered: ‘I have desire.’ Empress Wu asked again: ‘How can you have desire?’ Shen answered: ‘If there is birth, there is desire; if there is no birth, there is no desire.’ Empress Wu awakened upon these words.” “If there is birth, there is desire” speaks to the impossibility of asceticism.

For example, the Laozi says: “The five colors make people’s eyes blind; the five sounds make people’s ears deaf; the five flavors make people’s mouths numb; galloping and hunting make people’s hearts go mad; rare goods make people’s conduct go astray. Therefore the sage is for the belly and not for the eyes; thus he discards that and takes this.” This purpose of discarding that and taking this reveals the great desire behind asceticism.

The three teachings share the same stream; the three teachings were originally one family—at least monks and Daoists are similar. Here, they are collectively referred to as monks and the like.

Monks and the like seek loftiness; yet in Dream of the Red Chamber we can see a young nun having an affair with someone, the two of them only a bit over ten years old (the first time); in Water Margin we see a group of monks lose their souls at the sight of Pan Qiaoyun; Pei Ruhai has a tryst with Pan Qiaoyun at a fixed time every day. According to Mr. Ah Q’s theory, it would be: “If a nun can be touched by a monk, why can’t I touch her?” Recently there were reports saying “Nun and monk have an affair and she gets pregnant; monk refuses responsibility; nun commits suicide,” and it is said that the monk “has always behaved improperly, drinking wine and eating meat and doing anything without restraint, a ‘lecherous monk.’” I remember when I was a child I encountered a monk begging at our door who said he wanted to eat oyster cakes—“It’s fine even if there’s meat!” I once wrote a short essay about monks, “Are Monks Lustful or Not,” exploring the sexual embarrassment of monks and the like as follows:

People curse monks, saying: “One character and he is a monk; two characters and he is a ‘heshang’ (monk). Three characters and he is an ‘official of ghostly pleasures’; four characters and he is a hungry ghost in lust.” (Water Margin) Su Dongpo cursed monks: “Not bald, not venomous; not venomous, not bald; the balder, the more venomous; the more venomous, the balder.” It seems that except for Japanese monks—who marry and have children, with no prohibition on wine or meat, even hereditary—other monks and the like have no such privilege. Boccaccio’s Decameron curses priests and nuns all over; there is a story in it where a man pretends to be mute and sneaks into a nunnery as a gardener; wherever his amorousness reaches, not a single nun in the convent escapes an illicit affair with him! Monks who advocate asceticism indeed suppress people and sex; monks who indulge while dwelling outside the world likewise distort people and sex. A passionate monk like Su Manshu, in the end, still died early of depression. Even Tsangyang Gyatso, the Sixth Dalai Lama who was not Tibetan, could not help but sigh: “How can there be a method that fulfills both in this world, that does not betray the Tathagata and does not betray you?” In the Kizil Thousand Buddha Caves there is a painting, “The Entertainment of the Crown Prince,” in which more than a dozen half-naked and fully naked beauties surround Prince Siddhartha, yet he can say “form is emptiness” and “the four great elements are empty,” because his hands are also empty (note: meaning he did not “masturbate with his hands,” and he also says of himself that he “sat with a beauty in his lap without disorder”). It is not that he is not lustful; there is no lust in his heart.

Speaking ill of monks is by no means groundless. In Xiaolin Guangji: Monks and Daoists we can see:

A local official visits a temple and asks a monk whether he eats meat. He says, “Not much. But when I drink wine, I use a little.” The official says, “Then you drink wine too?” He says, “Not much. But when my wife’s father and wife’s brother come, I accompany them a little.” The local official angrily says, “You even have a wife—nothing like the precepts of a renunciant. Tomorrow I shall report to the county magistrate and have your ordination certificate reclaimed.” The monk says, “No need to trouble yourself. Three years ago when the bandit affair broke out, it was already reclaimed.”

……On the mountain there is a seller of characters, each character costing one wen……. (the young monk) then took sixteen wen and went. The writer inscribed: “A clever monk, looks like the Tathagata. Sleeps until the fifth watch, hard.” The monk said, “The end rhyme is inelegant; I’ll add four wen—please change it.” The character-seller said, “Once written, how can I erase it? Better I add to it for you.” He took up the brush and wrote: “Hard until broad daylight.”

A monk walks along the road; a little servant calls out: “Monk, monk—baldhead, dissolute!” The monk angrily says: “I’ll do a somersault onto your mother’s belly.”

A monk steals a woman; the woman’s husband gives chase. After he jumps a wall, he falls back down, sees on the ground traces of a bald head’s contact, and then makes a fist and points at the marked dirt as if it were a cap, saying: “No fear that a Daoist won’t admit it.”

In order to curse monks, there are allegorical stories both in China and abroad, saying that when a monk dies he goes to hell, while when a prostitute dies she goes to heaven. In Xiaolin Guangji: Monks and Daoists there are two stories as follows:

Someone who has always not believed in Buddhist rites, after death sits under very heavy guilt. So he pours out his nether wealth, invites monk-ghosts to perform services, but cannot find any no matter how he searches. He asks people: “Are there truly no monks here?” They say: “There are plenty who come, but they’ve all been sent to Ye Capital. (the eighteenth level of hell)”

A nun and a prostitute die and see King Yama. The king asks the prostitute: “What was your livelihood in your past life?” The prostitute says: “Keeping a man and receiving clients.” The king judges: “Keeping a man and receiving clients, convenient for lonely men (bachelors). Send her back to the world of the living; go quickly to be reborn.” He asks the nun: “Who are you?” She answers: “Eating vegetarian and chanting the Buddha’s name.” The king also judges: “Eating vegetarian and chanting the Buddha’s name, Buddha-mouth with snake-heart. One hundred bamboo strips—break the spine tendons.” The nun begs and says: “Not to hide from Your Majesty, though this little woman is a nun, in fact I keep a man in secret and run a private den.”

From the practical standpoint, from the early beginnings of Chinese Buddhism there are records of monks marrying and having children, even having affairs and visiting brothels, and among them are eminent monks. (Author’s note: Marriage and childbearing occurred because the early Buddhist system at that time was not strict; later, this phenomenon was not easy to occur, unless the monk first returned to lay status, or the system allowed it.) “For example, Kumarajiva accepted what the Later Qin ruler bestowed, marrying more than a dozen wives; the principle is the same as a certain female Russian legislator proposing to have Putin’s sperm planted throughout the wombs of all Russian women compatriots. And for example, the Fifth Patriarch of Chan, Master Hongren (the Sixth Patriarch was the illiterate Huineng), was an illegitimate child—a monk’s illegitimate child. Not only that, formidable monks ‘were even so lust-bold as to dare to have an affair with an imperial consort.’”

When early Buddhist theory was still immature, those chicken-stealing dog-sneaking matters, monks still did not dare to bring up as doctrine; but “after Chan flourished,” they invented the theories of “no discrimination” and “no attachment,” to “legally” and “openly” take wives and concubines, openly to keep prostitutes and roam for pleasure. So-called no discrimination means no distinction between men and women—for example, Guanyin Bodhisattva is actually sexless, can be male or female, both male and female, neither male nor female, can be human or beast; since there is no discrimination, then engaging in male–female acts is no discrimination, and if you denounce it as wrong, it is instead you who are distinguishing male and female too clearly. No attachment is nothing more than this. Obviously, lofty theories have always been an excuse for vulgarity; no discrimination and no attachment are the same. Even so, if this vulgarity is beneficial to human nature, then vulgarity it is—let it be. Thus, in the Southern Song, Chan master Song Gao of the Ji lineage said: “Eating and drinking wine and meat does not hinder bodhi; committing theft and fornication does not hinder prajna.” Not only that: Buddhism even has the proposition of “using desire to stop desire,” encouraging you to indulge first; after indulging, once you see everything clearly, asceticism is not hard either. Under such lofty theory, many lofty stories of lofty people also appeared; take the nun Wuzhuo as an example:

(Song Gao’s chief disciple Daoyan) saw Zhuo (Wuzhuo) not wearing a single thread, lying on her back on the bed. The master pointed and said: “What place is this?” Zhuo said: “All Buddhas of the three times, the six generations of patriarchs, and old monks under heaven all come forth from within this!” The master said: “Would you allow this old monk or not?” Zhuo said: “Here we don’t ferry donkeys or horses.”

This fact is simply the old saying “emperors, kings, generals, and ministers all come from here”! And ordinary monks and the like cannot produce any lofty stories; what they can do is those licentious things mentioned above. For example, in the Song there were poor families who attached their wives to monks “letting them fornicate,” profiting from it. In the Qing there was the Suzhou Yeping Temple monk who “built secret rooms to hide women, indulging in licentiousness at will.” As a result he was exiled to Heilongjiang.

It should be seen that even if a dawn of human nature appeared in monks’ theoretical systems, common people do not know it, most monks do not understand it, and society will not comprehend it. If a monk does not look like a monk, he will still be condemned by society, even exiled, sentenced. (Much benefited from Zhang Songhui’s book)

Although the above is not a strict academic exposition, still, just from my phenomenological talk, from the above exposition we can see: no matter which among Confucianism, Buddhism, or Daoism, especially Confucianism, all have an ascetic tendency. This tendency is a pursuit of a higher realm, and does not function as an -ism, that is, asceticism being disseminated in society.

In general, this is the “conservatism” of morality.

From the above discussion of morality, we can easily draw the following conclusions:

1. As the moral norms of China’s late antiquity, “sexual frigidity” may reflect precisely the “bad” social atmosphere. We must never, just because sages shout benevolence, righteousness, and morality every day, think that the ancients all emphasized benevolence, righteousness, and morality②.

2. We cannot ignore the influence of moral preaching on people’s cognition and concepts; we cannot ignore its shaping of the Chinese character. For example, the Chinese being ashamed to speak of sex cannot but be said to have been influenced by moral preaching; China’s lack of Western-style ascetic doctrine cannot but be said to be because there was no powerful ascetic theory.

3. The influence of moral preaching is enormous; therefore, the negative effects it causes cannot be denied either. For example, Confucianism advocates that men and women should not touch when giving and receiving, and that men and women should not sit together, resulting in the Chinese people’s abnormal gender relations view and sexual psychology. For another example, influenced by some extreme factors within Confucian thought, developing into Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism that goes so far as to “destroy human nature,” it caused many distorted hearts and sacrificed lives.

In sum, from the theoretical tendency and orientation of moral preaching, its sexual concept is conservative rather than ascetic. Applied to society, “Take the higher as your model and you only get the middle; take the middle as your model and you only get the lower,” so the whole society cannot form an overall climate of asceticism; it can only be a great hotbed of conservatism.

b, From conservatism to sexual shame, far from asceticism

Li Ao in “Chinese Nationals and ‘Sex’” says:

In China, beyond many historical phenomena that “affirm ‘sex’” (pro-sexual), there is another kind of historical phenomenon that “opposes ‘sex’” (anti-sexual). This phenomenon manifests as regulation, constraint, and even suppression of “sex.”

After that, he gives examples:

Under the marvelous use of modern methods, although historical phenomena are many, there is indeed no lack of lines of reasoning to be found. For instance, a true expert can tell at a glance that hexagrams such as the “Xian hexagram” in the I Ching depict sexual intercourse positions; the character “qie” in “Qian Shang” of the Book of Songs refers to the male genital; in the “Earth Office” section of the Rites of Zhou, the lines “ordering men and women to meet” and “those who run off are not forbidden” refer to a “mating season,” a “feast promiscuity”; the “yuan pin” in the Laozi is the female genital; the reason Confucius cursed women in the Analects is because he had divorced; in Ling Xuan’s The Unofficial Biography of Zhao Feiyan, Emperor Cheng of Han has a “foot fetish”; in Chang Qu’s Chronicles of Huayang, Guan Yunchang’s leaving Cao Cao was because he was jealous; in Xu Yingqiu’s Yuzhitang Tan Hui, the Six Dynasties woman Lou Cheng in “women dressed as men” is a sex change; in Liu Zongyuan’s Collected Works of Liu Hedong, “The Biography of Hejian” is about a Tang dynasty woman’s whirlwind of promiscuity; in Xu Shiluan’s Song Erotica, “Cruelty” records that Song dynasty Wang Jixun was a kind of sadomasochism (sadism); in Tao Zongyi’s Chuogenglu, the chapter “Strange Encounter” is about a Yuan person’s erotic daydream; in Ming Zhang Dai’s Langhuan Wenji, “Biography of Lu Yungu” depicts mysophobia; in Qing Xue Fucheng’s Tang’an Notes, “A Strange Fate of Entering Office” writes that Heshen’s “talking and laughing with his shadow” is a kind of shadow fetish……

As for the reasons for opposing sex, he summarizes:

Mystery and fear of “sex”: the ancestors lacked production knowledge; they felt mystery and fear toward the results produced by the interaction of the sexes.
Fatigue of “sex”: “sexual fatigue” is a phenomenon produced after sexual satisfaction or after excess; this phenomenon easily leads to a kind of reaction—feeling hatred or weariness toward sex, moving toward beliefs of moderation or world-renouncing abstinence.
Jealousy and possessiveness: in antiquity, women were only part of men’s property. Due to “possessiveness over property, triggering jealousy, and then combined with concepts like family and children,” slowly constructing many rules, constraints, and even theories suppressing “sex.”
Spiritual factors: because some people cannot be satisfied with the status quo and seek spiritual consolation to make up for worldly emptiness, “asceticism” or thoughts similar to asceticism arise. Thus they have to publicize the sins of “sex,” exaggerating or framing everything related to “sex.”

The reasons he summarizes are not unreasonable, and can serve as a supplement to this “study,” but the conclusion Li Ao draws from this is something we cannot agree with. He says: “In the past, under the shroud of Christian asceticism, the West’s sexual taboos, compared with historical China, can truly be called big brother and little brother. But through their efforts in the past few decades, they have finally broken free of traditional unreasonable regulations, constraints, and suppression of sex; finally they have gradually moved toward an open society, established a conventional sexual morality, cultivated customs, revised laws, and enabled their young men and women to recover the singing they had in the ‘Garden of Eden’ before eating the apple.” In other words, he examines the Chinese nation’s “sex” from the perspectives of modern science, law, and love, so he equates China’s traditional attitude toward sex (morality) with Western Christian asceticism (religion).

This is unreasonable. In comparison, I lean more toward Li Yinhe’s comparison of Chinese and Western attitudes toward sex in Sex, Marriage: East and West. In the first chapter of this book she has a brilliant discussion of this:

In the West, controversies related to sex often revolve around right and wrong, normal and abnormal, good deeds and sin; in China, what concerns the status of sex is instead the issues of important and trivial, lofty and shameful, refined and vulgar. In Western society, sex is in confrontation—confrontations between suppression and resistance, normal and pathological, sin and non-sin; in Chinese society, sex is ignored; sex, between important and unimportant, lofty and lowly, righteous qi and ghostly evil qi, belongs to the latter. Quite a few scholars have long discussed the view that the West is a guilt society and China is a shame society, and this makes a lot of sense. On the issue of sex, Western religion or ideology will warn people what kinds of sexual behavior are sinful and not to do them; while Chinese traditional ethics or ideology will proclaim that sex is shameful, and must be restrained to the lowest limit; it must be done secretly behind people’s backs, and not hung on one’s lips; although everyone has this bestial desire, more noble people can restrain it more, and the noblest people can restrain it most. The differences between the West and China on sex have produced at least two types of consequences for each: In the West, the negative consequence is that people are subjected to the “gaze” of norms judging behavior as correct or incorrect, and there are many things to worry about—worrying about not having orgasm, worrying about not having the right body shape, worrying about one’s sexual orientation being off, etc., and at the drop of a hat they seek help from psychologists; the positive effect is that, on the one hand there is suppression, on the other hand there is resistance; the more truth is debated, the clearer it becomes, so women win the right to “female-on-top”; homosexuals win the right to marry; sadomasochism enthusiasts win the right to receive special services in secret rooms; sexologists openly announce survey results vastly different from the original intentions of the governments that hire them to do research—pornographic materials not only do not lead to increased sex crime rates, they lower sex crime rates. In China, the positive consequence is that, because sex is ignored, people’s “self” instead takes the opportunity to be in a free and lax state; oral sex and anal sex are done as one wishes—there is not only no one else to control it, but one’s own heart has no anxiety about such acts; if there is no orgasm then there is no orgasm, and there is no need to see a doctor; the negative consequences have two aspects: on the one hand, because sex is regarded as low and vulgar, quite a few people submit to residual bestiality and thus willingly degenerate, doing many base deeds, and when doing them cannot help feeling guilty and deeply ashamed, hating their own “id”; on the other hand, a small number of lofty persons overcome the contemptible lust and reach a sublime realm, filling their hearts with righteous qi, thinking only of national economy and people’s livelihood, yet they are regarded as “fake moralists” and “hypocritical gentlemen,” adding quite a bit of distress.

Li Yinhe’s discussion is highly enlightening. By her account, we understand why the West Li Ao speaks of could so quickly “cultivate customs and revise laws” in the past few decades, while China has never been able to stir up any major dispute; even if there is, it is only a temporary bubble that soon vanishes.

—Because China is a society full of shame, and shame is the gentleman/petty-man talk in traditional moral preaching; the West is a society rich in guilt, and guilt is the doctrine of original sin in Christianity.

Because China’s moral preaching has always been attached under political power, with limited coercive force; in the West, ecclesiastical power was once higher than royal power, exerting powerful control from a person’s birth to death.

So Chinese people have always not publicized the things a gentleman “denies”; what is publicized is only Cai Gen Tan, and occasionally an Anti-Cai Gen Tan, which is also a small number of honest and dull people, unable to shake the mainstream; while Westerners are enthusiastic about debate and controversy, distinguishing who is right and who is wrong. Even Christianity is divided into multiple sects, among which fundamentalists (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, women in Arab regions) to this day do not allow women to reveal their faces. (So in 2008 a case in Yemen of a ten-year-old girl getting divorced shocked the entire Western world; she was even chosen as some “international woman of the year,” and a French journalist published a thin At Ten Years Old I Divorced—in Chinese people’s eyes, this is truly making a fuss and not worth publicizing.)

So Chinese people are “benevolence and righteousness and morality on their lips, but male theft and female prostitution in their hearts,” turning pale at the mention of sex, yet not lacking chicken-stealing dog-sneaking types; in the West’s ascetic period, there were occasionally libertines like Don Juan, but more often there were figures like Archdeacon Claude in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, whose sexual psychology was extremely distorted by ascetic thought.

So China’s tradition of love poetry and the tradition of “fragrant herbs and beauties” did not disappear; moreover, although some ancient spring-palace pictures and erotic novels and other sexual cultural works were banned, they were always widely circulated in private; while it was not until 1928, with Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, that an erotic novel caused a sensation in the West, and in Britain and other countries it was even listed as a banned book by the authorities, but after a court trial in 1958 the ban was lifted and it could again be read openly in full.

So, although in China later the despotic force of political power grew ever stronger and the power caused by morality consequently “rose and fell together,” in China one only saw some “moral models,” while as cultural rebound, most people nevertheless remained as they were, even intensifying; while in the West, although the ascetic era is gone forever, people still worry about this and that, worrying that their sexual concepts are not “scientific,” and thus it is the Western world that has great development in sexology…..

So, we have to say, Li Ao’s “marvelous use of modern methods” went wrong!——

Moreover, examples of sexual repression and sexual “perversion” cannot serve as the standard for distinguishing asceticism, although abnormal sexual concepts can also promote the production of sexual repression and sexual “perversion.” Because sexual repression and sexual “perversion” have existed since antiquity, and are even more intense today, and everywhere under the heavens; but today is not an ascetic period. To distinguish whether an era is ascetic, the best standard is to see whether it has a clear advocacy of asceticism and substantive implementation; and China clearly lacks historical facts in this respect, and Confucianism attached to political power has never had this ability③.

If we must give a general summary of Chinese people’s sexual concepts, sexual shame is the best term. The influence of this sexual shame is enormous; as a Chinese value system, it still cannot be eliminated to this day. Thinking in reverse about the impact this research-based learning will cause, at most it will make people uncomfortable, because the effect of sexual shame makes people unaccustomed to bringing this matter to the table. And for a high school student to speak of this matter, it can even more stimulate readers’ sense of sexual shame. This is also an example.

To imitate in today’s fashionable words, sexual shame is: “sex is allowed but sex is not advocated.” This is a muddled concept. Precisely because of this, what this sexual concept inevitably causes is that some people go from conservatism to sexual repression and sexual “perversion,” while some people go from unruly behavior to indulgence and licentiousness; it causes people to yearn for “sex” yet to be sneaky and not dare to be open and aboveboard; it causes a small number of extreme, ascetic-like dullards (this asceticism is a personal misinterpretation); it causes inequality in sexual behavior—since behavior is unequal, sexual concepts among certain groups naturally will not be the same.

We have the following various historical facts as evidence:

Although Wang Shifu’s Yuan-dynasty Romance of the West Chamber voiced the fine wish “may all lovers in the world become spouses,” a closer look shows that Zhang Sheng is actually a character with a very distorted psychology, very repressed, and with a bit of sexual perversion (this can also be seen in Guo Moruo’s “An Artistic Critique of Romance of the West Chamber and the Author’s Character”)
In the Ming, Feng Xiaoqing married as a concubine, suffered jealousy and bullying from the principal wife and lived alone, reflecting an obvious tendency toward shadow fetishism (“You must pity me and I pity you”). Relatives advised her to remarry; she refused, and it is not without shame about remarrying. In the end she died with sorrow and resentment, only eighteen years old. (Pan Guangdan, A Study of Feng Xiaoqing)
In Water Margin there is an old woman who privately instructs Pan Jinlian on how to choose a man and how to seduce a man. When Pan Jinlian and Ximen Qing have sex, there is no lack of delicate psychological description.
Spring-palace paintings reached a peak in the Ming and were also flourishing in the Qing. The Tang had Youxianku and Great Delight Rhapsody of Heaven-and-Earth Yin-Yang Intercourse; the Ming had Biography of Lord Ruyi, The Carnal Prayer Mat, Jin Ping Mei, Biography of the Lusty Old Woman, Su’e Chapter; the Qing had Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (see Liu Dalin, Illustrated Guide to Chinese Sexual History, “Sexual Literature and Art”), A Precious Mirror for Ranking Flowers, Nine-Tailed Turtle, New Bride Poems; the Republic era had Rhapsody on the Coupling Essence of Men and Women, and so on, sexual literature and art. In comparison, Western sexual literature and art was concentrated in painting (see The History of Erotic Art, Edward Fuchs), not as rich as China, and these paintings are called “satiric components of licentious customs,” a resistance to religious power. This cannot but be said to be a difference in sexual concepts.
Qing Yuan Mei in “Reply to Yang Lihu” said: “Li Gangzhu prides himself on the learning of not deceiving; his diary says: last night ‘performed marital duty’ with my old wife once. To this day it is passed on as a joke.” This shows that the matter of performing marital duty, gentlemen in their subconscious still take as shameful and a joke.
The author’s preface of A Precious Mirror for Ranking Flowers says of this book: “even as to narrow alley debauchery, filthy and obscene trivialities, all are what I conjecture must exist in the world…… this book too surely knows it departs from the classics and deviates from the Way, despised by writers.”
In Chapter 7 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Jiao Da blurts out the Jia family’s licentious atmosphere: “Every day you sneak dogs and play with chickens; those who ‘climb ash’ climb ash; those who keep their young uncles-in-law keep their young uncles-in-law—don’t we know?” but he says it very obliquely. In Chapter 23, after Jia Lian tells Fengjie about Jia Yun, “Jia Lian said: ‘If it’s like that then fine. It’s just that last night, I only wanted to change up the style, and you were twisting and turning your hands and feet.’ Fengjie heard and laughed with a ‘chi,’ spat at Jia Lian, and lowered her head to eat.” This line is actually “writing Fengjie’s erotic text” (Gengchen marginal note), and it is also said very obliquely④.
The protagonist of Yu Dafu’s Sinking is a typical sexually repressed person who cannot obtain release; according to the author’s own admission, the blame for sin begins with ritual teaching.
The so-called three great literary demons of the Republic era were merely Zhang Jingsheng, who openly wrote Sex History, Liu Haisu, who openly ran nude figure sketching, and Li Jinhui, who openly composed “decadent music,” yet they were notorious for life, slandered as literary demons.
From Yang Tianshi’s Seeking the Real Chiang Kai-shek we know that the young Chiang Kai-shek, on the one hand wanted to be a “sage,” on the other hand was doing “beastly” things; this contradiction is fully visible in his diaries. Contradicting back and forth, he finally contracted venereal disease—this historical fact we also see in Li Ao and Wang Rongzu’s A Critical Biography of Chiang Kai-shek.
When Ji Xianlin was young, he candidly wrote in his diary “I want women,” but afterward he was “made to marry,” and soon went to Germany to study; after World War II broke out, the way back was cut off; he could only devote himself to scholarship, yet had to cut off love with a German girl, so his sexual repression cannot be said to be shallow. After returning to China he spent thirty years with his wife, but had no love with her for life. In his son Ji Cheng’s My Father Ji Xianlin, the perverse, repressed, “perverted” strange old man we see should not be unrelated to early experiences.

c, Summary

In Zhang Jingsheng’s compiled Sex History, we see many letter writers confessing that they were influenced by traditional sexual concepts and had many confusions and abnormalities in sexual concepts, and mentioning the inequality between men and women in sexual behavior. For example, Ms. Yi Ge in “My Sexual Experience” confesses: in her childhood, her fifth younger brother used mud to pinch into the shape of genitalia and imitated intercourse. Seeing this, her third older sister blushed, threw away the mud, and told her not to mind these things. She asked her mother. Her mother said: “Good girl, you must know we are girls. What boys can see and say, girls cannot say and cannot see. If your fifth brother comes again, just keep farther away from him.”

This small story reveals the secret of Chinese people’s sexual concepts: ashamed to speak of sex, but can speak of sex. Only this speech and conduct is also classed.

In Sima Zhi’s compiled Li Hongzhang’s Way of Getting Things Done, we saw the 1886 “Nagasaki Incident.” The climax of the story is like this: drunk Chinese sailors visit Nagasaki brothels and clash with Japanese police; later the matter escalates. Li Hongzhang comes out and says: “It is also constant human feeling that soldiers go ashore and cause trouble through narrow-alley roaming. Even if the commanding general’s restraint is not strict, it is still not an irredeemably grave fault; there is no need to cover it up too urgently…… Martial men loving sex is their nature, but if they can covet merit and fame, naturally they will have their own rules.”

Li Hongzhang’s words reveal the bottom line of Chinese people’s attitude toward sex: lust is “constant human feeling” and “nature”; for the sake of merit and fame one should not be lustful and will naturally restrain oneself; lust is not worthwhile, but even so, lust is actually no big deal and not worth making a fuss about. This is not only “martial men” like this.

Chinese people in this period, broadly speaking, were conservative about sex. This conservatism, we call sexual shame.

Sexual shame is not shame at the sight of sex, nor is it strict asceticism. To understand it that way is too simplistic.

Sexual shame means not speaking of sex with one’s mouth; as for whether one believes the stale moral preaching, it varies by person. Those who believe and persist may become sexually repressed; those who do not believe and do not persist, under this abnormal social atmosphere, may move toward indulgence. This is not absolute.

In any case, this sexual shame is abnormal and unnecessary.

As for when Chinese people’s sexual concepts became conservative, as stated above, this is not what this essay explores, and this question may not have an answer, because as I pointed out in the introduction, today’s China still quite substantially has sexual shame. Under this shame, China cannot stir up any sexual revolution; but at the same time, progress in sexual concepts is also something no one can and no one will block.

Notes

① Clearly it is necessary to explain the meaning of cultural compulsion. According to Colverton, cultural compulsion is classed and unjust. He criticizes: “Cultural compulsion, in the form of psychology, represents social interests (benefits and emotions). It becomes compulsion because whether the ideas expressed have power depends on the magnitude of the interests represented by the ideas, without examining whether the content or structure of the ideas is correct. The content of cultural compulsion, as we have already said, has more emotion and less reason. The theory of origins represented by cultural compulsion’s interests—if the interests are not removed, the compulsion is not destroyed.” Even so, he did not deny the role of cultural compulsion. Morality is the same.

② For example, Smith, who lived in China for decades in the late Qing, said in Chinese Characteristics that Chinese people almost all lack benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trust, but also have many other strengths; and for example, proponents of Song–Ming Neo-Confucianism like Zhu Xi himself privately also took a maidservant as a concubine.

③ By the way, China and the West are not without similarities in sexual concepts. For example, Dumas fils’s famous work La Dame aux Camélias and Yuan Zhen’s Tang-dynasty The Story of Yingying are both works of disguise. According to La Dame aux Camélias and the Mystery of Dumas fils by Polordelbeish, the author, through excavating Marie Duplessis’s (the model for the Camellia Lady) grave, unexpectedly discovered Dumas fils’s diary, and even more unexpectedly discovered “how Dumas fils meticulously beautified his unclean relationship into a kind of pure love,” thereby “in one stroke entering the French literary world.” Yet Yuan Zhen’s The Story of Yingying finds excuses and polishes for the heartless man Zhang Sheng’s beginning in disorder and ending in abandonment. No matter how Dumas fils later quietly felt guilt for his behavior, and how Yuan Zhen shamefully cursed women as bewitching creatures while feeling himself unable to prevail, this all reflects that Chinese and Western sexual concepts alike stand on a chauvinistic position. China’s need not be discussed; a better Western example is in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, where Nora is called by her husband a “proud little bird,” meaning pitiably delicate.

④ Jingmei’s commentary: “Jiao Da’s drunkenness foreshadows Qin Keqing’s death. The author wields the knife-and-axe pen; each character is a tear; each tear turns into a blood bead. Only the commentator knows it.” That is to say, Qin Keqing died amid venereal disease, because of having sex with Jia Zhen (“climbing ash”) and “keeping” Jia Qiang, this “young uncle-in-law.” In fact, “sneaking dogs and playing with chickens” is seen everywhere in Dream of the Red Chamber, and this is why it was listed as a banned book; but all is very oblique. If readers fail to understand Jiao Da’s meaning, Qin Keqing will die inexplicably. The Jia family’s “licentious” deeds are too many; for example: Jia Baoyu has sex with Xiren. Qin Zhong has sex with the little nun. Jia Rui wants to have an affair with Wang Xifeng; as a result he cannot, and is instead toyed with, finally dying under the Mirror of Romance, dying of semen exhaustion. Jia Zhen and Xue Pan seek flowers and willows everywhere. Silly Sister finds in the Grand View Garden a handkerchief of “demons fighting” (spring-palace picture), triggering the search-and-seizure of the Grand View Garden. In Chapter 28 the crowd “now if you want to speak of the four characters sorrow, grief, joy, and pleasure, you must speak of girls” and compose poems. Xue Pan says: “Girl’s sorrow: she marries a man who is a turtle. Girl’s grief: from the embroidery room drills out a big macaque. Girl’s joy: in the bridal chamber with candles, in the morning she lazily rises. Girl’s pleasure: a cock thrusts in.” Baoyu laughs and says: “As long as it rhymes.” The significance represented by Dream of the Red Chamber is enormous, thus I do not begrudge the words.

Li Yinhe made a table by counting the number of articles in which the word “pornography” appears in People’s Daily over the years (A Study of Sexual Discourse in New China, p. 55). Through this table, we find that before 1979 the word “pornography” almost does not appear; after that it appears more and more. And when it almost does not appear, on the rare occasions it appears, it is uniformly criticized as something utterly heinous; when it appears more and more, the voices begin to become pluralistic.

Obviously, after the founding of New China (abbrev.: X China, same below), social sexual concepts mainly presented two ideologies. To put it more cleverly: first, in the early period there was no sex; sex was ignored by society, mainly concentrated in the more than thirty years after the founding of X China; second, in the later period there was sex; society and individuals, no matter what, began to pay attention to sex, mainly concentrated in the more than thirty years after reform and opening up. (It is generally said that 1985 is the boundary, and the impact of reform and opening up on sexual concepts is reflected by this time)

The standard of division here is obviously different from the above.

Prehistory obviously has nothing to do with whether society is conservative or open about sex, or whether it ignores or pays attention—prehistoric society has not yet formed! For prehistoric people, sex is mysterious, so they worship it; it is also ordinary—without sex education, one can watch “love action films” live. So, to summarize prehistory with sex worship is best. But also do not forget: sex worship, as a profound worship, has run through to the present. This is also the reason why later social sexual concepts are not summarized with sex worship.

For a considerable period after the Xia dynasty, as a transition from prehistoric “barbarism” to later civilization, people’s social sexual concepts certainly would not have been like later, turning pale at the mention of sex; normal interactions would certainly not have had too many moral troubles. At this time social sexual concepts were quite open. Later, society became sensitive to sex; on the one hand this was influenced by traditional moral preaching’s shame at speaking of sex, and on the other hand there may have been various other reasons such as people’s sense of privacy becoming stronger and stronger. In short, at this time society became more and more conservative, which is what I call sexual shame. So it is best to summarize this stage with the openness and conservatism of social sexual concepts. But also do not forget: from the founding of X China up to now, as a continuation of history, Chinese people’s sense of sexual shame still exists and still has considerable influence—if you don’t believe it, ask yourself.

In order to have a contrast, I use sexless and sexual as the characteristics of this period to describe the social sexual concepts of this period. If one insists on entangling what is sexless and what is sexless, then the extreme conservatism of social sexual concepts and the gradual loosening (not openness!) are barely satisfactory.

From the founding of X China to now, in history, though not far from today, it is precisely this not-far history that makes one feel unfamiliar. Li Yinhe said in her A Study of Sexual Discourse in X China, Preface: “My original plan was to write a sexual history of X China, but the lack of materials was too great; if I forced myself to do it, I would inevitably face the awkward situation of cooking without rice. So I stepped back and only did a study of sexual discourse.” Even Li Yinhe has the lament of having no rice; how could I possibly do well with this period’s “study”?

So, it can only be briefly discussed.

And because of reasons that are well known to all. So, it cannot be discussed in depth.

In any case, for this period’s “study,” aside from this preface part being written long, what follows is truly hard to put pen to paper.

So, what follows will be written without sticking to one style, forming its own school.

<1> The Chinese Communist Party’s attitude toward sex

When Li Yinhe wrote A Study of Sexual Discourse in X China, she had an estimate: “Fortunately, for 60 years, China’s politics have been highly unified and centrally centralized; all laws and decrees have never had a situation of ‘orders issued from multiple heads’; from top to bottom, with orders carried out and prohibitions enforced, neat and uniform, in step and consistent.” Therefore, “using the Chinese Communist Party’s organ newspaper People’s Daily to describe and analyze 60 years of mainstream sexual discourse became a feasible plan.”

As everyone knows, as the CCP itself admits, the CCP has always grasped deeply in the ideological field. Although it believes that matter determines consciousness, it does not deny and even directly affirms the philosophically dialectical thought that spirit can create matter. Its purpose is nothing more than to transform thinking, and then unify understanding. In the past, because it had just seized state power, it was necessary to launch rectification movements across society, pull out white flags and plant red flags, and give the whole society’s thinking a bath. Now it starts from education, and it also has to concentrate on developing the economy, and it is quite open-minded toward different voices, so such movements are no longer necessary to carry out so vigorously.

The absolute leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is powerful; its influence on ordinary people is life-and-death. Therefore, if one does not understand the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology, one will not understand the national will after New China; if one does not understand the Chinese Communist Party’s attitude toward sex, one will not understand social sexual concepts after New China.

Let us see:

A passage in Ross Terrill’s Mao: A Biography, Chapter 6, caught my attention:

“About 54% of the Long Marchers were young people under the age of 24; compared with them, Mao, at 42, was relatively old. Only 4% were over 40, and there were even boys of 11–12 serving as buglers, orderlies, water carriers, couriers, or simply as good-luck charms. Doctor Fu Lianzhan declared that, in his judgment, among these naive, plain, hot-blooded Long Marchers from peasant backgrounds, 90% had never had sex.”

As everyone knows, during the communist revolution, the CCP’s opponents often cursed them with moralistic preaching, saying they were indecent—didn’t “communism” mean sharing wives, promiscuity! But in fact, the CCP exercised strict self-discipline in this regard and enforced it tightly; for example, in the Three Main Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points for Attention there was the “Do not molest women” later added by Lin Biao.

That is to say, the CCP’s fine tradition was to represent revolution and ideals; for the revolutionary cause, one consciously ignored the personal and even “individuality,” which requires considerable moral sentiment. As everyone knows, CCP party discipline has always emphasized the collective: only after the collective comes the individual, and sex is something that very much represents the individual. Therefore, the secondary position of the individual is reflected in sexual concepts as well—namely, not treating sex as something important.

Look again:

In the New China after the CCP came to power, the first law promulgated was a “revolutionary” Marriage Law. The focus of this law was to vindicate freedom of love, to vindicate premarital sexual behavior by both parties, to oppose persecuting free love under the charges of “adultery” and “abduction,” and to negate the Kuomintang’s past, insufficiently thorough “kinship code,” i.e., to deem arranged marriages without personal will illegal. Li Yinhe believes that in the early 1950s the policy focus was opposing arranged marriages, so it was quite tolerant of free love and premarital sexual relations—a kind of avant-garde policy with a modern flavor. After it was promulgated, the first divorce boom in Chinese history appeared, and within the CCP it was even set as an example.

On this, we can also refer to Deng Yingchao’s words in 1952:

“Love and marriage in a socialist society are fundamentally different from those in a feudal or capitalist society. They are no longer considered from the standpoint of economic interests, nor should they obey parents’ orders, still less be influenced by religious prejudice. It is not only based on sexual attraction, but on the basis of complete equality between men and women and their joint participation in socialist and communist labor, and develops from political and ideological agreement into sincere feeling.”

That is to say, the CCP does not deny sex and emphasizes the personal autonomy of love and marriage, but all of this must still comply with “political and ideological agreement” and must also be distinguished from feudalism and capitalism. (The above is from Research on Sexual Discourse in New China.)

Not only that: at this time, punishments for sexual misconduct were also quite enlightened and fair. In Chapter 7, “Governing Northern Sichuan,” of Hu Yaobang: Volume I (People’s Publishing House, Party History Publishing House), edited by Zhang Liqun and Zhang Ding et al., there is a story that caught my attention:

“Liu Zhenhai had served as a platoon leader in Kuomintang troops before 1946, and had engaged in stealing and raping women. After 1946 he joined the PLA,” so he was suspected of being a spy; later, due to insufficient evidence, he was released. But “later, when he became the head of the detention center, he again raped women.” When Hu Yaobang analyzed the Central Committee’s policy in the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries in 1951, he used this as a typical case and analyzed:

“… (he) is basically doing revolutionary work… If we now handle him as a counterrevolutionary, wouldn’t that be somewhat unjust. But because over these years his hooligan nature has not changed, he is anarchic and undisciplined; in particular, as head of the detention center, messing with women is an error of political principle, but do not lump it together with counterrevolutionaries.”

That is to say, at this time, the understanding of sexual misconduct was merely an “error of political principle” and did not yet constitute evidence of “counterrevolution.” If one followed the later extreme trends of thought, especially the logic during the Cultural Revolution, would it not be unjust?

Look again:

Cai Chang’s 1955 speech:

“When phenomena of corruption, degeneration, illegality and indiscipline occur in people’s sexual life and marriage issues… it is not only an individual private-life issue, but a major social issue and political issue whereby bourgeois ideology corrodes the revolutionary camp and damages the concentration and growth of revolutionary strength.”

That is to say, sexual misconduct is already clearly opposed to the revolution; it is no longer merely an “error of principle,” but a “social issue and political issue.”

Look again:

As Deng Xiaoping pointed out, starting from the Anti-Rightist movement, especially the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, for nearly twenty years the country operated under the guidance of leftist erroneous ideological trends, failing to seize the great opportunity for development over those twenty years.

In this period, as everyone knows, society’s repression of sex was at its worst.

In “And That’s That: A Few Miscellaneous Thoughts,” Lu Xun described Chinese people’s sexual concepts like this:

“Upon seeing short sleeves, they immediately think of bare arms, immediately think of full nudity, immediately think of genitalia, immediately think of intercourse, immediately think of orgies, immediately think of illegitimate children. The Chinese imagination can make such leaps only at this level.”

This is a manifestation of China’s centuries-old traditional concept of sexual shame. Yet it was precisely during these twenty years that this logic was promoted and amplified in China: although no one spoke of it, it presented a sexless state. A relatively realistic summary is found in Bi Xingxing’s essay collection Sharp Past, where he says:

In the 1950s and 1960s and even during the “Cultural Revolution,” our nation’s passion for catching adulterers was astonishing. Breaking down doors, catching them in bed, hanging the “torn shoe” placard, hog-tying. If a letter came, it must be a love letter; a smile on the face probably meant springtime desires. Going out alone could be seen as a secret rendezvous; a man and a woman walking together, suspected of adultery. Hotel supervision, strict scrutiny. Little-foot detective squads, massive police-civilian joint defense. Everyone was a guardian of orthodoxy; each and every one a revolutionary. Everyone kept a tight watch on their own lower body; everyone stared fixedly at others’ lower bodies.

This cannot help but remind one of George Orwell’s description in his novel: the individual disappears into the collective. “The Party’s aim was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. The real, though unspoken, purpose of the Party was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.” “The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct.” The Party even wanted to manufacture children for you.

Of course, a novel is different from history. But according to the principles of materialism, because communist organizations share commonalities in organizational and management models, the results must inevitably have “common” aspects too. At its most insane, that commonality is: no sex.

Seeing this, we must understand: although the Chinese Communist Party, as a revolutionary party, carried out marriage reform and promoted new customs after the founding of the PRC (such as彻底 eliminating prostitution), in its own nature it still emerged from the “old society,” and accordingly it inevitably carried limitations. For example, China’s old tradition is sexual shame, used to distinguish the gentleman from the petty person; the CCP’s “limitations” are similar—for example, using sexual standards to distinguish revolution from vulgarity, saints from hooligans. These all belong to value judgments, and the essence of the values is also much the same. So after Jiang Qing fell, some people cursed her for secretly watching porn during the Cultural Revolution①.

Another example: as Deng Xiaoping pointed out, inner-party democracy at this time was insufficient, and the essence of leftist thought represented by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four was feudalism. So the prevailing social sexual concepts were still the traditional sexual shame; meanwhile the CCP, ideologically, was irreconcilable with traditional concepts and sought to “draw a clear line.” Thus, it is not strange that the concept of sexual shame was pushed to the extreme, leading to the issue of sex being ignored altogether②.

Look again:

In 1983, China had a campaign against spiritual pollution. In Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (Volume III), “The Party’s Urgent Tasks on the Organizational and Ideological Fronts” (October 12, 1983) says:

“Some people are vigorously promoting the so-called Western ‘modernist’ trends of thought, openly proclaiming that the highest purpose of literature and art is ‘self-expression,’ or propagating abstract theories of human nature and humanitarianism, claiming that so-called alienation under socialist conditions should become the theme of creation; a few works even propagate pornography. Although there are not many such works, the influence they have produced among some young people must not be ignored. Many literary and art workers neglect studying Marxism and do not go deeply among the masses to build a new life; some Party members also do not actively participate in Party life—this is an important reason for the various negative phenomena mentioned above.”

Similarly, in 1987 there was a campaign against bourgeois liberalization, and among what it opposed was also the debauchery of sexual life.

Look again:

After 1980, extramarital sexual relations no longer incurred administrative punishment, but in Party disciplinary punishments, extramarital sexual relations could still constitute a charge. For example, the 1997 Regulations of the Communist Party of China on Disciplinary Sanctions:

“Those who commit adultery with others, causing a bad influence, shall be given a warning or serious warning; if serious consequences are caused, they shall be given sanctions of removal from Party posts, probation within the Party, or expulsion from the Party.” (Research on New China’s New Discourse)

I read an article from roughly the 1990s, “A Topic Emerging to the Surface” (Huo Hong). The first paragraph says:

“Three years ago, a female scholar wrote a paper on domestic sexual harassment and published it in Hong Kong, and received a thorough scolding. Today, three years later, this issue has again been raised by a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and has received support. His words were: ‘China needs laws to punish sexual harassment and the abuse of power toward the opposite sex.’” (Seen in Idle Talk by a Hundred People, in “The Fun of Sex,” edited by Peng Guoliang, published in 2003)

In the preface by Zhang Shengyou to Tu Qiao’s Biography of Yuan Geng published in 2008, I learned that the book also truthfully recorded Yuan Geng’s private act of secretly watching “Category III films” at home.

The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone Gender Equality Promotion Regulations, implemented beginning in 2013, is China’s first local regulation on gender equality.

Look again:

At the 2002 Boao Forum for Asia, Wen Jingfeng, the owner of China’s first sex shop, asked Zhu Rongji: “I just saw you chatting very enthusiastically with the Thai Prime Minister. As far as I know, Thailand’s sex industry is very developed worldwide; their kathoey are a must-see reserved program for tourists. My question is: can China, at an appropriate time, under the government’s strict control, moderately start China’s sex consumption market? (Loud laughter) … My question is limited to the economic realm, because we are an economic forum here and it doesn’t involve ideology.”

Zhu Rongji (pauses briefly, kind but slightly reproachful): “Your question is a bit ill-timed. (Points down at the people below) It seems everyone is very interested in this question, so I’d better answer it. (The crowd falls silent.) I talked a lot with Prime Minister Thaksin, but I haven’t had time to talk about sex yet. (Expression slightly shy, smiled.) (Loud laughter, applause.) (Points with his finger at the heads of state) Many presidents and prime ministers attending today—we haven’t talked about this issue either! Because the conference has no such agenda, I can’t answer you.” (Forbidden Fruit 1993: Me and My Sex Shop, Wen Jingfeng)

Look again:

As everyone knows, in the CCP’s ideology, erotic obscenity is still defined as decadent thinking and needs to be banned. So from the early PRC’s thorough elimination of prostitution and its highly effective control of obscene materials, to the post–Reform and Opening era in which it could neither be cleared away nor controlled, the CCP has continued to suppress this pornography and obscenity. China thereafter was no longer sexless, but the CCP still attempted, in the ideological sphere and not without exaggeration, to instill the idea that the harm of pornography and obscenity is enormous, and also to attribute the causes of pornography and obscenity to the reflection of the shortcomings of the market economy in people’s thinking.

But this is also easy to understand: for example, the reason New China was able to thoroughly eliminate prostitution was that under a highly centralized political and economic system, prostitution could form neither a buyer’s market nor a seller’s market; everyone had no money. With Reform and Opening, politics and the economy both loosened; by the same logic, anti-porn campaigns naturally could not sweep everything clean—what’s more, some anti-porn enforcers still have to make a living by cracking down on porn and thus depend on it!

In summary:

From what everyone knows and from the examples above, whether it is putting revolution first, treating sexual misconduct merely as a “political error,” distinguishing sex from feudalism and capitalism, mentioning politics and mentioning sex less, opposing obscene pornography and the corruption of life, or the Cultural Revolution–style escalation of “no sex allowed,” the Chinese Communist Party’s attitude toward sex, summed up most appropriately, is still seriousness. But this seriousness is rather negative. Because under this seriousness, similar to the old sexual shame, people are still ashamed to speak of sex; in people’s first reaction, sex is something rather negative.

Precisely because of the Chinese Communist Party’s serious attitude toward sex, for Chinese people who already had deep-rooted sexual shame, it is also within reason that society’s sexual concepts would not be too open.

Li Yinhe says: “The basic sexual atmosphere of these 60 years has been ascetic and anti-sex.” But reading through her Research on Sexual Discourse in New China, I also cannot reach such a conclusion. As everyone knows, since New China, Chinese society has not practiced asceticism, and not many people were abstinent; if there were any, it was nothing more than abstaining from others’ sex and opposing others’ sex, becoming a fashionable drill, with sex simply evaporated by society. That is to say, if ascetic and anti-sex in the sexual atmosphere is different from ascetic and anti-sex in society, then what she says also makes sense.

In short, my feeling, together with the discussion above, leads me to the following conclusions:

1. The Chinese Communist Party’s serious attitude toward sex (especially proclaiming that socialist sexual concepts must be distinguished from the past and must submit to revolution and politics) will encourage the already ignorant sexual shame among Chinese people, even indirectly pushing it toward an extreme③.

2. Once the social atmosphere loosens—for example, in the more than 30 years after Reform and Opening, especially the past 10-plus years with the spread of the internet—society’s sexual concepts have loosened to the point that they cannot be banned. But between seriousness and loosening, what results is still a sexual concept similar to sexual shame: quite a bit of loosening and quite a bit of conservatism.

3. At the social level, sex is no longer something that cannot see the light of day; at least social issues such as sex and law, sex and health can be discussed publicly. But when they appear, they are mostly rather negative, rather adverse.

4. In any case, sex has never had a corresponding status and weight in the CCP’s ideology, and has not received open and full affirmation.

<2> The first thirty-plus years after the founding of New China: basically no sex

In the author’s experience, all literary works and research articles I have encountered related to this period seem to have colluded, giving people a feeling: this was an era without sex; there was only politics—in other words, sex was ignored by society, evaporated from the human world.

People are products of their times. Any understanding people have is a reflection of their times. In order to understand social sexual concepts after the founding of New China, starting from the understanding of the people of that era is clearly a good starting point. Here I also do not want to dig deeply into history; I only plan to use this starting point to glimpse the social sexual concepts of this period. Even if it is overly simplistic, so be it.

So, let me cite a few examples:

1. Sun Jingxuan, born in 1930, wrote a shocking long poem, “Here, There Are No Women,” written in 1987. Anyone who knows a bit about Sun Jingxuan knows that he harbors resentment toward the CCP; this poem, of course, refers to that period of history after New China. He writes: “It is not my poem that is absurd / Life itself is absurd Absurd, absurd / An absurd world, an absurd era / An absurd story once happened / There was actually a place with no women / No trembling caress of love / No scent of women’s long hair / No romance, no tenderness / Only men, coarse men / Men branded on the face with a golden seal / Half of them are human / The other half are devils / Perhaps God was too merciful / He did not strike them into hell / Only expelled them from Eden / Imprisoned on a lonely island / Imprisoned in a place with no women / A world with only stones and dead water.” (Selected Contemporary Chinese Poems (Volume I))
1. Zhang Xianliang, born in 1936, says in the novel Puberty: “Especially upon entering middle school, ‘Dedicate youth to the motherland’ became a slogan every young person had to follow…… But is it enough for a person to dedicate only this period of life to the motherland?…… Yet the later it got, the more the motherland seemed to need; every Chinese person’s entire life seemed not to belong to themselves…… It was as if I had never had puberty in my whole life, and as if puberty was thinly spread flat across the entire course of my life; all the days were like a single bluish-gray iron plate—hard, cold, and dull—sloppily scraped along all the way to today.”
1. Bi Xingxing, born in 1947 (? details unclear, but it shouldn’t be off, because he was only ten during the Great Leap Forward), said: “Since 1949, we have been cut off from all kinds of sex research and sex education; after the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ even more so—we entered an era of sexual taboo, sexual repression, and sexual confinement. As soon as sex was mentioned, the whole nation fell silent as if frightened, refusing to talk about it.”
1. Li Yinhe, born in 1952, wrote in her blog “Why I Want to Study Sex”: “I belong to a generation born in the 1950s, entering puberty in the 1960s, and discussing marriage in the 1970s. In those 30 years, sex in China was a monster. In all public settings, it was never present.”
1. Wen Jingfeng, born in 1958, wrote in Forbidden Fruit: “That was something that happened during the Cultural Revolution (referring to accidentally discovering a female violin teacher secretly going to bed with someone at night). In an era that expelled lines, expelled laughter, and also expelled sex, between men and women, aside from muddle-headed revolutionary friendship and having children, no other emotions were permitted.” When puberty arrived, “I” “could only guess what that place on a woman looked like from the dirty words neighbors used while quarrelling; and during the chest-expanding movement in broadcast calisthenics, secretly glance at a female classmate’s bulging breasts to satisfy a bit of sexual curiosity.”

Those from the early 1930s to the early 1960s feel this most deeply and truly, after all their best years were spent in this time period. Those born in the 1960s and 1970s were born in the craziest years; they had partial experience of that period and were also influenced by their parents, so they also have feelings, but not as profound as the previous generation. For reasons everyone knows, the most emotionally charged criticism of this period is concentrated in this generation. For example:

1. Li Chengpeng, born in 1968, wrote in “Only Puberty, No Youth,” in The Whole World Knows: “That’s how it is; these decades of youth education—we were fooled. This kind of thing would still happen. Youth ran past as fast as a tongue-lolling mutt, so those born in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s are not much different. We have puberty, but no youth.”

As a continuation, people born in the 1980s, influenced by their parents and grandparents, might also have a tiny bit of feeling, but this feeling is also a feeling about their parents’ generation. They may still sigh “only puberty, no youth,” but this sigh is merely a sigh about abnormal social sexual concepts; and later social sexual concepts are reviving—having such a sigh is evidence of that revival④. An example from someone born in the 1980s:

1. Han Han, born in 1982, wrote (whether true or false) in his early work The Triple Gate about the mental state of his parents’ generation: Father Lin ordered Lin Yuxiang to read good books. But there were too many women in Dream of the Red Chamber, and he feared his son would develop an interest in studying women too early, so he listed it as a banned book; fortunately, Water Margin had 105 men, holding an absolute advantage, and even if women appeared they couldn’t amount to anything, so it wasn’t banned, but some content in the dialogues had to be deleted; for instance, the character “bird” could not appear; wherever there was “bird,” it was all blacked out, leading to “over a thousand mountains, no birds in flight” in Water Margin—unfortunately there were too many birds in Water Margin…… So Father Lin, despite meticulous precautions, inadvertently left a few birds that slipped through the net; when he discovered it afterward, his scalp went numb, but fortunately he stamped out the trouble in time and it caused no impact.

One generation further down, aside from Jiang Fangzhou (born in 1989 and precocious) having a neurotic sort of feeling, other ordinary people feel this period is “distant history” and have no feeling. For example, people often ask me: what was the Cultural Revolution? When was the Cultural Revolution?

The sexual concepts of that time can also be reflected from the angle of “women’s liberation” as a sexless era. For example, Feminism: International Relations (published 2006, pp. 336–337), compiled by two people born in the 1960s, says:

Originally, “Chinese women’s liberation did not pursue sexual liberation, and even took a critical attitude toward it….. because Chinese people consider sex a private bedroom matter and believe it should not be spoken of in public; the majority of Chinese people cannot accept sexual liberation.” (p. 317)

“Women’s interests were set against the class interests of the proletariat and its national interests; the assertion of women’s rights was considered detrimental to the success of the proletarian cause and the smooth completion of anti-imperialist, anti-revisionist tasks. Feminism was labeled bourgeois and subjected to severe criticism…… heavily tinged with class coloring….. Whether one could unconditionally learn to be male became the boundary distinguishing women’s revolution from reaction, progress from backwardness. Especially in the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ which vigorously propagated the overthrow of the international ‘imperialism, revisionism, reaction’ and the elimination of their domestic agents, the storm of smashing the ‘Four Olds’ first swept away women’s hairstyles, women’s clothing, women’s experiences, and even women’s physiological characteristics; women ‘willingly and in eager competition changed men’s names, wore men’s clothes, and got men’s haircuts.’”

“In the first 30 years after the founding of New China, large-scale numbers of women entered decision-making positions at all levels and their political status rose rapidly, but this was basically reflected in quantity rather than quality.” (p. 348)

In Selected Works of Jiang Zemin, Volume I, there is a speech he gave the day before Women’s Day in 1990, “The Whole Party and Society Must Establish a Marxist View of Women,” in which, as the core leader, he spoke specifically about views on women—this was the first time ever.

In comparison, women’s liberation in this period: first, at most it had women’s liberation but did not bring women’s sexual liberation, largely unchanged, which coincides with my earlier conclusion about the CCP; second, it even regressed, attempting to eliminate gender differences—i.e., “China’s sons and daughters are full of lofty aspirations; they do not love red dresses but love military uniforms.”

In short, this was an era in which revolution and politics submerged sex. That is, basically no sex. Then how was it “revolution and politics”? Here I cite Cao Wenxuan’s words as an example: “For decades, we talked only about revolution and not about construction; one political movement after another…… superstitiously believing in the enormous role of the spiritual atom bomb; what constrained people were political dogmas, not economic laws.” (Research on Chinese 1980s Literary Phenomena)

Since the era ignored sex, people, as reflections of the era, naturally also produced extreme cases in which even sex—something that seems one can “pick up without a teacher”—was ignored.

In Wen Jingfeng’s Forbidden Fruit, he excerpted a story from Mai Tianshu’s The Secret World of the Kingdom of Sex. The story says: a peasant wife with a third-grade elementary-school academic level was raped in the fields by a man in his thirties; only from then on did she learn what sex was. Because her husband had congenital underdevelopment of the penis, there had been no sex life in three years of marriage. If she had not been raped, no one would even have enlightened her!

<3> The thirty-plus years after Reform and Opening: sex is possible

Reform and Opening, first as a rectification of chaos in thought, raised the call to emancipate the mind and seek truth from facts, fundamentally negating the Cultural Revolution. Based on Chinese people’s thinking traits and methods—the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the negation of the negation is affirmation—then the Cultural Revolution and the thirty years of sexlessness it represented, by the time Reform and Opening and the period after arrived, without thinking we know: there must be sex! That is my logic. The facts are indeed so.

As everyone knows, after entering the 1980s, domestic revolutionary fervor began to cool down slowly, and the rectification of chaos proceeded neither too fast nor too slow. Although politics was still one of the “three stresses,” it gradually ceased to be felt by ordinary people; the state’s attention shifted to economic construction. Though the main theme still had to be promoted, even textbooks began to align with international standards, and cultural forms were allowed to be plural. In other words, in this environment, as far as social sexual concepts are concerned, sex still, as before, did not carry comparable weight, but it was not necessarily a monster. Yet at the moment when Reform and Opening became unstoppable, especially with the popularity of the internet over the past decade, how could the gradual loosening of social sexual concepts be stopped?

Here, I have no intention of doing minute argumentation—not that I cannot, but that I do not wish to: 1) This is indeed hard to write, because those involved, limited by historical constraints, find it hard to see clearly the history they are in. 2) The facts are mostly common knowledge; saying more is pointless, and too many words will surely fail. Here I casually cite two sets of examples to sketch this chapter; the conclusion is the title:

1. Literary works

When discussing the anti-feudal theme of literary works in the 1980s, Cao Wenxuan said: literature demanded that society recognize human value and respect human nature, writing:

“In recent years (note: the book was first completed in 1987), literature has probed further, demanding that society acknowledge some reasonable human desires. ‘Preserve heavenly principle, extinguish human desire’: asceticism, together with autocracy and hierarchy, constituted the overall symbol of the feudal superstructure and ideology personified… (discussing how feudalism could not agree to ‘some reasonable human desires’) … Starting with Wang Zengqi’s ‘Ordination,’ literature began to touch on the seven emotions and six desires.”

There are Lu Wenfu’s The Gourmet, A Cheng’s The Chess Master, Zhang Xianliang’s Green Tree and Half of Man Is Woman, Gu Hua’s Hibiscus Town, Zheng Yi’s Distant Village, Zheng Yanying’s The Sun, Wang Anyi’s Xiaobao Village, and so on. Especially “works like Half of Man Is Woman, although suspected of ‘sex worship,’ are fundamentally still motivated by the author’s social motives.” Some other authors were motivated by aesthetic consciousness or philosophical consciousness, etc. “In writing about human nature, the overall trend is toward normality.” (Research on Chinese 1980s Literary Phenomena, Chapter 2, “Basic Theme: Anti-Feudalism”)

It can be seen that by this time society’s sexual concepts began to loosen: sex was possible; even works like Zhang Xianliang’s suspected of “sex worship” could be published⑤. This was unimaginable before. What’s more, the sexless examples from the first thirty years that I cited earlier were all later works—i.e., written after Reform and Opening. Later, the尺度 of sexual depiction naturally became more and more open; for example, in the 1990s Jia Pingwa’s Ruined City appeared, although the book was later banned domestically or abridged. Recently, so long as one does not exceed the standards everyone knows, it can be published—for example, the male protagonist is about to get it on with the opposite sex or a prostitute, and suddenly for some reason she gets her period or the police rush in to ruin the good thing, resulting in it ultimately not happening—so there isn’t even an opportunity for sex description; no need to leave blank space, it simply doesn’t happen—this can also be published; no need to list examples in detail. As for the internet now gathering large amounts of taboo-free, swarm-like crude sex-description novels—turning “adult films” into text—that is beyond the reach of the text police and cannot be stopped.

On the one hand, writers began to write more freely, and sexual issues could be touched; on the other hand, as readers, works involving sex could also be read. For example:

In the 1980s, there was a chorus of voices requesting the unbanning of Jin Ping Mei. Later, after technical processing, deleting parts unsuitable for wide circulation, the original text was published, but only internally, with full versions circulated. The publication note of the 1993 edition of Pinghua Baojian says: “We did not delete the not-many words of sexual-description text involved in this series of books (of which Pinghua Baojian is one) during this collation,” showing that the sexual尺度 had already been broadened quite a bit. Now, these books are not really published much anymore—why? The reason is very simple: Chinese people’s sexual concepts have improved, and those cramped sexual descriptions long ago became far from satisfying psychological needs. The internet is full of adult-film torrents and novels with large-scale explicit sex descriptions—who still cares to read those old books? What’s more, if you want to read them, a quick online search yields full versions for download, completely losing any sense of novelty.

Strangely, although Chinese people’s overly explicit erotic novels cannot be openly published—for example, Li Ao’s Virtual Seventeen and Jia Pingwa’s Ruined City—foreign erotic novels with large-scale explicitness, such as Junichi Watanabe’s Lost Paradise, are very easy to buy in full.

In addition, I won’t go on about the publication, since the mid-1980s, of many serious domestic and foreign sexology monographs.

2. Condoms

In the 1980s, there was a top Peking University biology student whose GRE score was only 7 points short of perfect. In that case, he was fully qualified to receive a full scholarship to study abroad. But at the visa interview, the officer asked him what Viagra was, and he couldn’t answer; yet the drug was already a household name in the U.S. As a result, his visa was denied, because not being able to answer at least indicated he lacked basic understanding of U.S. research achievements. A matter of a hair’s breadth, a loss of a thousand miles!

This may have been due to domestic information blockage, or it may have been that, as a Peking University student, he was ashamed to learn about such content.

In any case, with later progress and the loosening of social sexual concepts, such a thing would be unlikely to happen again. Let’s look at this progress through condoms:

In 1993, Wen Jingfeng’s “Beijing Adam and Eve Health Center,” opened in Beijing, caused a sensation in major media at home and abroad. After that, sex-goods shops in China became more and more numerous, up to today.

In 1999, Shanghai Jiao Tong University became the first university to install condom vending machines on campus.

In 1999, the state canceled the State Family Planning Commission’s monopoly qualification over condom production and sales and implemented qualification review, transferring this power to the Beijing Municipal Drug Administration; in 2005 the administration further delegated this power to the market.

With the boom in online shopping, sex products are now visible everywhere in online stores. They can even be seen in ads on ordinary web pages.

There was once debate in China over whether condoms should be普及 in public places; it later ended with the analogy that “wearing a seatbelt is certainly not to encourage car accidents.” So in recent years, major provinces and cities have begun gradually to promote measures to place condoms 100% in public venues.

Zhang Mengning, born in 1990, opened a creative sex-toy shop near the Communication University of China on the day of her graduation in June 2012; compared with Wen Jingfeng’s move 17 years earlier, it must be said this is another major progress of the times.

Some time ago I saw such an article online:

Men’s Style released a ranking of condom usage by province. Jiangsu won with 1.22 billion used annually; Guangdong ranked second with 970 million; Hubei third with 700 million; Shanghai and Beijing ranked 4th and 5th. Fujian, Guangxi, and Guizhou ranked 6th to 8th respectively. Big-population provinces Henan, Shandong, and Sichuan did not make the list.

In our country, perhaps no province would regard condom sales volume as an important component of GDP, but the reality is that condom usage is soaring nationwide, as if entering a bull market period… We analyze the reasons: besides condoms getting better in quality, thinner in wall, and everyone paying more attention to safety, the downfall of “Kuaibo” is probably also a main cause.

No.8 Guizhou Annual condom usage in the province: 360 million
No.7 Guangxi Annual condom usage in the province: 390 million

No.6 Fujian Annual condom usage in the province: 410 million
No.5 Beijing Annual condom usage in the city: 450 million

No.4 Shanghai Annual condom usage in the city: 470 million
No.3 Hubei Annual condom usage in the province: 700 million

No.2 Guangzhou Annual condom usage in the city: 970 million
No.1 Jiangsu Annual condom usage in the province: 1.22 billion

Some time ago I saw another set of data online, saying that China has more than 13 million induced abortions each year, with female college students as the mainstream. This at least shows: 1) college students’ sex lives are already quite considerable, and this does not include those with successful contraception who need not have abortions; 2) there is still a considerable number of college students lacking deep awareness of contraception.

Speaking of college students, let me add one more line. As everyone knows:

1) In the past, students were禁止 from dating, including students at all stages.

2) Later, it gradually became that dating was not encouraged, including high school and college students. Those above middle school were still not allowed to date.

3) And now, elementary and middle school students also talk about “husband and wife” love, though in the shadows; high school dating is an open secret—if it happens, it’s no big deal; college students who don’t date have wasted their youth—college students must date; not dating is too embarrassing and useless.

Although associating love with prohibition and non-encouragement is an expression of not knowing what one is talking about, misleading students, and even not respecting students’ personal lives, this change—from prohibition to non-encouragement to “whether you date or not is up to you”—does reveal the gradual loosening of social sexual concepts.

Notes

①We must understand that in the Cultural Revolution era, treatment of a small number of leaders and the rest of the people was different. For example, during the Cultural Revolution no one had稿费, yet every copy of Selected Works of Mao had to pay royalties to the author. Everyone watched the eight model operas, but when Mao Zedong was critically ill, a so-called “internal films” committee was privately established to shoot Peking opera and acrobatics films for his entertainment. (See Ye Yonglie’s A Splendid Turn, Volume I, Chapter 4, “Cinema’s Spring and Autumn,” “Making Internal Films for Mao Zedong.”) So people like Jiang Qing were merely what today would be called a privileged class.

②Cao Wenxuan put it more orthodoxly: “The reasons for the Cultural Revolution may be ten thousand, but the fundamental one is: a malignant outbreak of feudal consciousness. Lin Biao and the Gang of Four’s spiritual pillar was feudalism. Once uncovered, the Cultural Revolution was a product of feudalism; religious-style personal worship, impoverished egalitarianism, killing individuality and despising人格—all display its feudalistic characteristics.” (Research on Chinese 1980s Literary Phenomena) Another example is what Gu Hua said in Hibiscus Town: “After struggling against capitalism for more than twenty years, we then understood that capitalism is still progress compared with feudalism; in fact, it was deep-rooted feudalism that struggled against youthful socialism.” Of course, constantly using “-isms” may not necessarily explain matters.

③As for why the early PRC handled things in such a relatively enlightened way, the reasons are nothing more than these: 1) The new state had just been founded; domestically it was “poor and blank,” with everything to be done. It had to consolidate power, such as liberating the southwest and eliminating Kuomintang remnants; and restore the economy, such as land制度 reform and the “one transformation and three reforms”; moreover it had the Korean War to fight externally. Relatively speaking, ideological control could not be as extreme as later. 2) At this time, society was vigorously promoting new customs and changing old habits, with clear goals and sober thinking, distinguishing itself from the past. Thus, seen in hindsight, these treatments were a kind of progress and were not prone to digression or偏题. 3) The CCP’s party organization was not yet as huge as it later became (it should be noted that from 1945 to 1956, Party membership increased tenfold! And one must not ignore the tens of millions of Youth League members later). The drawbacks in organization and governance were not yet as obvious; for example, Deng Xiaoping’s point that inner-party democracy was insufficient.

④Even now, many people still have the feeling “only puberty, no youth.” This feeling easily deceives people: 1) What is puberty? For example, acne strictly speaking cannot be called “youth pimples,” and the season of budding love cannot be equated with puberty. 2) This sigh cannot be used to prove the confinement of social sexual concepts. In the modern world, on the broad level, “people are only regarded as hands for work and mouths to feed.” No matter how open a country’s sexual concepts are, its youth may still have such feelings; this is merely sexual repression under social repression. 3) Of course, some people indeed are influenced by conservative social sexual concepts. As everyone knows, under such concepts, natural feelings are depressed and restless hormones are doused with cold water. In any case, that sigh cannot reflect “society being sexless”; what it can reflect is conservatism toward sex—but for “sexlessness,” this is already a gradual loosening; it is only a beginning.

⑤But between the lines of Cao Wenxuan’s tone, there is faintly a feeling that society’s sexual concepts at this time were still quite conservative, and even toward issues of sex, the attitude was still quite serious—only as Deng Xiaoping said, like a woman’s bound feet just beginning to be unbound. The impression he gives is that his thinking is too orthodox. He uses anti-feudalism to describe the literary theme of this period, not realizing that even in feudal times, works of seven emotions and six desires (here not necessarily referring to sex; sex is one of them) could circulate; for instance, “fragrant herbs and fair beauties” poetry (of course, at the Ming-Qing transition, one also had to take political correctness into account). By his meaning, the Cultural Revolution was a major eruption of feudalism; yet during the Cultural Revolution these things of seven emotions and six desires left no trace, so writing a bit of seven emotions and six desires is anti-feudal. Does he not know that in the twenty years before the Cultural Revolution, ordinary seven emotions and six desires were also not allowed; what was allowed could only be works akin to revolutionary passion and heroic eulogy? Not to mention that if there were political errors, even revolutionary passion would be wrong (for example, Zhang Xianliang’s “Song of the Great Wind”)!

Epilogue

The title was coined in spring.The content was first written starting from the beginning of last semester. After that, it was almost always on Sundays that I hammered out two to three thousand characters, at most more than six thousand characters in a week. Only during those four or five weeks from October to November did I write with the most regularity. Later, I kept running into writing bottlenecks, writing intermittently—now doing it, now stopping. By December there was almost no major progress. In January I only typed once, and it was still the day before the final exam. Before winter break, I had originally already completed forty thousand characters of writing. Of course, within these forty thousand characters, not much involved New China—only a few thousand characters. After winter break, faced with the missing New China, I was still at a loss. Before this, I had already felt dissatisfied with my writing. At that time, I deliberately spent a few days “starting a new stove,” starting over again; the final result was also about forty-five thousand characters. In short, it was during these few days that I completed the writing.

Because of the influence of the season, this “study” inevitably carries a “Spring and Autumn” style of writing, although Confucius’s Spring and Autumn style was really only because he had no blank paper to write on and only bamboo to shave, not because of any other profound intent or subtle meanings. My writing, on the other hand, was typed out on a computer—spreading out at length, taking the occasion to elaborate—yet still with words not exhausted, interest still not exhausted.

These forty-thousand-plus characters, tossed about again and again, cost me a lot of thought and effort; it was not an easy or pleasing matter. This drove me quite distressed, so during the period of writing, I often found many problems; although I clearly knew, I let them be. Even in the present finished text, there are still many problems; because writing became too vexing, I no longer care. As said in the introduction, this study is, in the end, only a kind of learning and attempt; there is much immaturity, and I will just let it be.

Sex and history are both too vast—so vast that I do not know what to do—and the organization and unfolding of the materials is also hard to select and refine. In short, this kind of study is simply hard to write, and it often causes me, without realizing it, to fall into the pitfall of “hot on purpose, blind in method.” That is to say, of course, many things were not written out as originally intended, and I can only leave them omitted.

As usual, those who write research must at the end list a bibliography; even if only some sentence by some writer appears in the text, in the bibliography you still have to state that it is cited from that person’s complete works—I do not have that spare time. In a word, here I only want to recommend two books as references listed at the end, as reading for the general public: one is Liu Dalin’s 425-page Illustrated Guide to the History of Sex in China, and one is Li Yinhe’s 338-page A Study of Sexual Discourse in New China—even though when I was writing I only took two or three stratagems from them.

Affected by the season, I can only joke in a conventional way to vent what is in my breast, taking it as a makeshift conclusion:

Hide in a small tower and rule it all; who cares whether winter and summer or spring and autumn!

A Study of Sexual Perceptions in China

Introduction

Explanation of the Topic

Why Speak of Sex

How to Write and What to Write

Content Overview

Summary

Notes

I. Prehistory: Sexual Worship

<1> A Brief Prehistory

<2> Sexual Worship

<3> Why Sexual Worship

Notes

II. Ancient China: The Openness and Conservatism of Social Sexual Concepts

**, A period when sexual concepts were relatively open**

a, The Book of Changes and sex and its influence—before the Zhou dynasty

b, From the Book of Documents to the Book of Songs—before the Spring and Autumn period

c, After the Book of Songs—after the Spring and Autumn period

d, Summary

Notes

** A period when sexual concepts were relatively conservative**

a, The “conservatism” of moral preaching

b, From conservatism to sexual shame, far from asceticism

c, Summary

Notes

3. A Brief Discussion of Social Sexual Concepts in New China and After: Sexless and Sexual

<1> The Chinese Communist Party’s attitude toward sex

<2> The first thirty-plus years after the founding of New China: basically no sex

<3> The thirty-plus years after Reform and Opening: sex is possible

1. Literary works

2. Condoms

Notes

Epilogue

Comments

, A period when sexual concepts were relatively open

**a, The Book of Changes and sex and its influence—before the Zhou dynasty**

**b, From the Book of Documents to the Book of Songs—before the Spring and Autumn period**

**c, After the Book of Songs—after the Spring and Autumn period**

A period when sexual concepts were relatively conservative