We must close the curtains! exclaimed my soon-to-be-wife as we got down to getting to know each other a bit more intimately one lazy afternoon. Given that we were in an 18th floor apartment in a building that was conspicuous for its isolated height, I couldn't quite decide if this idea was charming or absurd. On the other hand, at that particular time, I didn't give it quite the amount of thought it deserved. Everything about the situation was all a bit surprising for me, a middle-aged Englishman. At that time (over ten years ago) I'd been in China for less than a year and Chen Fang was the only local woman I'd had the good fortune to become familiar with.

Of course there were signs of a similar priggishness in the classroom. Having started English-teaching about ten years before in central Europe, I'd become used to Czech and Slovak teenagers flirting with me, often quite outrageously. It was great; I loved it. It added a dimension of excitement to lessons that English grammar normally lacked. When I first moved to Asia and began teaching children and adults in Indonesia, I was more than happy to find that the same thing happened there—despite the country being such a religiously obsessive place. Then I moved to China and…oh dear. Was I getting old? Had I lost what desirability I had ever been lucky enough to possess? Or was there something odd about Chinese women?

Do Chinese women lack sexual awareness?

It took my relationship with Chen Fang to answer these troublesome questions. I soon found that my wife's general awareness of sex was akin to what must have existed in Britain around the 1950s or earlier. Watching movies with sex scenes often amazed her (though being Chinese she wasn't too quick to admit it) especially showing positions just a little more adventurous than usual. And that was heterosexual stuff; later, movies like Brokeback Mountain, proved almost too much for her. Other Western friends confirmed that it wasn't only my wife. One colleague started living with a well-educated, city-bred girl and was nonplussed to find she thought that she could get pregnant from performing oral sex. What shocked me more than a little was my wife's lack of awareness about her own body.  By talking to her and hearing about her friends and relatives, I came to realize that the old idea of masturbation being dirty and unnatural was quite prevalent among them and their generation. They didn't know their own bodies and consequently didn't really know much about what would give them pleasure. Later still, I would chance upon Xinran's excellent book—The Good Women of China—and then I began to understand more the real levels of ignorance that had tainted women's lives in China.

Back in the classroom I found intimations of similar problems. One textbook actually used the word flirting: students told me—after the self-conscious giggling had died down—that it was quite a bad word in Chinese (打情骂俏), and they made me feel like I shouldn't have used it. Then there were the adult students who spoke about their university lives as being nothing but studying, studying, and more studying.

But didn't you have a girlfriend? Didn't you do anything to enjoy yourselves?

No, of course not, we were too busy studying.

Where did this kind of repression come from then? Was it just like the West used to be?

Of all the religions practiced in China, perhaps the influence of 19th century Christianity promoted the most negative attitudes towards sex. Taoism and Buddhism seem more relaxed in comparison. Neo-Confucianism certainly has something to answer for in terms of treatment of women, position in society, and so on. And then there is foot-binding. When most Westerners write about this, they either seem to adopt a patronizing or a coldly objective viewpoint as if the subject has no parallel at all with treatment of women in other countries. Clearly, foot-binding was a pretty extreme form of what might be called the hobbling of women: keeping them in their place (at home, dependent on men), and forcing them to conform to the demands of a male-dominated society…Well alright, the strictures of Islam spring to mind. But have we in the West never had anything remotely similar? Just think of the constricting underwear of Victorian women with their hooped skirts restricting movement and tightly-laced corsets forcing women's bodies into unnatural shapes (the higher the social status, the more constricting the clothes). And, for the 20th century, doesn't the fashion in high-heeled shoes bear more than a little conceptual similarity?

The more things change, the more they stay the same

In a wider sense though, things in China are obviously changing. There have been sex shops on the streets (not just back streets either) for some time. Over in Tongli (about 50 miles from Shanghai) Professor Liu Dalin has been allowed to open his China Sex Museum—the fact that he's a respected sociologist must have helped him escape the ire of the authorities. And people do seem to have been enthusiastic enough to visit in some numbers; so much so that other branches of the museum have opened in Guangdong, Shanxi and Hubei. In the classroom too I've noticed changes. One class of exuberant teenagers I worked with recently paired off very soon after coming together—no problems with girls and boys sitting next to each other there. And they were always quick with jokes about things like yellow movies and Japanese teachers, suggesting that they'd either managed to download pornography or taken advantage of the easy availability of adult DVDs.

And yet…old attitudes about mistresses have resurfaced along with growing economic prosperity. The number of ernai—second wives—a man has can be taken as a direct token of status. And criticism of the same can be used just as in the past: a useful hook for nailing corrupt (or otherwise unwanted) officials. One recent news report described a local high official as being punished for raping ten underage girls during an official investigation. And like so many similar news reports in China it only gives enough information to provoke a hundred more questions: Why were so many young girls involved in an investigation? What on earth was being investigated? Why did the official get away with raping so many girls before something was done? Even the recent tribulations of Bo Xilai, the super-mayor of Chongqing and leader-aspirant of the CCP, have given rise to similar internet stories: specifically, that he paid a top movie star 1 million USD for sex—on each of ten occasions no less. It's probably only the fact that he's been completely discredited already that has led the government to ignore this other alleged moral failing of his (but can't you read between the lines and get the sense of wonder and respect for a man who would or could do such a thing? A million dollars! Ten times!).

Shorter skirts and better sex education

The past few summers here in Jiangsu have seen young women asserting their God-given right to dress pretty provocatively (I can't help noticing). Both the China Daily and in particular the Shanghai Metro authority have seen fit to comment—the former to question the propriety of this; the latter to warn women that they might well be inviting sexual harassment and should pay attention to how you dress,at least on public transport. And the resultant Sina Weibo survey prompted a majority conclusion that supported this. My personal feeling is that Chinese women (and not only my wife) are more than a little innocent about such ideas. They dress in shorter and shorter skirts and tighter and tighter shorts because it's the fashion—not because they want to inflame men's passions so unbearably. A case in point is the way so many women ride two-wheeled transport wearing such things as short skirts, apparently oblivious to the effect they might be having. I was truly amazed when I first began to notice this—doubly amazed (if such a thing be possible) when I failed to spot any Chinese man paying the same goggle-eyed attention I was. But then my wife had a conversation with a cabbie who admitted he loved working in the summer for precisely this reason: being able to look up women's skirts. So it's just Chinese men being inscrutably careful in how they look.

Whatever you feel about censorship, whatever you think about increasingly explicit sex scenes in movies and the availability of pornography, one thing is absolutely for certain—China needs more and better sex education in schools (Although one could also argue that even the most explicit sex scenes in feature films never show someone putting on or wearing a rubber; pornographic movies, on the other hand, often do). Oftentimes, it's such simple ignorance of how to properly use a condom that leads to unwanted pregnancy (and what must be untold misery); putting condom machines up on street corners or just allowing boxes of prophylactics on open display at supermarket check-outs isn't enough. Serious surveys suggest that younger Chinese are practicing pre-marital sex, though all too often without any form of birth control leading, not too surprisingly, to more abortions. Equally disturbing are the statistics on happy/unhappy marriages with the balance weighted far too much the wrong way and unfulfilled sex lives being cited as a prime cause.

Meanwhile, whatever the changes in China, I can't imagine my wife will ever feel comfortable about leaving the curtains open . . .
 

Related links
Cash vs. Culture: How Sex Sells in China
Sex Education in China – In the Dark or With the Lights on?
Overcoming the Taboo – The Evolution of Sex in China

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Keywords: Chinese sexuality Chinese sexual education Chinese flirting