Doing it by the book: natural tales of marriage and sex in contemporary Chinese marriage manuals

Abstract

This paper examines the construction of sexual knowledge in contemporary China through a typical instance of its production—the marriage manual Marital Medicine. China's reform era has seen rapid changes in attitudes to sex and in sexual conduct, and recent government interest in sex education has been motivated by a desire to halt the ‘negative impact’ of modernization on marriage and the family. Education for legitimately sexually active adults has taken a number of different forms, but the diversity of media is not matched by diversity of content. Sexual knowledge speaks in an overwhelmingly uniform and universalizing voice, and is constructed around a nature narrative, which sets out how bodies are sexed, how bodies have sex, and the legitimate forms of their intimate relationships. This paper is an examination of the production (rather than consumption) of sexual knowledge, and shows the current boundaries of ‘normal’, ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’ within which people understand and make choices about their sexual lives.

Notes

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The adjacent shelving headed ‘Reading matter for men’ has titles on success and longevity. Visit made October 2000.

There was, however, a large literature publicizing the requirements of the 1950 Marriage Law, which made monogamy based on free choice of partner its only legal form.

Straits Times online, 31 March 2002.

See Liu et al. (1997), appendix two, for a recent history of the implementation of sex education in China.

A student couple in Chongqing have taken their university to court for expelling them, sparking widespread public debate. Case reported in the Boston Globe 23 February 2003.

The radio programme Life, Birth, Living, for example, broadcasts one hour of advice over the Beijing airwaves every single night of the week, each evening's programme tailored to the concerns of a particular audience.

The NGO that tends to garner most interest in Anglophone writing on sex and gender in China is the Beijing Women's Hotline. This has four specialist counsellors who answer sex‐related calls between 1pm and 4 pm on Thursdays.

Some publishers, however, are reluctant to take on books with a sexual content because they are ‘too much trouble,’ a reference to the strict obscenity laws within which they have to operate. Director Dong of the Chinese Medical and Pharmaceutical Science and Technology Publishing House said that of the four areas his company covers (sexual health education, STIs, eugenics and ancient Chinese sexology) ‘only eugenics sells well.’ Texts on disease are particularly difficult to sell, his explanation being that ‘people who contract STIs are of a relatively low cultural level.’ Personal conversation, November 2000.

Two lone voices in the sociological wings are Pan Suiming, director of the Sex Sociology Research Institute at the People's University in Beijing, and Li Yinhe at the Academy of Social Sciences. In Anglophone research, these two writers tend to be paraded as evidence of a heterogeneity of views on Chinese sexuality. The influence of their work is, in my view, exaggerated, and is overwhelmed by the pervasive productions of the medicalized school.

Written by Li Xiaolin, a 64 year old male doctor. The book was published in 1999 by the Shaanxi Travel Publishing Company. The book cost 19.80Y, approximately £1.50.

This paper does not deal with the question of how sexual knowledge is used. It is very difficult for foreign researchers in China to obtain data on how ‘ordinary people’ understand their bodies and intimate relationships. A 1990 ruling formally prohibits foreign researchers from collecting data in the form of opinion polls or written questionnaires ‐ though these are possible in collaboration with respected Chinese institutions (Milwertz, 1997, p. 202). For qualitative research, the problem is how to gain access to informants for sufficient time for results to be meaningful. Such studies are few, but include Honig and Hershatter's book Personal Voices, which focuses on the stories of women with whom they studied at a Chinese university in the 1980s. A decade later, James Farrer was in the unusual position of living in Shanghai with his Chinese wife and parents‐in‐law, and being a regular of the local dance scene. That gave him access to the sexual attitudes and conduct of predominantly wealthy Shanghai youth from whose testimony he wrote his book Opening Up.

Data from the United Nations website at www.un.org.

The skewed sex ratio is attributed by different commentators to female infanticide, death from neglect and sex‐selective abortion after ultrasound tests (Evans, 1997, pp. 232–233). Non‐registration of female births is another factor.

There are no laws specifically relating to homosexuality, but homosexuals have been subject to arrest on the grounds of ‘hooliganism.’ Signalling a change of attitudes, homosexuality was deleted from the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders in 2001, perhaps, given China's 1.3 billion population, the greatest mass recovery from illness in history. See the website of the Chinese Society for Study of Sexual Minorities (CSSSM) at www.csssm.org.

Personal conversation, November 2000.

Article 21 of the 2001 Marriage Law states that ‘parents have the duty to rear and educate their children; children have the duty to support and assist their parents.’ Articles 182 and 183 of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China specify the penalties for family members who fail to fulfil their familial obligations (Phillips, 1998, p. 19).

The three versions of the Marriage Law since 1949 have become increasingly less specific about the illnesses that render a person unfit for marriage. Alongside the catch‐all ‘any other diseases,’ the 1950 law specified sexual impotence, venereal disease, mental disorder and leprosy as grounds to disallow marriage. The 1980 Marriage Law had reduced this list to leprosy alone, while the 2001 Marriage Law specified no particular diseases, and gave discretion over entirely to medical experts.

Some marriage manuals provide sketches of three and sometimes four different shapes that a hymen can take. See, for example, Gao Dewei, 1998c, p. 26 and Fu Jinghua, 1999, p. 18.

Rather than Judith Butler's conflation of sex and gender as social constructions, in which ‘the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all’ (Butler, 1999, p. 11).

‘It is just because men's sense of smell is not sensitive that women are interested in perfume’ (Guo Yuying, 1997, p. 74).

Often rendered by the saying ‘tan xing se bian’ (change colour at the mention of sex).

Personal conversation, November 2000.

The most recent definition states that obscene items are those that describe the specifics of sexual behaviour, or are crude erotic incitements. Scientific works on human physiology and medicine are not obscene, nor is literature or art with erotic content that has artistic value. Article 367 of the Criminal Code of the People's Republic of China, revised 14 March 1997 (Wu Zongxian, 2000, pp. 1–2).

A sex education CD Methods for Strengthening Yang and Returning to the Spring of Youth, produced by the Guangzhou Audio‐Visual Publishing Company ISRC CN‐F28‐98‐0095‐0/V.G4, Avseq12.dat.

A traditional saying makes the following equation: ‘one drop of semen, ten drops of blood.’

One source suggests the following: < 30: 2–4 times per week; 30–40: 1–2 times per week; 40–50: once per week; 50–60: 1–2 times per 3–4 weeks; > 60 1–2 times per 4 weeks (Guo Yuying, 1997, p. 160).