East vs West… part 1
by Stephen Kastner on 13/11/08 at 9:10 pm
Having lived in China for 6 months in 2006-07 does not make me an expert on Chinese culture, but I did experience a dramatic shift in my own consciousness. As an American I was led to believe that I was about to enter a very repressive “Communist regime.” What I experienced was just the opposite, a very liberal “adult” culture – one in which you are free to make your own choices about what to partake in and what to avoid… especially regarding sex.
But, it certainly wasn’t always like this. The Chinese have been steadily emerging since the days of Chairman Mao toward becoming a hybrid society, one in which the best of all worlds is adapted and employed to serve the needs of the people. The following episode of Sexy Beijing provides a glimpse of what sex and dating was like in the 1980s as experienced by best-selling Australian novelist and China expert Linda Jaivin.
Much has changed in just a quarter of a century…
In 2003, China’s infamous Sex Blogger, Muzi Mei, set the blogosphere afire with her candid narrations and personal on-line sexposes. With her screen name muzimei, claiming top honors for China’s most popular search term in 2005, Li Li – as she is known in “real life” – was also covered in a Time magazine feature, Sex and the Single Chinese.
“I express my freedom through sex,” says Li, defiantly. “It’s my life, and I can do what I want.”
Here’s a recent Muzi Mei interview done for the Danwei TV Hard Hat Show…
Time explains the dramatic attitude shift that has taken place in post-Maoist China:
“Today 70% of Beijing residents say they have had sexual relations before marriage, compared with just 15.5% in 1989, according to Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. A survey taken last January of seven major Chinese cities found that among those 14 to 20, the average age of first sexual experience was 17.4, while those 31 to 40 had lost their virginity much later, at 24.1 years old.”
While China is rapidly moving in the direction of ever-increasing sexual freedom, it seems that we Americans are suffering under the continuing heavy-handed and hypocritical influence of Christian fundamentalism. I’ll be blogging on it here and continuing to work for the evolution of an “adult” culture here in the USA… and I don’t mean porn!
