Part Five: A Contribution to the Debate on Sexuality in China
Return to Women’s Liberation in China
Part Five: A Contribution to the Debate on Sexuality in China
Introduction
Extramarital sexual relations are strictly forbidden in China. No fact about China is more widely known, and, in general, none is less well understood. Most people are quick to see Chinese sexual mores as a manifestation of bourgeois puritanism or as a Stalinist bureaucratic deviation, or even as proof of the impossibility of socialism liberating women. In short, they’re seen as repressive.
But the question is more complicated than such simplistic criticisms suggest.
12. Natural Needs and Cultural Needs
When it comes to revolutionary sexuality, everyone is an expert. We all know exactly what shape such sexuality will assume and need no other yardstick by which to measure the failure of the Chinese revolution than our own preconceptions: people still marry when marriage should have been abolished; people are rigidly monogamous, although monogamy is a sexual prison, and so on.
This sort of reasoning gets you nowhere but into the vicious circle of arguing that something is repressive because it’s not free and it’s free when it’s not repressive. Unfortunately, no one ever begins to explain what this freedom might consist of. We are reduced to mere guesswork but even the attempt to define freedom is considered repressive.
The idea of “natural” sexuality that supports these arguments is a very convenient one. We all have natural sexual needs and drives, so the theory goes. Different social norms suppress them and repress them in order to ensure male supremacy and to hammer submissiveness and fearful respect into us. If all such norms are eliminated, and morality itself is destroyed, sexuality will be liberated and will find its “natural” expression. Incidentally, this subversive practice will also destroy the roots of authoritarian power in the ideological submissiveness which follows sexual repression.
This may be convenient, but unfortunately, it’s also completely wrong. There is no such thing as “natural” sexuality, or else all the different forms of sexuality occurring throughout history are “natural”; it’s natural that in a feudal society a man takes all the women he wants for his pleasure, his pleasure even being to take women without their consent; that in some primitive societies sexual relations take place with several partners; that in a capitalist society a woman should be a virgin when she marries, a faithful wife after her marriage to a man who is, in fact, polygamous before and after marriage; that in all exploiting societies battalions of women are reduced to sexual commerce, the production of pleasure for men. It’s only when a ruling class collapses, dragging in its wake the morality it had forged for itself, that “natural” sexuality is revealed for what it is: the pretense that disguises a squalid relation of exploitation.
Furthermore, not only is the allegedly natural behavior by which we satisfy our sexual needs determined by the existing social system, but those sexual needs themselves are also the products of society. Marx said: “Production produces consumption. . . by creating in the consumer a need for the objects which it first presents as products. It therefore produces the object of consumption, the mode of consumption and the urge to consume.” 1 This is no less true of sexuality.
Sexuality has become another commodity, bought and sold like the rest, subject to the laws of supply and demand like the rest, destroyed by consumption like the rest. It makes no difference whether this commodity changes hands legally or illegally, with society’s blessing or without it between people of the opposite sex or of the same sex—it is still a commodity. We must ask ourselves what function our sexual culture serves in our society.
That is the fundamental question, and it must be answered before anything else.
Objects of Pleasure and Objects of Leisure— Pleasure Is Fun
Of course, sex education (in which I include the lack of any formal sex education) inculcates, especially in children and women, a respect for bourgeois morality and submission to the established order. But sex education doesn’t have the monopoly on teaching such attitudes, and that may not be the most important aspect of sex education. In a society where the division of labor becomes more accentuated, where the vast majority of people are deliberately deprived of creativity, where work has no other value than its explicit monetary one, sexuality becomes a means of escaping from society through self-centered sexual consumption, rather than the full expression of interpersonal relationships. This can only be an illusory escape in which the fugitive merely rediscovers all society’s detestable features. The relationship between oppressed and oppressor, market value, selfishness, consumption for consumption’s sake—are all there in another form. But illusion though it may be, it is nevertheless an important vehicle by means of which the ruling class can impose its own ethics and its vulgar materialism on the people in the guise of the true meaning of life.
Work, [says the spokesman for bourgeois morality,] is too often repetitive and tiring. This is, unfortunately, the hidden face of our industrial society. But while we pay a price for progress, it is a price we have to pay if progress is what we want. For production is progress and it is progress that gives everyone a television set and a car, that allows them to dress in the latest fashion, to enjoy themselves, to have some free time for leisure, that, in short, enables them to consume.
This is his morality, and he would like it to be ours. Isn’t sexuality’s social function to serve as a compensation for joyless work, the justification for a hopeless existence? Bourgeois sexual culture is like danger money; in exchange for ill-health, maiming, or death, the workers are offered a few extra pence in their pay packets. In turning sexuality and sexual pleasure (what pleasure? pleasure for whom?) into a reward, a leisure activity, capitalism has turned it into just another aspect of wage earning. For more than one reason, the idea of sex as a “warrior’s rest” is a scandal in our sexual lives. It involves “service” by women, who are treated as mere commodities and objects. It puts sex on exactly the same level as eating, drinking, and sleeping. It turns sexual satisfaction into a restorative for the workforce. It reduces sex to the same level of mundane requirement as proteins, clothing, television, education, and leisure activities.
Repression of Sexuality and Repressive Sexuality
Bourgeois sexual politics, the specific lines drawn between bourgeois sexual freedoms and taboos, help to create a repressive sexual culture, partly by the prohibition of certain sexual practices, but mainly by giving sexual relations market values—by turning the relationship into a transaction between an alienated man and a subjugated woman.
The man and woman can’t help reproducing their social roles within what seems to them to be their own and free domain. They carry into it the social patterns of dominant male and dominated female. Sado-masochism, passivity-aggression, potency, and frigidity merely translate the everyday reality of oppression into sexual terms. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the woman will always be the masochistic, passive, or frigid partner. Roles can always be reversed within an individual relationship, but the cultural form is perpetuated by the oppression of women and the generalized pattern of their subservience to men. A common attitude in the new women’s movement is that precisely because sexuality is a taboo area for the bourgeoisie and should not be discussed, the movement must speak out. We shall criticize the prevailing morality! they proclaim.
We shall leave no stone unturned! We shall prepare the ground for revolutionary attitudes! But as soon as the struggle starts, the new women’s movement throws in the towel. What have we heard from the movement since it took up this question? “It’s unfair for men to have sexual freedom when we don’t.” It has proclaimed the right of women to enjoy the same freedom as men. But since when have the oppressed demanded the right to do as the oppressors do? If you understand (and therefore denounce) the repressiveness that is the outstanding feature of male sexuality, what can you hope to gain by adopting similar sexual attitudes? Basically, the bourgeoisie couldn’t care less whether or not anybody talks about sexuality, but it dreads the moment when the sickening emptiness on which sexuality is founded will be exposed. To say that the bourgeoisie is repressive because it forbids the practice of sexual “deviations” is to say exactly what the bourgeoisie wants to hear. “Deviation” is not where the bourgeoisie says it is, but precisely where it says it is not—between the respectable sheets of the conjugal bed.
I have been using the terms “male domination” and “female passivity” because they refer to a facet of the reality I have been considering. But we must recognize that these two opposite aspects of our culture are simply complementary aspects of the same bourgeois sexual ideology. It isn’t that bourgeois sadism on the one hand is ranged against progressive masochism on the other, just as sadism is never clearly a male attribute nor masochism a female one. There is a wide range of culturally significant forms of more or less covert sadomasochism, each one more or less confused with the others.
The bourgeoisie, like all exploiting classes, finds its pleasure in the master/slave relationship. The orgies of our rulers or marriages in the smartest churches in Paris; pornography; striptease, in Pigalle for the masses or at the Crazy Horse Saloon for company directors; prostitutes or high-class call-girls; the vice squad or the priests’ confessional—all these are just variations on a single theme: the manufacture of pleasure out of intolerable oppression, at a price to suit every pocket and with an eye to all tastes.
The causes of our sexual repression do not lie in setting limitations on our behavior, because all sexual behavior has been repressed and perverted by the profound humiliation and commercialism natural to our society. Sexual repression is integral to sexuality; it does not conflict with sexuality; it determines it. No one could hope to escape from this oppression merely by breaking out of the confines of legally sanctioned sexuality, because that’s not what creates it. We have constant proof of this. For example, there is a moral prohibition on extramarital sex for women. Whenever a married woman has sex with her husband, she acts in the socially prescribed manner—she acquiesces in and reinforces the subjugation of female to male and her dependence on him. Whenever a woman wants to counter this repression and has sex with someone who is not her husband, she breaks the prohibition, but realizes, to her dismay, that the repression has not disappeared. Lenin, writing to Inès Armand, commented:
“Even a fleeting passion and intimacy” are “more poetic and cleaner” than “kisses without love” of a (vulgar and shallow) married couple. That is what you write. Is the contrast logical? Kisses without love between a vulgar couple are dirty. I agree to them one should contrast. what? One would think: kisses with love? While you contrast them with “fleeting” (why fleeting?) “passion” (why not love?)—so, logically, it turns out that kisses without love (fleeting) are contrasted with kisses without love by married people… Strange… Would it not be better to contrast philistine-intellectual-peasant… vulgar and dirty marriage without love to proletarian civil marriage with love? 2
Although it’s easier now to understand the way in which sexual politics are alienating, humiliating, and repressive, it’s still no easier to understand what precise alternatives are posed in society. If we cannot see that side of the contradiction, it will be impossible for us to understand why contemporary capitalism is characterized by confused and problematic sexual mores, while the sexual mores of feudal society, for example, which were fundamentally as repressive, did not create a conflict of such magnitude. All the evidence shows that the interest aroused by the sexual question among young people and in the new women’s movement cannot simply be the idle imaginings of the unemployed petty bourgeoisie.
We have already said that the repressive nature of bourgeois sexuality is manifested more in the type of practice it invites than in the activities it proscribes. Bourgeois sexuality is nothing more than an exchange of commodities, surreptitiously introduced under the guise of romantic love. This seems to be the nub of the contradiction. The desire for a love-relationship conflicts with the economic aspect of that kind of relationship, which is increasingly being revealed. Capitalism engendered this important contradiction, because only capitalism provides the material base for romantic love.
When capitalism destroyed family based feudal production and “liberated” the proletariat, it also made it possible for new relationships to be based on personal inclination alone. There’s no law against relationships between men and women from different social classes—a working-class man can marry a middle-class woman and a cinema usherette can become a millionaire’s wife. But if the only reason for embarking on a relationship with one person rather than another is the “free choice” of those concerned, the fact that anyone embarks on such a relationship at all is always determined by external material circumstances. “I’m getting married to Paulette because I love her and she loves me. But I’m getting married because I can’t manage any other way.” So that love, being the only motive for the affair, is always contradicted by the material imperative of the affair. Loving freely and without constraint, while apparently within our reach, is always strangled by the prosaic demands of economics. There is no freedom to love, only parole—our illusions of freedom are periodically shattered by our return to the penitentiary we are occasionally allowed to think we have left behind us. All love’s “free choices” are outlined against the background of material necessity, and this necessity is the decisive criterion. Not only do we find ourselves saying, “I know I have to get married, but at least I can choose who I marry!” but also, “Since I have to have a wife who will look after my home, manage on the housekeeping money, prepare my meals, give me affection, and devote herself to my happiness so that I won’t be alone anymore, I shall have to try to fall in love with a woman who will make a good, thrifty, hard-working, and loving housewife.” “Freedom” to love is expressed in the last analysis in the same terms as all capitalist “freedoms.” It looks fine on paper, but in fact it is almost casually flouted and contradicted daily.
Sexual repression becomes intolerable because it is based on a “freely chosen” union that generates sexual, intellectual, and emotional needs, while it is in fact a contract between two partners who are not free and who seek different and antagonistic goals in this union. The man looks for a way to fill his leisure time, while the woman looks for a way to justify her confinement in the service of her family. But even the sincerest feelings and the least calculated desires can’t stand up for long to the pressure of reheated stews and washing socks. The freely selected wife, the chosen one, rapidly becomes “a nagging bitch”; the husband becomes no more than the provider; and sex is just another entry in the catalogue of disappointments which runs the gamut from the most bitter to the most harmless.
The same thing happens to love as it does to all revolutionary aspirations that emerge from the heart of capitalist society. All of them are trampled under the inexorable tread of material necessity which opposes them. They are repressed; they aren’t yet able to realize themselves in practice, but they do exist. Revolutionary aspirations are the exact opposite of myths; they are the future society in embryo. The desire for love also tolls the knell for the old world.
Only men and women who are equally free will be able to form non-repressive and free sexual relationships. So, without the emancipation of women there can be no end to sexual repression. Looking for sexual freedom without this emancipation and, even worse, seeing it as a means of achieving emancipation are more than just political traps. Such mistaken attitudes help unwittingly to strengthen a bourgeoisie which didn’t even ask for help. There is no economic, political, or ideological reason why the bourgeoisie couldn’t eventually tolerate all the specific sexual activities that it now finds impermissible, but such license is of no value in the struggle for liberation. The experience of the Scandinavian countries, or even of the United States, should be enough to convince anyone of that. To say otherwise is to imagine that the capitalist superstructure of bourgeois ideology, including sexual mores, is rigidly defined. In fact, the reverse couldn’t be truer. The superstructure is constantly adapting and continuously adjusting to developments at the material base. Contradictions that were latent only yesterday are nakedly revealed today. The bourgeoisie can authorize every sexual activity it wants and introduce any sexual novelty it likes, subject only to the condition that sexuality remains within the limits of its own immoral morality—an egocentric practice that is not simply divorced from the rest of society but, moreover, is a social drug of special significance. 3
There is no returning to the “paradise lost” of natural and free sexuality. We can’t confront bourgeois sexuality with some readymade revolutionary sexuality. We can only achieve revolutionary sexuality in the course of struggle against bourgeois morality and as an aspect of the transformation of all social relations between men and women. Women must undoubtedly be the architects of the new revolutionary morality, for it is they who suffer most from bourgeois sexuality and it is they who have known its most repressive moments. And that means that they must be involved in the revolutionary transformation of society.
13. A New Sexual Culture Is Beginning in China
Marriage—A Voluntary Association of Equals?
The first task to be tackled is quite clearly to attack everything in the old sexual mores which formerly extolled male supremacy. Men and women must be allowed the same sexual standards, even if these standards are only temporary. This seems to me to be the major positive feature of the new Chinese sexual morality. There is no double standard and no special allowances are made for men. The ongoing ideological struggle for late marriages and the discrediting of extramarital sexual relations concern men and women equally. And if newly married women are usually sexually inexperienced, the same is true of their husbands.
One question springs to mind. If the correct approach is to put all male-female relations on an egalitarian footing, why is it necessary to preach this kind of equality in marriage? Wouldn’t it have been better to allow women the sexual freedom that men already enjoyed? Wouldn’t it have been better simply to allow marriage to transform itself into a voluntary association of equals? An experiment on these lines was tried in the Soviet Union immediately after the revolution. A series of laws were introduced to make the transformation smoother. They ensured that a couple who lived together would have the same rights and duties as a legally married couple; that divorce could be obtained at the request of either partner; and that the partners would be allowed title to their own goods in a joint estate, so that a husband could no longer seize his wife’s property.
But in a society where women have not escaped inferior status, such judicial equality can only reinforce actual inequality.
Men were given a free hand to practice a new, legalized form of polygamy. They changed wives as the fancy took them, abdicating all responsibility for their children. Since peasants could not employ paid labor, they would sometimes marry in the spring to get an extra hand for the harvest, and divorce after harvest time to avoid being saddled with an extra mouth to feed during the winter months. Within record time the Soviet courts were flooded with legal actions from women who’d been deserted as soon as they’d become pregnant. 4
The majority of women weren’t wage earners and they had no economic independence at all, so that the law setting up joint estates actually worked against them. Husbands controlled all the money they earned. They were the masters and their wives would be forced to choose between submitting to a man and being deserted and left penniless. And as for the idea of love that accompanied the Soviet measures, it reduced the sexual act to no more than the satisfaction of a base appetite. Only reactionary women, full of petty-bourgeois notions, could refuse something as innocuous as drinking a glass of water. These ideas acquired the force of law and enabled men to exercise enormous ideological pressure on women in attempts to force them to relinquish their “archaic sentimentality.” This is admirably illustrated in a survey made among Komsomol (Communist Youth) members at the beginning of the twenties. The question, “Is the abolition of prostitution a problem for young men?” elicited the common reply that the young men had no need to turn to prostitutes, because “We can have all the Komsomol girls we want for nothing.” This encouraged the revival of a reactionary movement among women, who, when asked the same question, would reply with a demand to reopen the brothels, which in their eyes gave them greater “security.”
Laws exist only because there are social inequalities. Either they are meant to maintain these inequalities—bourgeois laws—or to eradicate them—revolutionary laws. What use would laws be if there was true equality for everyone? From whom or what would such laws protect us? We need unequal laws to establish equality.
Every step in Chinese legislation is guided by this view. In discussing legislation about women, the periodical La Nouvelle Chine emphasizes:
Not only does Chinese law contain no discriminatory clauses against women, not only does it repeatedly proclaim the equality of the sexes, but it also adds special protective measures, that is to say discriminating clauses against men.
The article goes on to give specific examples:
The Marriage Law stipulates, in article 18, that a man cannot apply for divorce while his wife is pregnant or during the year following the birth, but a pregnant woman or a woman who has just given birth is allowed to divorce. The first sentence of article 21 states that after the divorce, if the mother is given custody of a child, the father is responsible for part or the whole of the necessary cost of maintaining the child, but the law does not state that the mother is responsible for the cost of maintenance when the father is given custody. According to article 24, the husband is responsible for paying joint debts where the joint property is insufficient to cover that payment. Article 23 on the disposal of property after divorce specifies that only the wife is always allowed to retain property she owned before marriage. 5
Incidentally, article 11 of the Marriage Law states that husband and wife have the right to keep his or her own family name and first name, and other articles ensure equal rights on similar issues.
While in the Soviet Union de facto marriage coexisted alongside legal marriage, China has deliberately opted for legal marriage (even though special measures are taken to ensure that children born outside marriage have the same rights and enjoy the same consideration as other children. In particular the natural father, like any divorced father, is held responsible for the maintenance of his child, and the child, like the child of any married couple, is allowed to inherit property from his natural parents.) However, a closer analysis shows that marriage in China is nearer to a voluntary association of equals than the Soviet de facto marriage was.
It’s important in this discussion to understand that both legal marriage and voluntary association have the same basic function in any given society. In a pamphlet published by the Dimitriev group of the French Women’s Liberation Movement the following demands are made: “Abolition of the institution of marriage. Recognition of voluntary association.”6 Such “recognition” of voluntary association can
be of no value except as a means of accentuating the repressive character of the legal marriages it would mimic. It’s scandalous that a man and woman who live together without legalizing their relationship should be deprived of the few rights and privileges accorded to married couples, such as legitimacy of their children, the right to Social Security benefits based on the husband’s contributions, automatic rights of inheritance, and the right to a death grant and a widow’s pension. It is right to demand the recognition of voluntary associations to free them from moral, social, and material discrimination. But that is the only reason why such a demand should be made. For if the institution of marriage is abolished and voluntary association is recognized, doesn’t the latter simply become marriage by another name? (In any case, voluntary associations, particularly among the working class, have in fact been just that for a long time. “Setting up home” is one of the ways of being “a family” and involves the same tasks and the same constraints as the legally recognized equivalent.) The Dimitriev group has put forward a laughable idea—the family structure itself is no longer the source of repression, selfishness, and submissiveness; the source is now held to be the marriage contract instead. Get rid of the marriage service and release woman from her servitude!
The Two Principal Scandals of Bourgeois Marriage
In capitalist societies, marriage is reactionary for two reasons. The first is the wife’s economic dependence on her husband, which entails her being seen as inferior—this inferior status may or may not be codified in law, in the familiar terms, for example, of “to love, honor, and obey.” The second is the legal indissolubility of the marriage bond, or at least the extreme difficulty of breaking it. Emphasizing a formal solution in voluntary association involves a preoccupation with this second aspect of oppression in marriage. But if women (including some who aren’t legally married) abandon the idea of regaining their freedom even when they’re bitterly unhappy, they do so because the main obstacle to their freedom is the economic impossibility of supporting themselves and their children.
Thus, economic independence for the woman is the first condition of any truly voluntary association. Without it the prescriptions for voluntary associations, or communes, or free love to transform relations between the sexes are no more effective than bandages round a wooden leg.
The material independence of women is an absolutely necessary precondition for voluntary associations to work, but it isn’t, by any means, sufficient. Furthermore, no simple legal demand will alter the fact that the marriage bond is, in the main, considered to be indissoluble. Such a demand has to be backed up by a revolution in male ideas about the value of women. The complete freedom to break up a union must not simply enable men to continue to use women as disposable objects. There’s no reason to hope that the legalization of this age-old male custom could effect in the slightest the desired transformation in male-female relations. The freedom to change partners, previously the undeclared prerogative of men, must aim to revalue the reasons why two people live together if it is actually to be progressive. When two people are no longer held together by material constraints they usually stay together because they love one another. Material freedom allows love to realize its full potential, but bourgeois society involves so many imperatives forcing people to stay together that love becomes redundant, at most a pretext for staying together.
Voluntary associations can represent real progress only if they are accompanied by sexual equality, the destruction of the economic function of the family, and the transformation of relations between adults and children. Words are not enough! Unless these conditions actually exist, the only freedoms represented by voluntary association are the freedom of men to oppress women and the freedom of parents to oppress their children—the same freedoms that the bourgeois institution of marriage offers today.
Freedom of Choice
I could say that Chinese marriage, despite appearances, is approaching true voluntary association precisely because the Chinese revolution explicitly aims to realize the necessary conditions for voluntary associations to work. There is one other fact which indicates that China proposes voluntary association in practice if not in so many words. It is the fact that the Chinese have freedom of choice in selecting their spouses.
Two people in our society get together only after considering all sorts of practicalities and after making all manner of calculations. The calculations of the bourgeois are well known—they count the dowry, consider the inheritance, and weigh the wife’s new social life against her lost opportunities before making any decisions. It often begins to look as though the marriage has been prearranged. No demands are made on the woman except to provide heirs and to behave as befits a lady—but that’s a categorical imperative. As for the husband, who will have the privilege of initiating his “innocent” wife into the sorry duties of the conjugal bed, he will already have found compensations elsewhere and is secure in the knowledge that he will be able to go on enjoying them outside the marriage.
However, the bourgeoisie doesn’t have a monopoly on calculating the “interest” or otherwise of a marriage. The other social classes also indulge in this practice, although their criteria are less degenerate. The peasant who has no alternative but to till his land will also look for a wife who displays the required qualities for her future tasks. She will be sturdy, hardworking, and have a life-long familiarity with peasant life. A shorthand typist doesn’t easily exchange her notebook for a pitch fork. The young, working-class girl also calculates her chances of getting a man with a secure job, a car, and a home before she stumbles not so blindly into love. As for practicality, we have only to look at the many thousands of unromantic marriages to see that “freedom of choice” is a phrase as empty as “love at first sight.” One woman marries her next-door neighbor, because he’s the first man who’s proposed to her. Another marries the father of her child, because our society forces her to. These women marry so as not to be alone, because alone they are outcasts and economically at a disadvantage. Do any of these women— and they represent most women in our society— exercise freedom of choice? If you are going to talk of the voluntary association of equals, you must at least recognize the need to create the conditions on which true freedom of choice depends. This is not simply a matter of banning arranged or other compulsory marriages. Men and women alike must achieve genuine control over their own lives—a control which need never yield to any economic or ideological constraints, which is exercised with complete awareness. This can be achieved only by following objective political criteria, in line with the present, diversified social practice determining the framework within which the choice of sexual partner is made.
What material conditions is China currently trying to develop so that true voluntary associations of equals will be possible? The answer to this question will judge the truth of the matter.
Late Marriage
While the Chinese are allowed to marry from the age of eighteen, an extensive campaign is being waged throughout the country to urge the young not to get married until they are in their late twenties. The importance of this issue was stressed everywhere we went on our visit. But the explanations we were given for it weren’t always very convincing.
For example, we were often told, sometimes by officials, that late marriage was a way to keep the birthrate down. But to say that is to ignore the main aim of family planning: the advancement of women’s emancipation.
Family planning in China is explicitly linked to women’s liberation, as Han Suyin confirms;
Voluntary motherhood must be founded on the emancipation of the woman, on her equality, her right to study and to participate in all political decision-making, as well as on her increased social awareness. The political and economic emancipation of women has been the first condition for the success of any mass family-planning campaign. 7
We must also realize that abstinence as a “contraceptive” method is a bit rudimentary. Which makes it difficult to understand how the one and only goal of reducing the birthrate could justify delaying marriages. The same extensive propaganda campaign could just as easily be used to encourage the young to use other contraceptive methods and to put off having a child until their late twenties. There is no reason to believe that the masses of young people who have voluntarily put off getting married couldn’t have married when they wished and refrained from reproducing themselves by methods other than abstinence.
But despite these objections, late marriage in China remains a revolutionary measure of great importance, for altogether different reasons. These reasons are worth considering.
I have repeatedly said that equality between the sexes is never complete during the socialist period. Without any doubt, late marriage is a means of promoting equality which takes account of this inequality. It’s easy to understand that a woman of twenty-six who has worked and been self-sufficient, who has taken part in various cultural activities and youth work, who has shouldered political and social responsibilities, who has spent a year or more in a people’s commune, who has been a member of the people’s militia, who has then gone on to university or various study schools, who has made many friends from many different walks of life and who has, in short, broadened her outlook on society, will have carved out for herself a firm foothold from which to resist any future pressure from husband or society to “keep to her kitchen.” The economic, political, and ideological independence gained over a period of ten or so years is a powerful motive force for wives and mothers to continue the active struggle for their emancipation. The fact that Chinese women don’t throw themselves blindly into marriage, that they don’t escape their parents’ nest just to start their own, is refreshing, but even more, it’s enviable. If this were all, it would be enough to show that late marriage is a revolutionary measure. But there’s even more to it than that.
14. A New Idea of Love
The wide-ranging knowledge and practical experience of Chinese youth have given them a new perspective on love and the family. That’s not to say that they have rejected love as a futile gesture, but that they can now struggle against idealism in love from the position of strength of materialism. Oppressed women are particularly prone to this idealist disease. For them love becomes the bearer of all hopes and all disappointments—the extent of its idealization is in direct ratio to their lack of social experience, to their being cut off from other social activities. As a consequence, every interaction with their husband is distorted, as is every judgement about reality.
The proper perspective on love doesn’t devalue it. On the contrary, love seen in context is revalued in the light of its practice. If love entails withdrawal from society, the abandonment of the revolution and complete devotion to one’s partner, then it will be rejected, for it can only be damaging. But if you see love in its context, relative to all other aspects of social life, you see it as part of everything else you already wish to do. The special relationship you have with this man must help you and him to reach a complete and conscious fulfillment of your social roles.
The advantage of prolonged celibacy, as it is practiced in China, is to avoid the privatization of love and to give it back its context in a revolutionary society. The warmth and affection the Chinese couple give to one another arise naturally out of their devotion to the people and the warmth they give to all their comrades. The progressive transformation of the work situation, which we have already discussed, means that both partners can expect the other to be politically committed to his or her work. Since the family is no longer the center of interest, each partner is expected to be involved in a variety of areas. Since relationships between parents and children are no longer run on authoritarian and self-centered lines, each partner is expected to have a responsible and fraternal attitude towards the children. Of course, the social experience of the young is an enormous stimulus to the growth of practical knowledge about one another—knowledge that can be used to gauge objectively the different qualities people require of their partners. There can be no doubt at all that late marriage can contribute only as much to the revolution as that experience will allow. Without such experience, late marriage would be worse than useless.
How could a convent girl of the nineteenth century, unmarried at twenty-five, have learned anything that would motivate her own emancipation? How could a son of the bourgeoisie, advised to remain a bachelor until his late twenties, bring to his late marriage anything but the corrupt morality of his parents? She would have spent a vital period cloistered with nuns. He will spend it in a highly lucrative job or as an officer doing military service in an imperialist army, ensuring his future marital bliss by bedding any and every girl he can, learning through the exercise of this “inalienable right” that women are no better than the contemptible objects of his own juvenile pleasure. In our society it would actually be progressive for such a young man to break with tradition and marry, at eighteen, the young student he so “innocently” loves.
In her commentary on the Marriage Law, Deng Yingchao writes:
Nevertheless, we oppose the idea that “love is supreme” just as much as we oppose those who trifle with love. Besides, we are opposed to those things that are insufficient to guarantee a lasting love, such as social status, money, appearance, etc., as conditions of love and marriage. 8
There is a story about a young Chinese student leader during the Cultural Revolution. He was filled with the spirit and fire of revolution and was worshipped by a whole group of women students. One day some of the women got together to talk about why the comrade had so many women admirers.
Several of you are in love with this comrade, [said one of the women.] I’ve been told that you love him for his revolutionary qualities, but I’m not convinced of that. I think there’s another reason which I’d like you to consider carefully. Because of his qualities this comrade has great prestige among the intellectuals. We have given him important responsibilities. He is listened to. Those who are troubled or confused willingly go to see him, to talk to him and to ask for his advice and help. This is only natural. But I ask you, isn’t it precisely because he is such a luminary that he is “loved” by so many girls? Isn’t it really his leadership that they love? That’s what I feel. And that’s why I think there’s something bourgeois about this infatuation. It seems to me that our comrade students are copying a bourgeois male-female relationship.
This story illustrates the meaning of class love better than I could. It is not enough simply to state that you couldn’t love a counterrevolutionary to destroy the class aspect of love and to transform it. You must also make sure that love is no longer full of bourgeois attitudes.
Good Looks Don’t Escape the Class Struggle
As Deng advocated, and as should by now be obvious, a person’s looks are irrelevant to marriage. But how does the bourgeois image of beauty reveal its class nature, so that the canon of good looks can be discarded? In class society female beauty is always the prerogative of the ruling class. It decrees, for the whole of society, what a beautiful woman should look like. To be beautiful in the West is to look like a bourgeois woman, an indolent lady of means whose status is announced by her attitude and gestures, her clothes and hairstyle. And this is no natural beauty (if such a thing exists), but a confection of purchasable ingredients—a pinch of hairdressing, a dash of couture and a spoonful of low-calorie food all garnished with a sprinkling of makeup and a heavy dose of plastic surgery. The world of women’s magazines is a hymn to this type of beauty. In “my lady’s” account books you can usually find one column for the “beauty budget.” The ostentatious luxury of such beauty reflects not only the power and prestige of money in our society but also, and most significantly, the role of sex object that has fallen to women. All this is almost brazenly translated in the advertiser’s image of women, in which “a woman’s face and figure are her fortune.”
Beauty like this is beyond the reach of most women, not just financially but also because of the lifestyle it entails. Even when she’s dolled up the woman who works in the fields or on an assembly line won’t be able to hide her calloused hands and her arms and body, which have become muscular with work. The housewife who spends her life washing clothes, ironing, cooking, cleaning windows won’t be able to cover the marks of physical or nervous exhaustion with makeup, and no finery will disguise her weariness when evening comes. And yet the man she lives with, just like all the others, is conditioned to desire the very type of beauty which she can’t afford—and that too is a significant facet of sexual repression.
This image of woman no longer exists in China. You will be greeted by a completely different image there—on wall posters, in newspapers, on the stage, everywhere. It is the picture of a worker or a peasant, with a determined expression and dressed very simply. She is always shown doing one of the daily tasks that the millions of Chinese women know from experience. You can see her working, studying, taking part in a demonstration, or simply laughing, but you will never see her in any of the unreal and mystifying situations and stances that the advertising imagemakers construct for us. This transformation of the female image reveals the new place of women in society, and undoubtedly also serves to focus men’s attention on to the changes that are necessary in their relationships with women.
Contemporary Chinese theater is concerned both to criticize the idea of love as a refuge and to advance the practice of the new love. This is particularly striking in The White-Haired Girl. The co-author who revised it at the time of the Cultural Revolution discussed the play with us in great detail during our stay in Shanghai.
He told us that the kind of love that was depicted in the first version of the play had been the subject of bitter controversy. The two main protagonists are Xier—the white-haired girl—who is a poor peasant and an ardent revolutionary, and her fiancé, Dachun, who is also a poor peasant and a soldier in the PLA. The two meet again after the Japanese invaders have been driven from their village, and in the original ending, marry and live happily ever after. Some people approved of this ending and tried desperately hard to keep it, arguing that it was normal and right and proper that the couple should think of themselves once they had struggled against the Japanese and finally won. The revolutionaries, on the other hand, condemned the ending as sentimental and wanted it to be radically rewritten. Eventually the revolutionaries won this particular artistic battle and a new ending was written. In this version the victory over the Japanese leads to Xier and Dachun deciding to continue the struggle, but this time against Kuomintang troops. Now the play stresses that no one can “live happily ever after” while his or her country is being put to fire and sword. A love born out of common hatred against oppression cannot grow freely under the yoke of that oppression, be it domestic, colonial, or imperialist. This idea of love closely linked to social reality is diametrically opposed to the bourgeois idealistic conception of love. There is nothing mystical or magical in Xier’s and Dachun’s love, there is no magnetic attraction and no love at first sight. But there is an identical background of suffering, a shared anger, and a common will to struggle. They love one another because they share the same hatred of the old society and the same determination to create a new one. In her refusal to conform to the traditional stereotype of the seduced, fragile, and submissive woman, Xier loves Dachun as an equal. He doesn’t protect her— they help one another. We don’t have to choose between love or struggle, but only between the ways in which we will love one another. We can do it selfishly, escaping from reality, or we can do it by living in the real world and struggling to change it. Love can then become encouragement and mutual support in that struggle. Xier’s feelings are not incompatible with her revolutionary commitment; they are an expression of it.
We Must Not Conclude. . .
It would be an obvious mistake to conclude from all that has gone before that love and sexuality no longer present problems in China. For one thing, how could any society produce a perfectly satisfactory or even an exemplary sexual culture when its women aren’t yet fully liberated? As Mao Zedong has said, “Every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of class.” What miracle could allow sexuality to escape this rule? For example, it’s clear that strictly demographic interpretations of late marriage can only diminish its revolutionary scope. But on the other hand, it’s one manifestation of the class struggle that all things are open to a variety of interpretations, and such diversity is unavoidable.
It seems to me that revolutionaries often make the mistake of not criticizing right-wing interpretations firmly enough, so that “peaceful co-existence” appears to be the watchword in what should be the arena of ideological struggle. Naturally this absence of polemic can only have negative results in practice.
Take the case of late marriage that I discussed above. The failure to criticize the overt rationale given for late marriage has resulted in many Chinese people accepting it and adhering to strict monogamy not because of their revolutionary convictions but out of moral conformity—which is not the desired state of affairs.
The revolution and the people—men and women—who make it have nothing to fear from an open ideological struggle about love and sexuality. Why aren’t the Chinese waging this struggle? Some Chinese comrades themselves attempted to give us an answer. “Sexual education,” they said,
Is difficult, because even our political cadres have an inadequate political and ideological grounding in the subject, because the people are reticent, because the myth of virility is still strong, because the old mentality that sees this area as shameful still survives. . .
All the more reason, surely, to open the debate! There can be little worry that love and sexuality will become central preoccupations to the exclusion of other, more immediate, concerns. Chinese society manages to conduct many debates without any of them becoming popular and political obsessions.
In spite of these criticisms, the Chinese policy on love and sexuality is in no way comparable to conventional Judeo-Christian morality. This is another case where separating some social phenomenon from the new social relations underlying it results in a failure to understand anything at all about it. And judging policies on the basis of ostensible ideological explanations alone is less satisfactory in this area than in any other. For such judgements will always be misguided if they ignore the practical results of political decisions. With love and sexuality, for example, we must look at the effects of Chinese policy on the emancipation of women.
A society cannot conceal the evidence of its treatment of women as sex objects, and China shows no such evidence. I don’t doubt that the new sexual attitudes held by Chinese youth, judged by some to be too severe, have actually had an enormous influence in helping Chinese women to shake off their former status. Furthermore, if sexuality and love are closely bound up together—as they are in China— sexuality will be altogether more valued and more valuable—as it is in China. To lose sight of these things would prevent us from making any judgement with a materialist basis.
We can have some idea, albeit embryonic, of what love, sexual morality, and the family will be like in the future by taking what exists today as a starting point. But the Chinese experience has taught us that there is no “natural” or “innate” revolutionary morality that is simply waiting to be applied to concrete situations. A new and revolutionary sexual morality and a proletarian viewpoint in sexuality, love, and the family can only be gradually constructed (and not necessarily in a linear fashion) through the practice of the class struggle, and within the revolutionary movement against the ancient traditions, divisions, and reactionary functions that have enslaved women.
8 Footnotes
