Monday, March 3, 2008

Sexual revolution in China

An interesting story appeared today on CNN's website about a chinese sexual revolution and likens it to our own revolution of the 60's.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/03/02/china.sex.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
The thrust of the story seems to lay blame on 4 factors:
1. Declining authoritarianism of government.
2. The Taboo of the word sex.
3. The rise of capitalism.
4. Lack of sex education.
You would almost think that this story came right off of the presses of the communist propaganda department.

"China is in the midst of a sexual revolution, a byproduct of rising prosperity and looser government restrictions on private life. The relaxed attitudes about sex mark a historic turnaround from the days when love and sex were denounced as bourgeois decadence, and unisex Mao suits and drab austerity were the norm...Now, a government that once had say over when and whom people could marry is more concerned about regulating interest rates. And rising incomes have allowed urban Chinese to pursue much more than mere survival."


One fact in the story which they mention in passing, "the average urban marriage age has crept steadily higher, reaching 31 for men in Shanghai last year." , I think this is the root cause of not only Chinas recent problems, but also our own. The problem is not caused by lack of sex education or the rise of capitalism but a natural side effect of delaying marriage. One major side effect of industrial societies is that to be successful one has to have a much higher level of education than in an agricultural society. This causes us to put off getting married until we are 'ready for it'. Where once societies would marry off their young people almost as soon as their hormones started kicking in. Now we try to put off the sacrement of marriage until after the peak of hormonal urges start to subside.

I dont know if there is a solution to this problem but it is naive at best to blame the natural result of repressed nature on lack of education or capitalism.

2 comments:

Rob R said...

Don't be such a square daddio.



on a more serious note, I'm surprised western influences weren't cited.

Doesn't china have a huge pirating operation of our hollywood movies were shacking up is before marriage is portrayed almost as the unquestioned absolute norm?

Barb said...

I read where Russian old-school communists and socialists blame capitalism for their out-of-control crime.

One of our founding fathers said that democracy only works for a religious people -- because religious people believe in rule of law, morality, eternal consequences, etc.

Tyranny can control public morals to a point as in communist Russia and China.

Apparently, even the communists knew that sexual morality was more economical than decadence. Immorality is the luxury of the well-off?

One wonders how much of our current U.S. economic slump can be related to the fact that people have over spent into debt, in part trying to juggle multiple children of multiple marriages and in single-parent homes --too many divorced trying to make ends meet on not enough money.

Actually, CA, men of the past often waited until early 30's to take a wife --but your parents' generation tended to marry earlier--for some the union jobs made a living possible --others believed that 2 could live as cheaply as one --I think feminism has done a lot to make women put off marriage for career pursuits.

but the other factor is the sex outside of marriage. Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? We have made it respectable in western culture to get the cart before the horse -- to think that the only reason for waiting for marriage was the possibility of pregnancy and pregnancy itself was a reason to marry--and now we have birth control and abortion. So sex is seen as a temporary arrangement for recreation having nothing to do with life time commitment.