Quick update 1/13/07: A site called Buzz Feed.com picked up this story but I wanted to point out that the post was discussing a historical situation NOT a prediction for the future. (I’m a historian, not a futurist.)
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From the Reuters China desk–who must be in the middle of a slow news cycle this week–comes a story that the Chinese sociological establishment has weighed in with the opinion that ’sex is good, but swapping wives is bad.’
Chinese sociologists said that the country should promote bolder attitudes towards sex, but that wife-swapping was off the agenda, state media reported on Monday.Chinese attitudes towards sex have relaxed in recent decades, triggering a boom in extramarital relationships which the Communist Party has blamed on bourgeois mores imported from the West.
“Wife-swapping should not be promoted to the public as it will lead to the spread of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases,” the China Daily quoted Zhang Feng, a family planning official, as saying at the fourth Guangzhou Sex Culture Expo at the weekend.
The historical angle here? I coincidentally just finished reading an interesting article by Matthew Sommer on polyandry among the poorest members of Qing society.* The basic argument being that in Qing China, a hypergamous marriage market, polygamy among upper class males, and the restrictions on widows (but not widowers) re-entering the marriage market, meant a shortage of woman that grew particularly acute as one descended the social scale or traveled out to the more remote villages. One response, according to Professor Sommer: the sharing of wives or multiple men occupying a household with a single woman.
I suspect the current injunction is directed more at would-be swingers in China’s burgeoning latte set…just as long as they remember: it’s been done before.
Will, at the always fascinating Imagethief, has a full report from the Guangzhou Sex Culture Expo.
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* Sommer, Matthew, “Polyandry Among the Qing Poor,” in Bryna Goodman and Wendy larson, eds., Gender in Motion. Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
2 responses so far ↓
1 dB // Nov 7, 2006 at 6:31 pm
It is refreshing to see risk of HIV/AIDS from heterosexual sex being covered as a real risk (although I’m not sure it’s the only reason why wife-swapping shouldn’t be promoted) - I still remember an early trip here reading a sign in Pudong airport warning of the dangers of HIV/AIDS which could be contracted by “Drug Abuse”, “Blood Filtering” and “Maternity”
I can understand how a man might be, ahem, coerced into wife-swapping but I’m intrigued as to how wife-sharing would arise as a general concept (particularly among lower classes) - one would imagine that in a world with a shortage of females, a man would fiercely defend his wife. I guess if the current male:female ratio keeps trending the same way this issue may return to rural China before too long.
2 花崗齋之愚公 // Nov 7, 2006 at 10:08 pm
DB,
One would think that too…unless the first ‘husband’ was hurt and couldn’t work or they needed help for farming. There could be other scenarios, some of the situations mentioned in the article are pretty much prostitution…husband pimps wife. Others were affective relationships. Sommer’s first book, Sex and Law in Qing China, also discusses another possibility which was the proliferation of homosexual partnerships among China’s wandering “guang’gun” class during the Qing.
Naturally, Qing officials and lawmakers freaked out about all of this. Especially the Manchus.
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