A youth sexual revolution in the 1990s would challenge this patriarchal culture of premarital chastity, bringing unprecedented sexual freedom to young women as well as young men. Although its origins can be found in some of the trends described above, including socialist notions of gender equality and the popular cultural celebrations of romantic love, the sexual revolution in China in the 1990s also involved cultural innovations. Youth not only began having sex before marriage, but publicly challenged public moral standards, redefining what was considered ‘normal’ for young adults. There were signs of backlash, but also rebels who challenged even the emerging liberal conventions. By 2000 Chinese youth sexual culture was becoming increasingly pluralistic.
The key focus of youth sexual culture was the changing attitude towards sex before marriage and female chastity in particular. Women’s virginity was still supremely important through the 1980s (Zhou 1989). A 1990 survey found that 70 per cent of students described a woman’s virginity as more important than her life (Evans 1997: 108). In contrast, by 2010 a national survey of 14—17 year-olds found that 61.6 per cent of males and 52.3 per cent of females surveyed described themselves as ‘rather open’ or ‘very open’ about sex (Pan and Huang 2012), with ‘open’ meaning more permissive. Similarly, surveys of university students conducted in the 2000s found a growing majority approved of premarital sex, with a shrinking ‘permissiveness’ gap between males and females, and a weakening sexual double standard (Pan 2007).
In the early 1990s, Chinese urban youth still lived in a sexually restrictive domestic and educational environment. Youth consistently reported very little communication about sexuality with parents, almost always cautionary in nature. Schools were little different. Though enforcement varied, high schools officially prohibited dating, and students could be reported to their parents for engaging in ‘premature dating’ (zaolian). Universities enforced rules against premarital sex with expulsions of violators. Until 2005, regulations prohibited students from marrying. Even into the early 2000s there were cases of university students being dismissed because of pregnancy or sexual intercourse (Farrer 2006: 107).
Despite this conservative institutional environment, youth sexual culture changed radically in this period. Premarital sex became far more common. Less than 10 per cent of urban couples married prior to 1987 reported having had sex before marriage (Xu 1997). By 2006, a national survey found that 61.7 per cent of unmarried people aged 25—29 admitted having had premarital sex, an increase from 32.6 per cent in 2000 (Pan 2007). However, sexual opportunities were not distributed equally. Urban residence, wealth and education all increased the likelihood of a person having a premarital sexual experience (Pan 2007). Although not universally practised or accepted, premarital sexual intercourse had become a common and unremarkable aspect of Chinese youth sexual culture by the mid-2000s.
One of the most significant changes in youth sexual culture was in the increasing fluidity or turnover of sexual and romantic relationships. In the 1980s, there was an aura of marital inevitability about most serious love relationships that made a break-up seem like humiliation or moral failure. This was especially true if the couple had crossed the line into sexual intercourse (Zhou 1989). By 2000, however, the average number of premarital dating partners of Shanghai couples increased from roughly one (that is, most people married the one person they had dated) to more than three (Li and Xu 2004: 84). Although the sexual double standard had not vanished, young women could exit a relationship and still find willing and accepting male partners. Ideas such as ‘one-night love’ became common parlance among youth in the 1990s, though still relatively rare in practice. Less bound by the codes of female chastity, women began to experiment with multiple sexual relationships beyond dating or courtship (Pei 2011).
Researchers have debated the influences behind this youth sexual revolution. One explanation emphasises a lower age of puberty leading to greater sexual interest and activity earlier in life (Parish et al. 2007). Others argue that the ‘one-child policy’ introduced in 1980, although aimed at population control, normalised birth control technologies, with the unintended consequence of breaking the traditional bond between reproduction and sexuality, inadvertently ushering in a sexual culture centred on personal gratification (Pan 2006: 28; Zhang 2012: 132).
The one-child policy no doubt affected the meanings of sexuality for married couples, but there were other institutional changes influencing unmarried youth. In urban China in the 1990s a new market-oriented culture emphasised ‘choice’ in all areas of life, including work, relationships and sexuality (Farrer 2002). This culture of individual choice and individual selfexpression was tied to institutional changes, such as the decline in the work unit system, which freed young people from the moral oversight of workplace cadres. Along a somewhat similar line, Lisa Rofel has described a neoliberal program of market-oriented governance which promoted all kinds of desires, from the consumerist to the sexual (Rofel 2007).
In addition, we should not underestimate the power of ideas, including influences from abroad. The 1990s saw a proliferation of youth-oriented media ranging from Chinese youth magazines and Taiwanese teen romances (especially the novels of ‘romance queen’ Chiung Yao) to imported Japanese television serials and pirated videos of Hollywood movies. Bolstered by numerous models of romanticised sexuality, Chinese youth in the 1990s engaged in complex renegotiations of the meanings of chastity, redefining sexual ‘purity’ in subtle but significant ways for young women. The discourse of romantic love was used to shift the locus of ethical discussion from the sexual act itself to the reasons behind it. Sex for ‘love’ (or ‘feelings’) was good; sex for lust or money was not (Farrer 2002; 2006). Surveys of university students from 1991 to 2006 found that one of the most consistently held beliefs was that sexual behaviour should be based on love (Pan and Huang 2011). Even conventional or conservative young women could thus escape the ‘virginity complex’ through this revised rhetoric of romantic motives in which love justified sexual acts.
Culturally available sexual scripts were not limited to this new orthodox romantic scenario. More daring or adventurous youth could also pick up the novels of young women novelists such as Mian Mian and Wei Hui, whose popular autobiographical novels celebrated casual sex, extramarital affairs, multiple partnerships and affairs with Westerners (Mian Mian 1997, 2000; Wei 1999). Such extreme sexual scripts were controversial, but they also helped establish a ‘new
|
|
Figure Т0Л Young women reading magazines on the Shanghai subway. Photograph by Andrew Field.
normal’ of (moderate, romantically linked) premarital sexual experience for young women. As a whole, the 1990s was a period of cultural ‘xenophilia’ in which urban youth looked to Western countries, and sometimes Japan, as models for sexual modernity and consumer affluence (Weber 2002). This was vividly evident in the emergent nightlife scenes of the 1990s which were saturated with images of occidental sexual exuberance (Farrer 1999).
Social spaces are important in the formation of any culture, including sexual cultures (see also Tang this volume). In spaces ranging from Shanghai’s glitzy and ‘disco plazas’, frequented by overseas visitors as well as trendy locals, to the smoke-filled discos and ballroom dance halls that sprang up in every provincial Chinese city, urban nightscapes served as ‘live’ performance sites for the sexual revolution enfolding in 1990s China. Nightclubs were not only meeting spots but also stages for viewing and performing in these sweaty, ostentatious spectacles of sexual modernity. The youth sexual culture experienced in these nightlife spaces was not necessarily about ‘hooking up’ with a partner, or even about partnered sexuality at all, but could be about wearing sexy clothing on a stage above the crowd, pantomiming a groin-thrusting hip-hop dance or teasing spectators with a pelvic ‘lambada’. Whether as customers or paid performers, mini-skirted dancers in the 1990s were memes of Western-style sexual freedom before such styles of dress were common on city streets (Farrer 1999, 2008). In these liminal spaces — contexts symbolically marked off from everyday work and life routines — youth were able to express sexual personae radically different from the earnest and marriage-oriented selves presented in the everyday culture of love/dating (lianai) relationships. Such ephemeral ‘sensual experiments in the art of being human’ (Malbon 1999) might not register in the sexual behaviour statistics, but they became part of the expressive sexual repertoire of many Chinese youth in the 1990s.
Beyond these qualitative factors, demographic trends were another influence on the youth sexual revolution of the 1990s. Much as the sexual revolution in the USA was driven by the population bulge of ‘baby boomers’, the youth sexual culture of China was amplified by a large population born in the early 1970s and coming of age in the 1990s. In 2000 China’s youth population was 315 million, or 25.36 per cent of the total (Xi 2006). This massive cohort was the first generation to come of age in the reform era. Among this group, those finishing university in the 1990s were especially well situated to reap the rewards of urban market reforms. Endowed with more prestigious, modern and better-paying jobs than their state-employed parents, they felt empowered to ignore what they saw as the tired old ethics of their elders. This was a cosmopolitan generation oriented towards the outside world and the marketplace and cynical about the cultural guidelines set by the Chinese state (Farrer 2002; Zhang 2012).
Finally, it is important to note that the developments above were not confined to urban youth. Rural youth also experienced their own versions of sexual revolution, though sometimes as work rather than as play. For many rural youth, the 1990s were an era of mass migration. Many young rural women made their way to the cities as migrant service workers, some as sex workers. Others served as waiters, waitresses and dancers in urban nightclubs. The city was a space where many rural youth experienced modern life, including casual sexual relationships, though often as very marginal and vulnerable participants on the urban fringe (e. g. Liu 2011).