Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Sex in Ancient China

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

How did the people of Ancient China think about sex?From sexual vampirism to unrealistic representations of courtesan culture, from wife lending to avoiding *ahem* finishing: in this episode Kate and Paul R. Goldin from the University of Pennsylvania delve into the beds and sexual beliefs of Ancient China.*WARNING there are adult themes and mentions of rape in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely bit twixters. It's Kate Lister, jumping in with your fair do's warning. Fair do's, we are talking about adult themes today. We are talking about sex in ancient China. So we will be talking about sexual practices. We're talking about bodily fluids.

We'll be talking about all kinds of stuff. And you know what? You just might not want to listen to that right now, in which case, don't even worry about it. I'll catch you next time. What is sexual vamporism? No, no, no, it's not Robert Patterson in Twilight. It's an actual thing. Why would a person rent or lend their wife out?

And how, how can bringing a woman to orgasm ever be considered selfish? We'll join us today betwixt some ancient Chinese sheets because we are going to find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning me. Enough and pushing the fun. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, for beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister. For centuries, the history of China has been orientalized and fetishized by Western writers. And this is no different when we're talking about the history of sex in China.

So today I'm talking to Professor Paul R. Golden from the University of Pennsylvania to find out just what was really going on, Betwixt the Sheets in Ancient China. Let's go. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets Paul Golden. How are you? I'm doing fine, thank you.

How are you? I'm doing very well. I'm thrilled to be talking to you today. And I'm talking to you about sex in ancient China. That's a good subject. It's a fabulous subject. How did you come to do this kind of research. Because I know it's not just sex and sexuality that you research in China, but what was it

that made you become a historian of Chinese history and culture? So I've been interested in China for a very long time and I thought I was interested in history and philosophy, and I still am. And around 1997 or so, 1998, I had a colleague, he's since moved to a different university who was writing a book about sex crimes and legislation and punishment and so on in late Imperial China. And he wanted to confer with me about some of the classical texts and ritual illusions. And I realized that the topic was much more interesting than scholarship had given it credit for being. There's a substantial literature.

It's very honest and forthright and thoughtful. and the reasons why it was neglected weren't very good. Remember, we're talking about 25 years ago. The situation isn't as bad anymore. So the reasons back then why it had been neglected weren't very good. There were a few Orientalist studies that were interested in the sort of exotic, erotic orient. And they even got some things right, but they got most of, you know, most things wrong. And I also realized, again, we're talking about the mid to late 90s,

that if I didn't start moving in this direction, maybe no one else would. So that prompted me to start by teaching an experimental class, well, experimental intellectually, and then a book. As I said, the materials are extensive and rich, so there was a lot to read and appreciate. When it comes to sex history, the one thing that we all struggle with anyone that's researching sexuality are the sources and the quality of the sources. Even if you've got abundant medical, legal, moral sources, you so rarely get the voices of the people themselves recording their first-hand experience of how they had sex, what kind of sex they had. What kind of sources are you dealing with when we're talking about ancient Chinese culture?

First-hand accounts by ordinary people of the first time they had sex are very rare. So rare. There might be a story in which a narrator who's probably... in a, you know, an elite literate writer and so on is imagining somebody recounting a sexual experience. That's not so rare, but that's not what you're describing. So we have a variety of sources. They're all interesting, but they don't help us write something like a history of pre-modern sexual practices. Because we know much more about how people thought about sex and, you know, used sex as a metaphor for other kinds of like politics and so on. More about how people conceptualize

sex than about how they actually practiced it. Then the closer in time you get to the present day, the more coverage the sources give us. So by the time we are in late imperial time, so realistically we're talking about 18th and 19th centuries. We have digests of real legal cases. This is some of the material that my colleague was talking about. And there you come close to voices of ordinary people because they were being interrogated. Often it was in the setting of a criminal proceeding. So it's still not ordinary everyday sex. And you still don't quite get their testimony.

You get a clerk's summary of their testimony. Yeah. But that's as close as we get and that comes pretty late. Wow. So what are some of the earliest records? in Chinese history related to sexuality. In Europe, I'm thinking that we've got the little Venus figurines or paintings on caves where men have got erections and then historians forevermore argue, is that erotic or is that just he has an erection? That kind of thing. What kind of things are you

dealing with in Chinese history? There's relatively little, certainly compared to Greece in the area of visual art. There are things like some famous erotic tomb bricks, which are sort of, you know, on an international scale, maybe not all that shocking. But they were shocking when they were first widely displayed maybe about 30 years ago because people weren't accustomed to seeing that kind of material from China. And so there's threesomes with animals watching intently from a tree, things like that. The sources that are a little bit fuller are written. And there's a variety.

Some of them are fiction. You know, some of them are pornographic or very nearly pornographic, but some are not. Some are high literature that are not afraid to use sex as part of the plot. Then there are also things like household manuals that will talk about things like how to manage your finances, how to pick the right furniture, how to choose the right menu for a party, and also how to keep your spouse satisfied. And it's all very matter of fact. I love that. And then there are things like sexual self-cultivation manuals.

Sexual self-cultivation manuals. Yes, they're very predatory. What is that? They tend to be aimed at elite males, and the idea is that when a man and a woman have sex, each party releases concentrated essence. And in the case of males, that's understood as the jaculate, and in the case of females that's understood as vaginal secretions. Okay.

And the premise of this literature is that if you can suck in the secretions of your partner without allowing any of your own to escape, then you will increase your store of what's called chi, life material, life matter. And we can tell that these are aimed at elite men because they tend to recommend having a very large harem. As you do. Yeah, because if you just practice this on one person, sometimes this is called sexual vampirism in scholarly literature.

You just practice this on one person. The person's going to die because you're sucking the life essence out of her. So it's better if you have a whole harem, and then you can suck life essence out of multiple consorts. And one of the texts uses the example of the goddess of immortality, the so-called spirit mother of the West, and claims that she was originally just an ordinary human, but she had sex with lots and lots of very healthy boys,

and over time she attained immortality. But I think that's supposed to be just a warning. I don't really think these manuals were intended for women, because when they get down to the nuts and bolts, it's clear that they imagine the reader as male. Is this what we still see today in some neo-tantric groups and in weird corners of the internet, this idea that if you don't come, then you are storing up your masculine energy, like a come X-Men or something. Yeah.

So that part is related. And the idea is to avoid ejaculation. So you can either injectulate and some of the manuals explain how you can achieve that. In other words. Internal ejaculations. It goes back into the bladder, yes. Oh. Or just avoid.

orgasm entirely, but you don't have to. You can still have an orgasm, but you have to figure out how to keep the ejaculate inside your body. So that part, I think, is similar. But when you're talking about neotentric, you know, I don't think the goal is necessarily to suck the life essence out of your partner. Oh, no, it's not. That's it. So that's a big difference. And these manuals can be very callous about it. Really? It's just like, drain the bitch. Yes. Wow. And it's better if she has a had children yet because children, you know, will detract from her life force so you'll get a, you know, a juicy, almost disgusting them as though they were fruit. You'll get a juicier target. At points even gets a little creepy. It's better if she hasn't had her period for very long either because

that's also draining the life essence from her. So that's very different from what you're talking about. That definitely is. Yes. I've never heard of a town-trip person saying I'm going to suck the life force out of you. That's like the Dementas and Harry Potter or something. Did they give any sense of what happened to these poor childless women who hadn't had their periods for very long once they'd had all of their energy sucked out? In the manuals, as I said, the attitude is pretty callous. The impression I get is they might die. No. But they'll help you on your way to immortality. So the 20th century scholar who branded this sexual vampirism, I think he was right. You know, it's not vampirism like Dracula, but the idea was you are predating on other people.

Wow. That's quite intense, isn't it? As you said, that was for men. There's no evidence of texts telling women how to drain the life force from a man. Yeah, as I mentioned, as far as I know, the only time that this possibility is explicitly contemplated is in this cute little digression about the spirit mother of the West who attained immortality through the same practice. You know, most of this literature was lost. It survives in fragments and is an interesting story. The only way we know about it is because the fragments were

collected in a Japanese medical Christomathy in the Middle Ages. And then that text was reintroduced to China. And the titles were known. The canon of the plain silk maiden is one of the most famous ones, but the texts were all lost. There was a lot of objection to this kind of literature. I don't want to give people the wrong impression that this is the only kind of writing about sex that there was in Chinese culture. But then when these fragments were reintroduced a couple centuries ago, people realized this is probably authentic and a little gruesome. It does sound a little bit gruesome. And I've read up on the Taoist philosophy that taught that you shouldn't orgasm and sort of the goal was to be able to have sex with, I think it was like

seven or ten women without orgasming is... Well, now you understand why, because you're trying to suck the life essence out of seven to ten women. And then lots of Western readers have also been misled. You're supposed to try to induce orgasm in the female partner, because you're not going to be able to suck her essence unless she has an orgasm. So lots of Western readers read this and thought, oh, how enlightened Chinese authors are they actually care about women's orgasm. Well, yeah, but it's more like harvesting. Oh, it doesn't sound sexy. Sexy. Yeah, there's a French work. I can't name the author, but it keeps talking about juicense, which is the French term for orgasm, but there's too much joy in that word. It's not a joyous

event. No. If this was kind of written down, this suggests it was for a more elite audience. And the question with any kind of sex history is, do we have any sense of what normal people were doing? Was this something that day-to-day people would have been doing, practicing having sex? Or was this elite sexual athletics? Yeah, this is for the elite, and there are several indications. One of them you picked up on right away, these are written texts, and they talk about having a well-stocked harem. So it's clear that we're talking about male readers and super-elite male readers.

For ordinary people, we have fewer sources, but I think we can surmise that the two primary goals of sex were pleasure and procreation. Not this kind of vampirism, because according to the way the texts tell us you're supposed to do, this an ordinary person wouldn't have the resources. Now, we can try to make educated guesses about earlier periods from what we know about sexual life. in more recent centuries. And, you know, in that context, one of the most important differences, you know, between traditional Chinese society and what I think most of your listeners would expect is polygyny. So the first problem is that there is a sex ratio imbalance.

There's more males than females. And there's a few reasons for that. One of them is female infanticide, but I don't think that's the major one. Right. Death in childbirth is a major contributor to female mortality. in pre-modern societies, and that's true in China too. And then things like unequal access to food, medicine, resources, and so on. So there's already a sex ratio imbalance, and it's exacerbated by the fact that, at the top,

households are very often polygynous, meaning elite males have one legal wife, and then as many concubines as they can afford. So if you add those two together, when you get to the, you know, further down the pyramid, there's a lot of males who are unlikely to find a permanent female sexual partner. Yes. There's just a superfluous population of males. They're regarded with suspicion by the state and by the law because they're up to no good. They're prone to theft and violence and rape.

they might not have an address, so they're sort of wanderers, drifters, and they're often predating on the good daughters, the innocent daughters of good families. And, you know, from the perspective of the law, they'll easily predate on the innocent sons of good families because innocent daughters are harder to find, because there are fewer of them. So the further down the pyramid you go, the rougher it gets. And just my crude guess would be somewhere around 80% of females had children over the course of their lives. Almost all women would eventually become either wives or concubines.

There are, of course, exceptions. Some women became nuns. But a very large percentage of women would be married either as wives or as concubines, but not males. the percentage of males who had children would have been much lower, and there would have been a sizable proportion of them. We never even got married over the course of an entire lifetime, simply because of the arithmetic. Was this sort of imbalance between men and women, is this what led to the practice of, I want to say, wife swapping, that's not the right there. Wife lending, is that, have I read that?

Wife renting. Wife lending. Did I read that correctly? Yeah. It certainly does. A lot of it is understandable through the lens. of pure economics, there's more males than females, and a poor couple is going to have a hard time staying together. And for some poor couples, one of the most important resources would be

the wife's sexual services. And in some periods that was criminal and other periods it was not. I see. So it depends on when you're looking. But in recent centuries, it was, it was outlawed, who was regarded as a kind of prostitution. And, you know, today removed from that society, we can see how bitter their life must have been and how cruel. Not only did they have to take the presumably unwelcome step of renting out the wife. And there were many different ways. It was renting.

There was leasing. And some of them were more dangerous than others. Presumably most couples didn't do this willingly. But then on top of it, they faced prosecution because it was regarded as criminal. So who would be renting to whom? I mean, once I've kind of got my head around the fact that, I mean, you know, like with fuel bills rocketing and mortgages going up, then, you know, we're going to start renting out our spouses more regularly.

I can see the idea of like we need more income. But when you said that, like, that you lease your spouse, that you rent your spouse, it sounds like a formal contracted agreement rather than a fast exchange of sex. for money. Is that who was renting to who? It's a great question and there's, as I said, lots of different arrangements. There could be one time only. There could be a longer term agreement and these agreements were all invalid in the eyes of the law so it's not a real contract. But for it to work, both sides presumably had to trust each other to some extent. And very often the renter, the lessee, I guess if we're using that metaphor, would be something like a day labor

or a temporary laborer who wouldn't be able to accumulate the necessary bride price to acquire a wife, but was also not penniless and wanted companionship. And often it was combined with a kind of communal cohabitation scenario. So he needs a place to live. Probably will never be able to get married, you know, legally and permanently. But he's not poor. He's working. So he finds a couple that could use the extra income and they work out an arrangement, but all three of them are breaking the law, the wife, the husband, and the extra male, all three of them are breaking the law. So we get to see this when something happens that forces the state to investigate. And that suggests that it happened a lot. And many judges, you know, we can tell from their opinions,

had an enlightened view of this. They'd rather not know. But some other, a murder, an accident, they got into a fight, that kind of thing. And so the state had to investigate, and lo and behold, they uncovered this kind of menage, which, as I said, was illegal, and so the judge had to intervene.

And it was not pleasant. What kind of dates we're talking about here? Because it was in 1851 that regulation required sex workers to register with the, is it, the purer? of Chinese affairs. That was when sort of like brothels started being brought into state control, or with the laws before that that were impinging on this. There's a long history of brothels, goes back to classical times, and the largest and most prosperous brothels, if you go back to antiquity, were government brothels staffed by slaves, and who were the slaves, usually the dependence of convicts.

So your husband commits a crime, lo and behold, you, because, a government slave and spend the rest of your life in a government brothel. So the government control of brothels is very old in Chinese history. That's not the only kind of brothel there was, but that was one that commonly pops up in the sources. Now that said, there were types of prostitution and wife selling that were not categorically illegal before about the early 18th century. And from about the early 18th century onwards, there were.

was a radical reform of a lot of the laws relating to sex that prompted a lot of these situations that I'm talking about where a poor couple, often a poor family, right? Sometimes not just a couple, sometimes they have children. They have to resort to renting out the wife, and then they make themselves vulnerable to criminal prosecution. You know, I may as well mention his name, the former colleague that I mentioned, he's written about this very, very compellingly, and has studied the underlying archival materialist. His name is Matthew Summer, and he's written two books on this subject. They intersect.

The first one looks more at the legal and political background, and the second one takes the perspective of some of these individual cases. You know, what's going through the husband's mind, what's going through the wife's mind, what's going through the outside male's mind. And he writes very knowledgeably, but also sympathetically. I'll be back with Paul after the short break. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway.

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would do, but a bit of research into the sale of sex in China and in Japan as well. And one of the areas that it was very difficult to write about and explain was the willingness of some parents to sell their children to the brothels. And the idea that it was regarded as, sorry, it's even difficult to explain it now, but that it was a good opportunity for the child because they would be educated to some degree. And there was this idea that they were actually doing a good thing by selling them to the brothels. It's very controversial. and of course there's a wide range of opinion about it. And the outcomes also varied from horrendous

to tolerable. So if you're a family and you have a daughter, the ideal outcome would be to marry her to a prominent family. And the problem is a prominent family won't marry your daughter unless your family is prominent too. So unless you're in one of these elite families, that most desirable, option is unlikely. Sometimes a daughter of an ordinary family can end up as a legal wife and so on, you know, relatively well-to-do family. If she's divorced or a widow or there's some sort of factor that explains why she would be appealing. But, you know, for the sort of first-time marriage, daughters would be married in their teens,

usually. It would be unlikely for a daughter from an ordinary family to be able to, you know, marriage. into an elite prestigious family. So if that kind of marriage isn't in the cards and further down the pyramid you go, the likelyer the prospect is going to be, then you're talking about selling her as a concubine, and that's still better than selling her to a brothel. The worst would be selling her to a brothel because her future would be less secure. So a life as a life as a concubine in an elite household is judged less preferable than a life as a legal wife in an elite household. But it's still okay. It's not going to starve. And some concubines, especially if they

become mothers, they acquire authority within their new household. And they go on to lead, you know, reasonably fulfilling lives in which they're respected, especially if they give birth to sons who go on to have successful careers. Then, you know, by transference, you have, to respect the mother, even if she was originally a concubine. The language that's used is really interesting. So you say cortisan or mistress. Really what we're talking about is rich people who were doing this. And throughout Western history, certainly,

not only has there not been the same shame and stigma attached to being a professional mistress, but in many ways it's aspirational for the reasons that you were laying out there is that this was something that was potentially accessible to people that would never have been able to access the aristocracy before. Was that the case in Chinese history? Was their shame and stigma attached to concubine working in a brothel? And did it increase, as we're talking about, the poorer you get? The short answer is yes, but it's complex and interesting.

So a concubine is a legal status. There are laws protecting concubines, and I guess the easiest way to summarize the legal status of a concubine is that she's somewhere between a slave and a wife. She's not a slave and can't be treated like a slave, but she's also not a legal wife. Each man can have at most one legal wife, and then, as I said, any number of concubines,

but it's a legal status. And yes, you're quite right that the only realistic way for many daughters of ordinary families to get into an aristocratic household on a permanent basis would be as a concubine. And there was some shame involved in that, that. It did involve ritually selling one's daughter. A bride usually came with a dowry,

and there was great pride taken in the fact that the bride's family was able to marry her with a dowry. They were not selling her. For a lot of families, that was just not in the cards. We didn't have the resources and or the connections to be able to marry their daughters to prominent families like that. So they would have to collect a bride price. And there's some, shame in that. And we even have some written expressions of the shame that the fathers feel, you know, I wish I didn't have to sell my daughter, but circumstances are such that our family doesn't have a choice. And then if you're going to make that choice, as I said, there are worse and much worse options, and a lot of it depends on where the daughter is going to end up.

if she's going to end up in a stable family, then that's regarded as, you know, less of a disaster than something like selling her to a brothel where there's no telling what might happen. And they're going slightly off track now, but the pirate queen, Xu Yang, she started off in a brothel, didn't she? At that point, it was sort of every woman for herself. Some concubines went on to become extremely powerful, especially if they had prominent sons, if they got along well with the legal wife, if they outlived the legal wife. It was possible, right? I don't think a young girl entering a household as a concubine had that expectation, but it was possible and there were such cases.

Getting out of a brothel was a little bit harder, and in your example, we're talking about becoming a pirate. that's not becoming, you know, the... It's extreme that, the option there. Yeah, that's not becoming the lady of an aristocratic household. But some acquired musical skills, some acquired poetic skills, and the more such skills they had, they better the clientele that they could appeal to. And some of them entered, you know, what we call a courtesan culture. And this has been glorified both by a Chinese,

literati and by, I think, naive Western scholars who, you know, just read about all the happy times with courtesans. And they think, you know, what a, you know, a lot of them were Christians. And so they think, ah, what a guilt-free, sin-free society that we could have lived there. And if you look at it from the courtesans' perspective, it's very tenuous. Who's the patron? How long is the patron going to last? Yeah. And being an aging cortisan is always socially a tricky situation. in any society. And in Europe, there's literature about that too. And if you haven't managed to secure a wealthy husband by the time you're in your mid to late 20s, then you are potentially in trouble unless you go on to run your own brothel,

which was an option for some of them, I suppose. In that respect, China is not very different. Interesting. Okay. I mean, in many other respects, China is, many of the things that we've been talking about are very different from Europe. I don't want to say that China is just the same thing as Europe. But what I know about courtisans in European cultures from literature, things like Fannie Hill and so on, that kind of carve out your own adventure, live by your wits, you know, combination of wit and fortune. It's all loads of fun. Yeah, but a lot depends on luck.

It really does. There's that in the Chinese cortisan world too. So when did the sort of the fetishization of cortisan culture in China? When did that start? was that sort of in the 19th century when explorers went off? Because I've read accounts of the floating flowerboats in Canton, and there is a kind of a sort of mysticism that's created about it. Among Western writers, I think you have the right century.

But among Chinese writers, the unrealistic glorification of courtesan culture goes all the way back to the Tang Dynasty, if not earlier. And many of them were very accomplished poets. So, you know, the fact that they were courtisans doesn't mean that they didn't have any talent. Sometimes their poetry survives to this day, and prestigious males would want to hang out with them. You know, just as the courtesan's reputation would be burnished by the males in her network. It worked the other way around, too, if the courtesan was famous enough. You know, if you were a young, up-and-coming, hopeful poet, you might

want to get into a certain courtesan's network, and not necessarily for sexual reasons, just because you will then be in the same network as a lot of other prominent literati. So there's an aspect of salon culture, too. It's all very coerced, of course, and there is inevitably this sort of coerced erotic aroma hovering over everything. But it wasn't all just about sex. There's poetry. There's music.

And if male can't hack it in that kind of a discourse, he's not. going to be welcome. So some of the gatherings sound a little bit like salon gatherings where people are writing poems and reciting and chanting and singing and playing musical instruments. I can't let you go without asking something about the history of homosexuality in China. Would you tell me a little bit about what attitudes to same-sex were? Those also vary. And a good place to start is always by casting aside any sort of Judeo-Christian notions we would have. Because even though there is a notion of sin in China through Buddhism,

the first observation I would make about homosexuality in China is that it's not unlike Europe, unlike the Middle East, it's not laden with a concept of sin. So people are not going to hell for having homosexual relationships, and even emperors are often recorded as having male favorites. Sometimes it's unclear whether the relationship with sexual, but sometimes it's not unclear. Sometimes it's pretty clear that the relationship was sexual.

Opinions varied. If you're taking the perspective of the sexual vampirism handbooks, then homosexual acts cancel each other out. You need a balance of the male and female chi. So the vamporism happens in heterosexual sex. If it's two men or two women, they're not getting anything out of it, but they're not harming each other either. And there are not too many laws against it because the laws about rape, the laws about adultery and so on, have a lot to do with protecting the dependence of families.

And if it's male, male or female female, then there's no dependence of families who are being harmed. So the laws have fewer teeth. You don't really get carted off to jail. or thrown off the top of a building or anything like that for homosexual acts because they're not perceived as harming people in the way that, you know, something like rape would. Raping an unmarried daughter, that's a grotesque attack on the family, harms her marriage prospect and so on. Now, that said, that doesn't mean that everybody loved homosexuality, and it was also regarded as a characteristic of this kind of floating male underclass that we were talking about.

There's these superfluous males. They're unlikely ever to get married. Their relationships with women are going to be sort of informal and impermanent. They're likelyer to form homosexual bonds with other men of their class. And so you read a lot about beggars who are homosexuals. And you mentioned pirates. You know, gangsters whose band is almost exclusively male and understandably. sexual relationships take hold in that context too. So it's not all a bowl of cherries and great acceptance,

but it's also not regarded as a horrible sin against God the way it is in many areas of the West. Is it true that homosexuality used to be known as the bitten peach and the torn sleeve? Yeah, there's lots of euphemisms. The torn sleeve is because the emperors, favorite fell asleep on his sleeve and the emperor had to go to work and he didn't want to wake up his lover so he cut off his sleeve oh that's quite sweet yeah and the half-bitten peach is related to this you know a ruler had a favorite and the relationship was so intimate that they would share a peach but then when the ruler's favor waned and he turned against his former lover, he said, you gave me a half-bitten peach one time. How disrespectful was that? So, you know,

back when they were lovers, it wasn't disrespectful to be passing half-bitten peaches to one another. But once the relationship is over, then it seems extremely disrespectful to hand the emperor a half-bitten peach. And, you know, there's female homosexuality, too, and there's euphemisms for that. In polygamous households where there's multiple concubines and only one male running around, Raise the Red Lantern, of course it's fiction, but it's a film that's well worth watching. There's a lot of opportunity for women to have homosexual experiences too, and there's euphemisms for that as well. Now, Raise the Red Lantern is the title of a very interesting film about the brutal world of being a second wife, or being a third wife.

The idea is when the master decides which one of his women he's going to sleep with that night, they hang a red lantern in front of her door, and that symbolizes both to her and to everybody else in the complex that she's going to be hosting the master that evening. So that's where the title raised the red lantern comes from. And, you know, it's fiction, but it's a good glimpse of... that society. What were some of the euphemisms for women having sex with women? The major one in classical times is eating each other. Very modern. It sounds very modern. Eating is a frequently used poetic metaphor for sex. So when the bird catches a fish that will often be a kind of an image

presaging a sexual encounter. And that's in some of the earliest poems we know. So eating each other has this sort of obvious modern connotation, but it also, in the context of traditional Chinese culture, would have meant enjoying each other sexually. I like that, eating each other. And my final question to you, Paul, is do you think that we can learn a great deal from these kind of ancient sexual customs and practices today? Can they teach us things today? Well, I don't believe in sexual vampirism. No, that's bad. Don't do that anyone. So I wouldn't say to study that for the purpose of attaining immortality. I must drain you of your vital lessons.

Yeah. It's worth reading that literature in order to comprehend how, you know, people conceived of one another as resources to be exploited. History is not always beautiful, but it's the misrepresentate. You know, we fool ourselves if we try to shield ourselves from the more brutal and less palatable aspects of history. So I'm not recommending sexual vampirism as a way of practice. No. But there is something, you know, fundamentally accepting and honest in a lot of Chinese writing about sexuality. And Westerners rarely saw this because it was all behind closed doors. So something like

public displays of affection, kissing and so on. Westerners rarely saw that because it wouldn't happen in public. So the view of Chinese sexuality that a lot of ignorant Westerners got was the view that they saw when they visited a brothel, and that was highly skewed. But what went on behind closed doors, we now know from poetry, from these household manuals that I mentioned and so on, could be very open about the fact that people have sexual needs, men and women, that they're nothing to be ashamed of, and that there are more and less productive ways. of gratifying them. You know, one of the greatest philosophers

in the whole tradition, Mencius, he's trying to convince the king to be more moral, and the king is trying to get out of it by claiming that he's, you know, fundamentally not moral, and he keeps on saying, you know, I have a weakness, I love wealth, I have a weakness, I love music. And at one point, he says,

I have a weakness, I love sex, as a way of trying to get Mencius off his back and saying, you know, maybe morality is good for you, but not for me, I like sex. And Mencius's response, is just very eye-opening. Essentially, the same as his response to,

I have a weakness, I love wealth, and I have a weakness, I love music. Do you know anybody who doesn't love wealth, music, and sex? All human beings love wealth, music, and sex. Why do you think, you know, addressing the king, you're any different from other people because you love sex? Everybody loves sex.

If you want to be a good king, why don't you make it possible for all the people in your realm to attain sexual gratification through the institution of marriage? That struck me. It's a very typical and honest acceptance of the fact that human beings are sexual creatures and there's something strange and abnormal about trying to deny that. I love that. I do like that attitude. Oh, Paul, you've been just amazing to talk to.

If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? Type my name into Google. You'll find my webpage. The email address is on my web page. It's not hard. to find me. Are you on social media at all or are you a clever person who doesn't do that nonsense? I'm a clever person who doesn't do that. I'm on academia.edu, so that's, you know, social media for academics. But it's not like Twitter or Facebook. It's very academic. Hardly any nudes at all on it. There might be some nudes, but they would be academic nudes. Thank you so much for talking to me. You've been just wonderful. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much.

everyone for joining me and thank you to Paul. It was just a fountain of knowledge, was they? And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex, scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.