The messed up state of relationships in China: Part 2

First, I want to start off by saying that there is a huge amount of variability within China. It's a big place with (in some ways) more cultural diversity than America. My experiences are mostly with people from Beijing and Hunan province, which consists mostly of the middle class and is relatively urban and of the Han ethnic group. If your family is Cantonese, Taiwanese, or of an ethnic minority, our experiences probably differ a lot, and I'd love to hear what you think.

So let's talk about virginity. Chinese culture, like many cultures, value purity in unmarried women and girls. This is quickly changing among upper/middle class young people living in cities, where modernization is occurring quickest, but the generation above them, the policy makers, still retain these values. There are obviously many aspects of life affected by this, but there are two I want to focus on. The first is the pressure to marry your first partner. The second is the inadequate/lack of sexual education.

I would say that the young women in China generally fall into two groups. Those who can afford to not marry, either because they are financially independent/parents will provide for her and can afford to offend their parents/have liberal parents make up one group. They may get married anyway, but they at least have a choice. These are the women I mentioned in the last post, who can afford to be choosy because they don't need to depend on a man.

Some of these women don't want to get married because they look around at the married couples around them and think "I can take care of myself. Why would I want to enter a relationship so I would have to do housework for my husband at all, and still go to work, and satisfy him when he wants sex?" This was a quote from a 27 year old relative of mine translated directly from Chinese. The issues here are both that the sharing of housekeeping and childcare between the spouses hasn't caught up to women having careers, and that many women don't expect to enjoy sex. Many women view sex as something that only men enjoy, because it is still so taboo to talk about it, even with friends. My cousin (21) was surprised when he found out that his girlfriend (also 21) knew the slang term for oral sex in Chinese. And because girls can't be vocal about it, I'd imagine that the only place that men learn about sex is from porn (and each other,) and we can generally agree that porn does a terrible job portraying women as having sexual needs. So as a result, I'd imagine that sex in general isn't that good for women, because they don't know how to communicate about it. It doesn't help that there is no slang in Chinese for female genitalia. Sex education in schools would at least open up the channels of communication about the subject. Obviously there are other detriments resulting from the lack of sex ed (such as young women using abortion repeatedly as a form a birth control), but I won't talk about them in detail here.

The second type of women are those who don't have a choice, whether due to familial/social/financial, or other reasons. These are the women whose mothers say to them "you're not a virgin anymore, so you can't be picky."

I'm going to back up a bit first. Pre-college, China's education system is intense. It is a well known fact that Chinese parents put a ton of pressure on their kids during high school especially because of the college entrance exams. (There are a whole other set of issues with the education system, but maybe some other time.) That, along with the purity thing, means absolutely no dating in high school. Especially if you're a girl. It wasn't that long ago that if a teacher at school suspected that you had a relationship with a boy, he or she could tell your parents and get you expelled. In the big cities, it's much more lax now and some schools won't interfere, but that's definitely not true everywhere.

But the age that you should be getting married, in the parents' eyes, is low. Especially in more rural communities, parents want their girls married by the mid-twenties, at the latest. That puts a lot of pressure on both girls and boys to start dating as soon as they get to college. In Chinese, there's not really a concept of "a date." In a conversation I had with one of my cousins asking a girl out for the first time, he told me that the most noncommittal thing you can say to ask a girl out is "want to be my girlfriend?" There is a lot more fear of rejection on the guys. To make matters worse, many people think that if a girl dates more than one person, she is a slut. So in the girl's mind at least, the best case scenario is to treat the guy's "want to be my girlfriend?" as a "want to marry me?"

Imagine having to marry the first person you dated. You're inexperienced. You don't know any better. So it's understandable that, at some point, many of these girls wonder if there's someone better out there. Girls can shop around if they're not afraid of the consequences. You might have a harder time finding someone a second time. You might be looked down on by society. But the alternative is to stay with someone that you're already bored with (often before marriage) and is probably not that compatible with you, because you haven't had a chance yet to figure out what works for you. How does a desperate boy get a bored girlfriend to stay? Take her virginity.

Girls don't have a monopoly on getting bored, though. Boys can too. The problem is, it usually takes them longer. They spend the first part of their relationships feeling lucky that they could get a girl at all. When it finally catches up with them, some of the time, it's too late. The question is, do you take the unhappy marriage? (Which may work out, but I doubt it. Chinese people aren't much for marriage counseling. Or counseling in general, really.) Or do you leave your girlfriend a secondhand commodity?

This post is getting really long, and I haven't touched on cheating on your spouse or divorce yet. So I guess there's going to be a part 3.