But it has a deeper significance. It was by their relations with other people that the couple judged themselves. Yun believed her life was a failure because it was all her fault her husband had lost the affection of his parents. ‘While I have tried to do my best to be a good daughter-in-law [which for Chinese wives was as important as satisfying a husband], I have failed.’ Fu’s father adopted twenty-six sons, and his mother nine daughters: that is how parents could get nearest to immortality, proliferating descendants who would remember them. Yun herself, while looking after their two children and doing everything to please her husband including making his clothes and developing frugality in housekeeping into a fine art, wanted something more, to be able to do what men were allowed to do, to accompany him on his journeys and see more of the world. Above all she wished to expand the range of their affections, and that extended to people as well as places. Yun as a woman did not have the freedom that men enjoyed, but would winning it have satisfied her? She did not see that men were not free either. Fu revealed the limits of what men could do when he said, ‘I have never been able to search out and explore secluded places on my own.’ This is a clue to where sexual revolutions could go next. Too much is left out when sex is thought of only as a force of nature, or an expression of love, or a criterion of morality, or a struggle for power, or a theatre in which genes and hormones are the main characters. It is also about what one person cannot do satisfactorily on their own.
One day, Yun announced to Fu that she would find him a concubine who would come to live with them. How, he asked, could they possibly afford such a luxury? The practice of taking a concubine, not out of desire but to produce descendants, ideally with the approval of a loyal wife free of jealousy, had become a tradition that had spread particularly among the wealthier classes, supported by the emperor, who even provided concubines for his senior officials. ‘We are so happily married,’ Fu said. ‘Why should we look for someone else?’ Yun refused to be deterred and found a young woman who was ‘both beautiful and charming . . . her eyes were as lovely as the surface of an autumn pond’ and ‘her literary knowledge was extensive.’ ‘I love her too,’ Yun explained, and she took an oath with the concubine to become sisters. Fu asked: was Yun trying to imitate the heroine of the famous play by Li Yu (1610–1680), in which a wife falls in love with a woman and brings her into her home as a concubine for her husband? ‘Yes,’ replied Yun. The novelist and actor-manager Li Yu was another examination failure who became a bold analyst of eroticism (and gastronomy too), and an advocate of originality and invention. His message was, ‘Even if your tastes are mistaken, if you cultivate your own mistakes, they are not mistakes anymore.’ In the end, nothing came of the concubine idea, and Yun died aged forty, too poor to afford a doctor.
She was unintentionally a pioneer by living with Fu as a couple, separated from his parents, who practised what was then and has in many places remained normal, to have a large family of many generations all in one house, sometimes with employees or servants too. However, innumerable modern couples who have replaced this with the ideal of independence and privacy have been struck down by an unforeseen epidemic: boredom, having nothing more to say to each other. The entertainment industry has struggled to offer short-term relief for this recurrent affliction, but it is not a cure, for entertainment can also become boring. Yun’s attempt to bring a third person into her home so as to extend the range of her experience of life has been widely rejected as a solution and couples have defined themselves by their exclusion of third parties. According to surveys, the majority of American women believe it wise to give up their close male friends when they get married because their jealous husbands feel threatened. From the beginning of human history, how to be a couple without jealousy has been a problem: the very first recorded conversation between two lovers, in Mesopotamia about 1750 B.C., centres around a woman suspecting that her lover was too interested in another, and her determination to win him back: ‘No, she does not love you,’ says the woman. ‘I shall win over my rival . . . I shall win back my beloved . . . It is for your love that I thirst.’ But jealousy is only one of the obstacles in theway of making the relations of couples more beautiful.
Sexual revolutions are not a modern invention. In the third century A.D., Chinese moralists complained that the Celestial Empire was entering an age of debauchery, that people were interested only in gratifying their senses and were giving way to ‘lustful impulses’, that even well-bred women ‘jest lewdly, drink and sing as they go along’. Well-to-do provincials, excluded from power and disgusted by the incompetence and corruption of the emperor and his courtiers, made sexual conquest an alternative form of politics. For these men, it was another way of asserting their independence of state-supported morality and their ability to do what they pleased, at least with women, another way of building their own little domain of authority and of finding an inspiring purpose. But the result was nothing more dramatic than the growth of an industry of ever more sophisticated courtesans to entertain frustrated gentry and newly rich merchants. Even when the Taoists turned sex into a cosmological experience, promising longevity with elaborate sexual ceremonies, liturgies, massages and varieties of copulation, though they sometimes gave women an active role, they often degraded them too.
‘Debauchery’ stimulated a lot of questioning about what men and women wanted from each other, but offered few practical answers. Juan Chi (A.D. 210–263) questioned whether traditional sexual morality was out of date: ‘Were the rituals established for people of our time?’ The wife of Hsieh An (A.D. 320–385) said, ‘If the rules on sexual conduct had been written by a woman instead of by a man, they would be different.’ Liu Ling (A.D. 221–300), notorious for wearing no clothes when at home, issued one of the first declarations of the right to privacy: ‘The rooms of my house are my trousers. Gentlemen, what are you doing by entering my trousers?’ A wife, reproached for not addressing her husband with the habitual ceremonial circumlocutions of respect, dared to reply, ‘I am intimate with you and therefore I call you you.’ Through the centuries that followed, every time people lost their respect for government, or their fear of it, and felt they could ignore imperial controls on their behaviour, they attempted a sexual revolution. Every time emperors reinstated their authority, they brought intermittent periods of sexual freedom to a close. This see-saw between sexual freedom and sexual repression was repeated time and again. In the twentieth century, under Mao all talk of sex was silenced and energies diverted to economic progress, but immediately after his fall it reappeared, with a vast range of publications on the ‘bedchamber arts’ and social surveys describing the precise sexual techniques people could use.
The goal of these sexual revolutions was to keep private life separate from public life and free from public censure. But freedom has proved to be too limited an aim. ‘Sexual liberation’ has repeatedly aroused puritan reactions, and it has not necessarily enabled men and women to understand each other better, nor increased the amount of affection exchanged between them, nor expanded their idea of what life has to offer.
In the lifetime of Fu and Yun, parts of Europe also experienced a similar flux and reflux. In 1763, the year they were born, John Wilkes, sometime member of parliament and Lord Mayor of London, the popular campaigner for liberty in England and the American colonies, wrote:
Life can little more supply,
Than just a few good fucks,
And then we die.
This was an extreme application of the doctrine that the pursuit of happiness was the most important aim of life. Lust, hitherto condemned as dangerous, was now celebrated by some as ‘the most exquisite and most ecstatic pleasure in life’. Male appetites were freed from restraint: ‘A woman being enjoyed by a dozen . . . can never render her less agreeable to a thirteenth.’ England’s Hellfire Club crowned itself with the motto: ‘Do what you want’, and brought together respectable clergy, leading politicians, army officers, noblemen, merchants and academics to ogle naked women,
read pornography, compare their penises and masturbate in ‘elaborate rites of phallic celebration’. However, as in China, that phase passed and by 1800 piety and modesty were back in fashion. Though the 1920s and the 1960s revived the celebration of sexual freedom, they also produced a backlash. In 2012 Alain de Botton concluded that there was ‘no solution to the majority of the dilemmas that sex creates for us’ and that humans have to learn to live with their disappointments. Today indeed individuals are more rigorously categorised by their sexual orientation than they were in the past. And no public figure would dare openly conduct a relationship as King James I and the Duke of Buckingham did in the early seventeenth century, communicating in unsealed letters, with the king addressing the young duke as ‘my sweet child and wife’ and signing as ‘your dear dad and husband’, with the duke writing back, ‘My only thoughts are bent on having my dear dad and master’s legs soon in my arms’, and ending, ‘your majesty’s most humble slave and dog.’
India, in contrast to China, had clearly expressed divine support for the pursuit of sexual pleasure as one of the goals of life. There was therefore no need to fight for freedom, but obeying the rules of religion implied respecting social structures too. The Kama Sutra, (written possibly as many as eighteen centuries ago) gave the sub-continent the reputation of being nearer than any other place to reconciling conscience and carnal knowledge, by showing how its sixty-four ways of love-making could be raised to the level of art and religion. Each gesture, each embrace, each position was given a meaning, orgasm was turned into a mystical union of male and female, elaborate play-acting during intercourse transformed quarrel into theatre, and the exchange of bodily fluids was made into a ritual for the expiation of sins. Temples, moreover, were filled with erotic works of art that assimilated sex into a search for the divine. European visitors were astonished by the sophistication and variety of sexual teaching and believed they had struck on a golden remedy for adultery, because in their own sexual practices ‘monotony begets satiety’; but in this civilisation it seemed possible to ‘live with a wife as with thirty-two different women, ever varying the enjoyment of her and rendering satiety impossible’. They were amazed that Indian women ‘cannot be satisfied with less than twenty minutes’. But outside the bedroom, social hierarchies remained untouched. Ancient constraints on individual behaviour, often ambiguous, were sometimes even reinforced. The great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, which dates back as far as the ninth century B.C., suggests it could have been otherwise:
‘The wife is half the man, the best of friends . . .
With a wife a man finds courage . . .
On her depend the joys of love, happiness and virtue.
But ten centuries later the Arthasastra insisted that all that was expected of a wife was obedience: ‘She should do nothing independently, even in her own house. In childhood subject to her father, in youth to her husband, and when her husband is dead to her sons, she should never enjoy independence . . . The virtuous wife should ever worship her lord as a god.’
Sexual intimacy did not dismantle the barriers between men and women. ‘Love Poem for a Wife’ by A. K. Ramanujan (1929–1993) ends by saying ‘what keeps us apart is an unshared childhood’: they are brought up too differently. According to the Hindustan Times surveys, three-quarters of people aged under twenty-five in today’s India are in favour of arranged marriages. In Bollywood films, love is not generally expected to triumph over family. The harassment of women remains a major complaint. Sexual freedom is not enough to change the relations between men and women.
Nor are prosperity and luxury, nor the rise or decline of civilisations. The problem with the cultivation of sensuality has been that it then raises the question of what comes next, beyond more sensuality. Just when the Roman empire, in the first two centuries A.D., was at the height of its power, people who seemingly had everything rebelled against the ideal of sensual pleasure, and Christianity joined the rebellion, adding its religious authority to Stoic philosophy. The flesh dies, the spirit lives, said the preachers; spiritual pleasures were more important. The worldwide monastic movement exalting celibacy was not just about sex but an expression of a different idea of what humans should be. Monks, nuns and hermits attempted a heroic experiment: to have such complete faith in the divine that they did not need children to care for them in their old age. For many, in any case, the end of the world was imminent. They wanted to distinguish themselves from mere animals by their will power in resisting all natural temptations, and to be able to love everybody, not just one partner. Their ambition to free themselves from the domination of sex was as bold as that of communists who later tried to free themselves from the domination of money, but it proved just as difficult. Pachomius (292–346), the Egyptian saint who was the founding father of Western monasticism, said that between the ages of fifty and seventy he had not spent a single night or day without desiring a woman, even when he tried to concentrate on prayer. St John Cassian (360–435), who introduced monasticism to Europe from Egypt, claimed that he could guarantee perfect chastity in six months: all that was needed to purge oneself of lust, desire and gluttony was to live on nothing but two loaves of bread a day, changing the meaning of what it meant to be alive. The idea of accepting suffering so as to test one’s ability to triumph over it, and of overcoming sexual desire in favour of spiritual rewards, was for many centuries admired, as was rejecting contact with another human body because flesh was a reminder of mortality and sexual desire a sign of human weakness in the service of God. Women embraced asceticism by becoming the brides of Christ. But when Catholic priests tried to interfere in the sexual lives of lay people, allowing copulation for only 184 or 185 days a year, and used the confession to punish them for unorthodox sexual variations, they found the limits of their power. Instead today’s economic system was built, in part, on the rejection of self-control.
To change one’s understanding of what life is about is one way of having a sexual revolution. But another is to change what is understood by sex. In 1905 ‘sexy’ meant to be engrossed in sex; in 1923 it meant, for the first time, to be attractive. Could a ‘sexy’ person today be one who appreciates the complexities that the existence of two sexes involves? The Chinese encourage such a view because their word for sex, xing, had a broader meaning before the twentieth century, describing an individual’s whole personality rather than referring specifically to the genitals. But the whole personality is still far from being what initially attracts humans to one another. According to researchers who like to put numbers even on such matters, people are attracted first of all by appearance (55 per cent) and then by the style of speaking (38 per cent), and much less by what is actually said (7 per cent). Is that an additional clue to what another sexual revolution might concern itself with? In 1511, the word ‘conversation’ was used to describe sexual intercourse. In the eighteenth century, ‘criminal conversation’ meant adultery. In the twenty-first century an ‘intimate conversation’ is a reminder that the magnetism that draws people to one another is not always the product of a desire to penetrate bodily orifices, and that they also enjoy exploring each other’s minds, tastes and experience. The sex manuals which give precise instructions about how to produce arousal and orgasm may eventually become a quaint relic of faith in mechanical efficiency, with the realisation that if you repeat what someone has told you to do and to say, you become a mere shadow of a person.
In China, Yun could not know that almost at the same time as she was talking to Fu, a member of the Constituent Assembly of the French Revolution was demanding that after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which ‘made man free and happy in public life, it remains for us to assure him liberty and happiness in private life’; but the only result was a law to allow divorce and another to abolish the power of fathers over their adult offspring. The politicians failed to notice that though French novels had hitherto been about rebellious children quarrelling with authoritarian fathers, they were increasingly portraying fathers seeking
the affection of their children. Providing affection has never figured in any election manifesto, and the slogan ‘Make Love not War’ did not follow from any careful research to discover whether making love does generate affection. The word ‘love’ does not occur in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nor do Liberty, Equality and Fraternity concern themselves with it. It is as though public authorities still agree with Confucius who said ‘I have never met anyone who loves virtue as much as he loves sex’, and recognise that they are powerless when it comes to promoting love, the most deeply desired of all blessings, even though they wish to be loved themselves. Those who have power or money have their own idea about how to make everyone happy, which is by giving everyone more power and money. But it is possible for those who have neither power nor money to attempt something different, to make more inventive use of that mysterious magnetism, the attraction and repulsion that humans have for one another.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 23
