Post Date December, 03 2023
Chinese traditional sexual morality, regardless of its specific content, has always had two major prerequisites: first, to oppose society (or even the country) to the individual, and second, to oppose the individual's sexual performance to the entire personality. It assumes that if an individual "transgresses" in sexual matters, it will inevitably harm society and even the country; At the same time, this person is bound to be worthless, or even completely rotten. Therefore, not only does society and the state have the power to regulate and punish such individuals, but also every citizen has the right to "sweep the snow in front of their own doors and monopolize the affairs of others in bed.".
However, in the past 20 years, driven by the overall changes in society, people have increasingly realized that both of these assumptions are actually absurd. Therefore, traditional sexual morality has to gradually disappear; However, society has no new ideas and can only call for "return" in vain. As a result, many people are beginning to worry about the "moral vacuum", even panicking.
In fact, morality is an inevitable objective existence. How can there be a "vacuum"? Many so-called "progressives" are building a new kind of sexual morality, which is definitely generated from China's national conditions. The only problem is that mainstream society and public opinion still refuse to recognize that it is also a kind of morality, let alone to recognize and learn.
The following is just an example of "one night stand": its main characteristics are "encounter", "sexual discussion", and "non entanglement". Many people regard it as "no refusal", "no emotion", and "no responsibility", implying that it is better to buy prostitution than a pig or a dog. But:
First, "one night stand" in the relationship between oneself and the other party, unprecedentedly and fully respects the rights of the other party, truly realizing "do not do to others what you do not want.". Otherwise, even if thousands of "self" are looking forward to a one-night stand, if they cannot do this, how can one "other" agree? On the other hand, in today's China, there are so many "reasonable and legal" "marital rape", and which one is more ethical?
Second, "One night stand" implements the principle of "I live, let others live" in their relationships with other stakeholders. Therefore, they are not entangled with each other, which means that while exercising their rights, they do not infringe upon the rights of themselves and their spouses, lovers, parents, relatives, etc. On the other hand, do parents who insist on "hitting a couple with a stick", spouses who fight for divorce, and couples who have no sex and don't let others go?
Third, "one night stand" follows the law of love, both achieving "oneness" in the process and in a specific period of time, without "consistency". If this is not considered a new morality, it would be too short-sighted and shallow. In China, more and more people are getting married multiple times in their lives, becoming single and divorcing multiple times, each time legally. In today's society, where divorcees account for 4.5% of the total urban population, shouldn't we make some moral preparations for this phenomenon of "continuous monogamy and multiple couples"?
Fourth, "one night stand" puts sex back in its original position, which is neither so scary nor so precious. Just let nature take its course. On the other hand, should the traditional morality that advocates "one mistake leads to eternal hatred" continue to kill so-called "virgins"?
Of course, just like it's not all bad, "one night stand" can't be all good. The problem is, if you only know what it has destroyed but cannot see what it has built, it is an observer's fault.
We Chinese people are accustomed to worshipping the country, so we always like to attribute individual "deviance" to social "runaway". Therefore, we always like to beg for power to "manage" ourselves, and we also like to regard the extension of individual rights as "selfish" and "lawlessness.". As a result, it is precisely because of this, it is difficult for us to learn how to properly handle the relationship between ourselves, especially when strangers are facing strangers. This is the direct source of the so-called "disorderly release" and "lack of integrity". In terms of sex, the prominent performance is that once "liberated", those powerful individuals either use their power to bully others (such as "keeping secrets" specifically aimed at subordinates) or return to tradition (such as imitating the "keeping mistresses" in groups of wives and concubines).
For ordinary people, this comes from the fact that we almost never exist and live as an independent individual. Therefore, it is impossible to cultivate a lifestyle based on individual rights. For example, some "rebels" can legitimately kiss in public on crowded buses, less than a foot from someone else's nose. They only know that this is their "right of expression", but they have not thought that it also violates the "right to not see" of people around them, and they have no right to force others to "be clean without seeing". On the other hand, the "others" who are indignant about this are all using "immorality, everyone shouting and beating" as moral weapons, and they have no idea that as an individual, what they should uphold is only their right not to look at, and that this does not necessarily generate the power to punish others. It is precisely because of the confusion between rights and power (which is currently the most common "clerical error" in Chinese writing) that the debate on sexual morality in the past 20 years has been basically a low-level "double blind fight".
For example, in all cases involving "third parties", our judges always have to act as instigators without acting as guardians. In fact, if we no longer have to take a stand on an unmarried relationship, but instead treat the person involved as three independent and equal rights individuals, it will be easy to understand who infringed on whose rights and who owed whom much between each two individuals. Generally speaking, the person at the center owes both to the person inside and outside the marriage, while the two persons inside and outside the marriage have no relationship at all. The person outside the marriage has no right to separate the person inside the marriage, and the person inside the marriage also has no right to require the law to punish the person outside the marriage.
Looking back at the development history of advanced culture, there is no one who is not only building a universal morality based on individual rights in the entire social life, but also taking place and accepting the "sexual revolution"; There is a positive interaction between the two. Otherwise, the "sexual chaos" there is far more severe and widespread than in China, and social disputes are also much sharper and more antagonistic. Why does the entire society thrive without "seizing and managing together"?
In developed countries, the so-called social sexual morality has been transformed into a power relationship between individual individuals (individuals can also be organized, of course). For example, if you believe that the "adult bookstore" next door should be closed, there is only one way for you to come up with concrete evidence to show what specific rights the bookstore has infringed on you. Simply saying "immoral" is not enough, and generally speaking, "poisoning teenagers" is not enough. On the contrary, the reason why this bookstore can open next door to you must be that it has provided concrete evidence that it does not infringe upon the rights of others.
Another example: In all adult bookstores, those magazines are only allowed to be bought and not allowed to be read on the spot, because the customer's right to buy cannot undermine the right of not reading that the salesperson has.
To sum up, this kind of personal rights based love dominated morality can be summarized as follows: taking one's own rights as the driving force for progress (rather than blindly following any kind of social morality, whether conservative or open), taking the equal and equal rights of the other party as the premise (rather than luring, deceiving, deceiving, or suppressing), and taking the non-infringement of the personal rights of all relevant parties as the boundary (rather than being arbitrary), Take love as the leading factor (not "love only", not to mention greed). If so, then the future of the Chinese sexual revolution will be as beautiful as it itself.
