Sex Education and Sex Culture Museum Professor Liu Dalin Doctor Hu Hongxia
发布日期:2008-03-05
Sex liberation is an inevitable historical developing trend in the world, including China. There are two kinds of sex liberation. One is turning into indulgency and promiscuity, which we strongly fight against; The other is the healthy and scientific sex liberation, which is the sex culture we agree with. Sex of the human beings has two natures. One is the sociality or instinct, which is born and need not be taught; the second is sociality, which requires appropriate limitation to the sex and asks for cultural and gracious values, sentiment, habits and style of the sex. The latter one should be acquired through teaching. It’s necessary to make use of outside force to help human beings to build up their healthy personalities. This is called sex education, which is an indispensable important part of every human in process of leading to the civilization.
I. Sex Education in Ancient China
China has a long and luxuriant history, including the plentiful and centuries-old sex culture. For a country, if her history has been considered to be long and abundant, it’s impossible for her sex, which is one of the two basic living needs of human beings, is conservative and unenlightened. For China, her ancient sex culture has no more than been covered and dusted for nearly one thousand years.
In ancient China, people paid much attention to the family, bearing and generation. It’s certain that they were aware that no sex, no generation. Therefore, sex education did draw much attention. According to a history book called Bai Hu Tong written in Han Dynasty (about BC 1st century to AD 3rd century), then there was some noble school named “Pi Yong”. Children of nobles, when they were after 15 years old, should go to that school, learning poems, composing, horse riding, toxophily, Wushu, traditions and music, as well as sex education which was a required course. As to the content of the course, it could not be observed and studied on today.
Although the ancient ordinary citizens could not send their children to those noble schools to accept sex education, they also got their own ways to process the sex education to their kids. China Sex Culture Museum has collected some ancient sex educational tools. One of them was called “Ya Xiang Di”, which is a china with a top and always has the shape as fruit or boat. The top lifted, a pair of man and woman inside were doing coition. Usually, people put it at the bottom of box to prevent evils. When the daughter was going to marry, the mother would take it out and make the daughter watch the inside man and woman to do the coition, suggesting that what the daughter should do after marriage.
Anther sex education tool is called “trousseaux painting”. It is a long scroll printed in wooden plate, containing 8 to 12 pairs of men and women doing sex at different positions. When the daughter got married, parents would buy one or two those paintings and put into the trousseaux. In the night of new marriage, the young couple couldn’t know how to make love. Then, they would take out the “trousseaux painting” and learn to do pursuant.
In Ming and Qing Dynasties (AD 14th century to 19th century), Happiness Buddha has usually been oblate in the royal palace. Happiness Buddha is a figure of Buddha that a male Buddha and a female Buddha was having sex and at the same time conducting the sex collection. The eunuchs often led princes and offspring to view the Happiness Buddha and taught them how to make love. However, there were always ministers to propose opposite advices considering those actions were too obscene and would let the princes to learn something bad.
There are some other different ways to transmit civilian sex knowledge. For example, female friends would sing songs of sexual contents to the bride. This action was some of joke. However, the bride did get much sex knowledge from those songs. Before the girl went to marry, her wet nurse would convey some knowledge about sex to her. That girls read some novels about sex was another resource of sex knowledge.
Although there were different methods to teach sex knowledge, that the mother suggested that to the daughter should be one major solution. In ancient China, there was a rule going like that “male and female could not get into touch with each other. Under this rule, the mother could not talk about sex with her boys because of the difference between male and female; due to the same reason, the father could not refer to sex to daughter as well. The father and the son were in same gender, but in ancient time, the father was very strict and shouldn’t talk about sex with the son. Therefore, conducting sex education was almost doing along the way of “mother telling the daughter”.
II. Birth and Development of Modern Sex Education
In ancient China, sex education was conducted among contradictions. On one side, due to requirements of generation, people had to have the sex education; on the other side, feudal thoughts considered the sex as obscene or at least may not enter into the elegant hall and that the sex could only be done but not talked about. Correspondingly, civilian sex education was always done through hints. It would definitely be great different from modern open sex education.
Modern sex education in China started from 1920s. At that time, a man named Zhang Jingsheng, who was a philosophy doctor getting back from France, had advancing thoughts and continued to advocate that sex was an ordinary and normal thing having absolutely no secrets; If human beings wanted civilization, the sex education must be conducted; male and female should be free to communicate with each other and be fair; opposing the package marriage or business marriage; do not use virtue values to oppress the women; using methods as “seeing the blood” to verify the virgins were extremely unscientific; etc. He has published many books on sex education, which were popularly welcome by the youth. But there also were many feudal thoughts against him. due to popularity of his books, some illegal book merchants misused his name to publish some obscene works. For some period, Zhang Jingsheng had rather bad reputation and could not defense for himself. At last, he was almost compelled to commit suicide. Then, he went aboard for the second time. After returning, he was just quiet and poor to live for his rest life.
Since the establishment of new China in 1949, status of sex education hasn’t been changed and was still blocked. Till 1963, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai has organized some experts and professionals on medicals and education to discuss this issue. He believed that it was very important to healthy growing up of the youth and should be spread and promoted. During that period, China was not so open up. Not much later, Cultural Revolution just took place. Therefore, sex education failed again. What Prime Minister Zhou emphasized at that time was only the knowledge education of the sex and focused on the attention of the youth. Its scale and meanings are not as large and deep as those understood nowadays. Due to great personal authority of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, his words about conducting sex education was still a flag, a foundation and a protecting umbrella taken by some scholars when they planed to put sex education into practice in 20 years later.
Till the middle of 1980s, several years after opening up in China, sex education has been proposed again. In 1985, we hold the first serial lectures about sex in our country in Shanghai and being open to the public. Those lectures were totally 10 lessons in topic of Sex Issues in Modern Society and raised huge reflection during the society. In succession, we hold the first session of training class to backbone of education. More than 80 persons who have attended this class have all become the basic skeletons in spreading sex education. Just in the same year, Shanghai municipal educational authorities made decisions to set sex education experimental spots in 100 middle schools in shanghai. In the second year, experimental schools increased to 254 middle schools. After two years, which was in 1988, national education and family planning leading authorities hold an experience exchanging meeting in Shanghai and jointly issued documents to require middle schools all around the country should set lessons about sex education and every youth should receive sex education. Consequently, this has put sex education in China to an unprecedented height.
III Resistance of pushing forward Sex Education and Current Issues
Taking advantage of national administration authority to spread sex education certainly is a powerful and advancing condition. But, many conservative thoughts never stepped back in front of administration authority. At the very beginning when starting sex education in the middle schools, there already have been such opposed voices as: “Even dog would not need to be taught, not to say the human being?" “It’s OK that children don’t understand the sex. If they know about it, they would rather do something bad.” Some presidents of middle schools posed at daggers drawn against sex education and said that “Had I been the president of this school, sex education would have not enter into this gate!” some parents knew that their children received sex education classes in the school and they would say “How dare your teachers talk about those nonsense to you. Don’t listen to him!” therefore, the effects of school education have been killed by the families’ counteractive.
Due to resistance as well as lack of experience, modern sex education in China still has issues as follows:
1. Incomplete educational objects. Sex education is a life-lasting education, of which the objects include children, the youth, young couples and old citizens. But, only sex education to the youth have been commonly conducted in middle schools and some sort of being referred to when young couples get married. Otherwise, there’s still blank in sex education to children and old citizens. The main reason remains to be resistance in mind. Someone thinks that “children could not understand what sex is. To learn more would rather let them do bad things.” Actually, although the children are not willing to fall in love, get married and have sex, they do have curiosity about sex and some habits related to sex. If without correct guidance, the children would receive unfavorable sexual psychological stimulation and form sense of sex mystery or abnormal psychology. For sex education to the old citizens, someone believes that: “they are too old to talk about sex!" Indeed, for the increase of living and medical standards, Chinese old citizens are commonly slow senility in physiology and psychology so that they still have interests in sex. However, these circumstances haven barely been understood and they themselves were getting worried, lost in contractions and pains.
2. Incomplete education contents. There are two parts of sex education in China: one is knowledge education and the other is personality education. Both are very important. But in common sense, personality education of sex carries more importance than knowledge education of sex. This is because that lack of knowledge could be fixed up quickly by learning lessons. Once values, sentiment, habits and style have been formed, it would be difficult to change them. But nowadays in China, sex education mostly focuses on conveying the knowledge with less emphasis on personality education, even turning the sex education lessons into physiological and sanitary courses.
3. Lack of mature general guideline and teaching materials of sex education. Since the beginning of promoting sex education in China, we have never collect national intellects to edit a comparatively mature guideline and teaching materials. Today, experts still hold their own positions in different issues. For example, issues about condoms and homosexuality. For these issues, which are whether the sex education should take place and to what extent; to stop pre-marriage sex and which one to use convincible to prevent those, there are none comparatively mature considerations.
4. Lack of qualified sex education teachers. It’s very difficult to be a qualified sex education teacher, who should have the following conditions: have correct sex conceptions, being open and strict; get comparatively wide knowledge base related to sex education, such as physiology, psychology, sociology, education, literature and medicine; very decent style, never being loose; good capacity of language expressing, being able to control the lessons; being most important to make hearted friends with students and let students talk about their most private things to conduct education accordingly and reach expected effects.
However, many sex education teachers have low qualification. The reason that there is less people meeting the foregoing requirements does not always lie on the teacher himself but on less attention paid to sex education. The school didn’t lift the standards when selecting sex education teachers and teachers of sex education could barely get the chance to attend in advanced studies. There have been no professional courses in Chinese colleges. These are all limitations of the time and society.
IV. Pay Attention to Historical and Cultural Education of Sex
During 1989 to 1990, we have organized a national investigation about sex, which got twenty thousand samples. This has been the largest investigation about sex in China till now. through investigation, we have got many discoveries, an important one of which is that sex conceptions of modern Chinese have been greatly influenced by traditional culture.
For example, some thought that the sex was dirty and could not tell other people; even when having sex between husbands and wives, the women could not be active otherwise she would be considered as indecent; the virtue of a girl was extremely important, and if being raped, although she was innocent, she was “an unclean woman” for ever; devoice was a bad thing and people who devoiced were bad neither; etc.
Roots of these conceptions planted into the ancient time. Therefore, we started to research Chinese ancient sex culture. Without understanding towards China’s yesterday, we could not learn about her today and tomorrow.
There are three ways to study Chinese ancient sex culture: the first is to view many ancient books; the second is to visit many places of interests related to sex all round the country; the third is to collect sex cultural relics to argue the history. It will be most arguable to approve history by sex cultural relics.
Collecting sex cultural relics always faced many difficulties of human resources and material resources as well as much mind resistance: “why are you so interested in those obscene things?” However, we have overwhelmed various difficulties and stick to the end. During about the past 20 years, we have collected more than 4000 pieces of cultural relics, of which the oldest one was 9000 years before.
As to these cultural relics, as many as we collected, we found it necessary to publicize them. And the best way is to publish book, hold exhibitions and museums. In the last decade, we have hold 34 exhibitions in China Mainland, and 12 overseas.
Since 1999, we have set up several sex museums in the country.
These actions have drawn wide attention from home and abroad. It’s suggested by domestic viewers that: “Never have seen or listen to before. Have a vivid lesson of history and culture.” “We couldn’t imagine that our ancestors 5000 years ago have been so enlightened. Our Chinese nowadays should never be more conservative and behindhand.” Foreign viewers commonly thought: “After viewing this exhibition, we got a real picture of China.”
Observing the effects of this museum playing on audiences, we further found that this sex culture museum could function as some of sex education. As described before, although knowledge education and personality education of sex are both important, for some people having certain intellectual base (such as college students, and white collars), it’s also necessary to add some historical and cultural education of sex, for it can make the following effects:
1. Promote motherland’s culture and make people proud of it. Chinese are definitely not conservative or behindhand in sex. China has a long and luxuriant history, including the plentiful and centuries-old sex culture. When we set up China Ancient Sex Culture Exhibition in Berlin on May 1995, 600 Chinese restaurants were undergoing the falling reputation due to some rumors that those restaurants sold dog meat and blamed to be "savage" and “uncivilized”. Just at this time, Chinese sex culture exhibition was hold in Berlin and has received great evaluation and become popular all around Berlin. This has significantly increased courage of bosses of those restaurants. They said:” You said we are savage and uncivilized. Then take a look at our 5000-year culture. Where were you German 5000 years ago?” After that, they volunteered to organize together and sponsored this exhibition.
2. Understand the developing rules of sex culture. In general, many countries and peoples are during the process of walking into sex liberation from sex durance and then going to new sex liberation. This is an indispensable historical trend. What we should pay attention to is that we should develop into scientific and healthy sex liberation but sex indulgency and promiscuity.
3. Break the mystery of sex. People have realized that the human beings are continued generation by generation through sex and sex does not have something secret or dirty. Once, a 61 old virgin visited our museum and kept viewing for three or four hours. At last, she told us that she has always believed that the sex was obscene and dirty so she wouldn’t want to get married. After viewing our museum, she has deeply understood that the human beings are coming down generation by generation just like this. Sex has nothing secret or dirty. Therefore, she had the willing to be married.
4. Be good to develop personality and build up harmonious society. Sex is one kind of human natures which can not be oppressed. In many conception movements during Chinese or foreign history, recovering and developing the personality has always been the important subject, of which sex liberation is just one component. Sex has three functions: functions for happiness, health and bearing. People should make full use of these three functions to achieve satisfaction of human natures.
5. Absorb the soul of historical heritage and serve the culture of modern society. There are many excellent contents in Chinese sex culture. But due to historical prejudice for hundreds of years, some of these contents have been missing and some have still been ignored till now. For example, the Book of Changes and Nosy in Taoism, those contents have close relationship with sex but haven’t been dig out and researched till now. There are good sex health care ways but most of those have been missing. And few people will actually try to study that. All these should have our attention.
|
