An autoethnography on the topic of body, intimacy and sexuality

My hometown is in the south of mainland China, a small town built on a river in a humid and hot climate. In the early days of reform and opening up, this place experienced a brief period of prosperity due to the papermaking and shipping industries. Since the new century, the changing and changing social relations and social contradictions have become increasingly apparent. After the bubble gradually dissipated, what was left was a kind of depression that was hesitant to speak. I was born in the millennium and grew up in the downward situation of the times. During my turbulent adolescence, I witnessed the process of the promised future gradually becoming an illusion. The people in my hometown are hardworking, simple, and quite conservative. There are many such towns in China, which have nurtured generations of people. Perhaps one thing in common is that for children who grow up in such an environment, gender, identity recognition and their socialization process are all somewhat difficult.

During the elementary school period when gender awareness was being enlightened, I was both eager and confused about my female identity. Like many little girls, I made some silly underground attempts, such as secretly trying on my mother's high heels and almost falling down; for example, I imagined the day when I could wear lipstick when I grew up, and had high expectations for the beauty effect. Sometimes I would be disappointed because I didn't like Barbie dolls but liked racing cars, which was a bit strange; and because my mother never let me wear bottoms above the knees, she thought it was too indecent - now I can understand her limitations and the habits and admonitions placed under the patriarchal structure, but at that time, I could only realize one thing, that is, if I were a boy, I could wear convenient shorts casually and no longer have to quarrel with my mother about it. There is a very classic concept in Chinese culture, which is the "moderation" emphasized in the "Book of Changes". The so-called "self-restraint and restoration of propriety, the middle is the right and the harmony" and "the virtue of moderation is the highest", I have always felt that it is very applicable to women: you need to have femininity, but not too much femininity. There is a ruler of judgment across the female body. On the left side of the scale is the unloved "tomboy", and on the right side is the promiscuous "slut". Women need to pursue a safe zone that can balance the two throughout their lives. Here, you may suppress yourself and give up your rights, but you will cater to society and reduce humiliation.

On the one hand, sex education is almost non-existent in mainland China (especially in underdeveloped provinces). Therefore, the exploration of body and sex is a process of crossing the river by feeling the stones. The river is winding and the water is turbulent. It is common to be injured actively or passively. While the tradition of sexual repression is inherited, because it is the instinct of human beings and the origin of human nature, sex begins to exist everywhere outside of sex. Pornographic elements are mixed in various daily life, such as dining gloves that look like condom packaging, which bring a kind of pleasure and bad taste brought by breaking taboos, and bring abnormal guidance to adolescents in the period of sexual budding and maturity. Film and television literary works always tend to describe the middle school period as a pure and flawless utopia, but from my actual life experience, sexual humiliation and violation are not uncommon in every middle school. The problem shown by most gender crimes is that no one teaches girls how to protect themselves physically, and no one teaches boys how to deal with their sexual impulses. When I was young, I was sexually assaulted twice, once by an acquaintance and once by a stranger in public. Self-healing is a long process and lasts a lifetime. I once opened my heart and told this experience to a former boyfriend, and his first reaction was to doubt the authenticity of the story. I lamented that understanding between the sexes is so difficult, empathy is so rare, and the growth of the "first sex" can be so strong that it is arrogant in the carefully woven social framework dominated by generations of men.

On the other hand, the education of intimate relationships has obvious gender differentiation characteristics. Byron mentioned that "a man's love is something different from his life, but a woman's love is her whole existence". The word love has completely different meanings for men and women, which is the reason for serious misunderstandings and even divisions between them (Simone de Beauvoir, 1972). The long-standing romantic narratives and love myths have provided girls with a script for intimate relationships: love should be full of flowers and chocolates, sweet words and eternity. Religion, social thinkers, writers and mass media have worked together to create a romantic legend with many believers. Disney fairy tales are a typical symbol. The princess's self-realization needs to be completed through the prince's redemption. The success of romantic love foreshadows the success of being a woman. Society encourages every woman to imagine herself as a princess, but the princess must be beautiful and slender. The beauty of the flowers is a letter of recommendation to enter the world of love. After entering, the ability to control oneself is tested: it must be strong enough to devote oneself to the family, but weak enough not to cover up the light of the husband - under the romantic sugar coating is the essence of being an "other". For men, subjectivity is preserved in the dictatorship of love, masculinity is taught to be insensitive, strong and arbitrary, and excessive emotional expression and self-disclosure by men are seen as weakness. The huge gap in misaligned training requires a structural strait to be crossed in decoding information in intimate relationships.

To be honest, after entering university, the open and inclusive atmosphere and the humanities and social sciences major I studied changed me a lot. The basic education I experienced in the mainland was oriented towards strict examination purposes. The most obvious characteristics were the single evaluation criteria and serious competitive thinking. The transcript is like a judgment book. Students need to base their self-worth on scores and learn to suppress their unique personality and chaotic thoughts. "Social Darwinism" permeates every middle school. Individual identity and background are forgotten, and intimacy and sex become taboos that are avoided. Now, more than four years after graduating from high school, I can finally face my body and identity sincerely and respect my needs as a "person". In the continuous construction of society, gender is fluid, and in fact, human beings themselves are also fluid. Everything created from the human mind exists and can only exist when the human mind exists. "Tropical Melancholy" is the book that enlightened my interest in social sciences. As it is written in the book, "And yet I exist. I certainly do not exist as an individual, because in this respect I am just a bet and a battlefield, a bet and a battlefield that is always in danger, just a bet and a battlefield for the struggle between a society, a society composed of billions of nerve cells in my head, and my body, this robot."

From an anthropological perspective, humans are a complex of biology and society, shaped by natural attributes and acquired cultural experiences. And my shaping was often carried out in the long journey of social migration. "Migration" is an important keyword in my growth so far. Because of further studies, I left my hometown early and went to several other distant cities. Now it seems that the whole process of migration, breathing, resting, and wandering, has made me feel more and more the value of self-identity and the impact of modern civilization on people. I began to learn to reflect on and embrace my gender and identity. I think a soft and powerful heart can give people a sense of belonging to home. Helen MacDonald wrote in "Takeoff at Dusk", "Home can be carried with you, not just a fixed place. Perhaps it was the birds who gave me this idea, or they brought me here." In the wild, on a clear, cool, cloudless autumn afternoon, I once witnessed a row of peregrine falcons flying across the sky. Their sharp and slightly hoarse calls, flying diagonally through the pouring sunlight, made me feel a distant similarity.