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More reviews by Tim O'Connell
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The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters by Richard Bernstein
When in 2006 a Shanghai-based English teacher dubbing himself ChinaBounder posted an internet blog bragging about the ease and extent of his sexual conquests, he ignited a storm of nationalistic outrage. "Let our compatriots act together on this Internet hunt to find this foreign trash until we kick him out of China," urged one enraged professor.
This modern-day (apparently British) lothario now makes his online taunts from the safety of Thailand, but the incident raises two uncomfortable questions: how could an undistinguished, underpaid Westerner so readily indulge his caddish fantasies? And why did such crude sexual boasts, likely to attract little interest if made by a Chinese businessman in New York, elicit such a wide and furious response?
It takes a brave white male to write a book on this highly charged subject (and perhaps a foolish one to review it), but RICHARD BERNSTEIN, the author of six previous books and a veteran journalist who in 1980 opened Time magazine's first Beijing bureau, has embraced the challenge. THE EAST, THE WEST, AND SEX: A HISTORY OF EROTIC ENCOUNTERS employs a lively cast of historical characters to explore why "for centuries the East, broadly defined to include most of the world's territory from North and East Africa to South, Southeast and East Asia, represented a domain of special erotic fascination and fulfilment for Western men."
Bernstein identifies two main themes at work in this pervasive but neglected aspect of the centuries-long dance between East and West. The first is the perennial association of sex with power. Travellers such as Marco Polo (visitor to the concubine-rich court of Kublai Khan) and adventurers like Ludovico de Varthema (love slave of the supposedly besotted queen of Arabia Felix) had long titillated Europe with tales of the exotic "harem cultures" of the Orient. But as Western colonial power advanced east over ensuing centuries, even the most ordinary of traders, administrators and soldiers found they could live like "erotic potentates" should they so choose -- American-dominated post-colonial Asia has afforded similar opportunities.
There are, of course, many reasons why both men and women find fulfilment (and often freedom) in an East-West interracial relationship, and the author fully explores the subtle social forces at work there. But like it or not, he concludes, in a broad sense, "The patina of prestige that attaches to foreign men in Asia is a cultural leftover from the century during which European men were the masters of most Eastern societies." Hence, the "powerful sense of wounded national dignity" aroused by oafs like ChinaBounder.
There is more to the story than that, however, and here, in developing his second theme, the author takes issue with the late scholar Edward Said. In his seminal work Orientalism, Said argued that Western pre-existing prejudices about the East (the sensual side of which promoted by sexual-adventurers like Ludovico, Gustave Flaubert and Sir Richard "Dirty Dick" Burton) were projected onto the region and used as a powerful diminishing tool of the imperialist enterprise. Bernstein doesn't necessarily disagree, but contends that Said in his focus on the Western mind underplays the fact that the Orient really did (and in many ways still does) possess a fundamentally different attitude to the sexual.
Regardless of the fantasies and stereotypes with which Westerners arrived, the erotic world of multiple wives, concubines and courtesans that they encountered was a real one. Such practices and values were the product of a patriarchal system very different from that of repressed, guilt-obsessed Europe -- a system of highly questionable benefit to women, but one possibly more realistic about the biological nature of men and society's low expectations for their behavior.
"The East, sexually speaking, has always been a good place to be male, and that's one of the reasons when the East became accessible, many Western men went there -- and continue to go there," Bernstein observes. "If the Western man became an erotic potentate in the East, he did so by grafting himself onto an Eastern erotic culture that had always been more frank and less morally fastidious about sexual needs than the Western Christian erotic culture, which valued exclusivity with a single lifetime partner and associated sex for pleasure with sin."
Such statements ring alarms in today's politically correct world, regardless of how well they may reflect reality, and a skim through overseas reviews of the book finds a fair share of criticism and, I think, misinterpretation. Later chapters on more contemporary scenes such as Vietnam's "wartime erotic circus of historic proportions" provoke particular outrage, sometimes in tones that imply just writing about prostitution suggests approval, or even vicarious, lascivious enjoyment.
Those with experience of this part of the world, however, are likely to respond to the author's observations with more recognition and understanding. The sex industries of Southeast Asia, for example, clearly differ from the dangerous red light districts of the West, and play a more integrated cultural role -- probing the reasons for that is an interesting and worthwhile exercise. Bernstein identifies Thailand as "the country where the encounter of the sexual culture of Western Christendom with the harem culture of most of the rest of the world is most actively enacted in a present-day setting. It is also a place where the practices of the past have been most vulgarized, commercialized, and globalized."
The author handles these sensitive issues of history and culture with delicacy and gentle humor, and remains largely unjudgmental, with the exception of a last-chapter nod to the "higher standard" of Christian monogamy, sexual fidelity and equality (perhaps anticipating that mob of irate reviewers). The book is lightly illustrated, and apart from some repetition and the turning of Graham Greene's Quiet American into an Ugly one (not for the first or last time), well-written and carefully crafted.
The East, the West, and Sex is an original, provocative survey of a fraught, complex subject that ranges across hundreds of years and a swath of territory stretching from Morocco to India to Shanghai. Thoughtful readers courageous enough to tiptoe through this cross-cultural minefield will find much to debate and ponder.
Tim O'Connell
26/12/2009
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Tim O'Connell is a China trader turned writer and historian who has lived in Hong Kong and Beijing since 1981. |
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