OK, so you might be wondering why I am reading an essay from the women’s section at 163.com, because that is SO NOT MY GENRE. But i was drawn to the title: “how should i deal with my husband’s many lovers”. At first I thought this meant a hubbie that was into menage a trois or more (the mathematical possibilities are endless) but in fact, it seemed mostly to be about something more basic: why can’t men keep their dicks in their pants when they’re supposed to. Like on long, lonely business trips. Here is one passage that i found particularly interesting:

老公说，其实每个男人最幻想的人生角色，就是国王。男人觉得，权利能征服男人，征服世界。而占有更多的女性–女人的身体，就等于占有了女性这个类别。每个男人，大概都是这样。就占有女人而言，男人需要资本。中国古代的潘安、柳下惠靠的是美貌，武则天的情人靠的是美貌加性能力、秦始皇母亲赵姬的情人嫪毐除了色相，似乎还有点别的类似于政治的东西。这些是古代的，现在的男人，单靠色相很难靠近更多的女性，因为东方女性属于被动型的。那么，钱就是很好的东西，男人占有金钱，然后用金钱征服女人。

老公接着说，你固然是个非常好非常好的完美女人，我找其她女人不是否定你。举个例子，我花100万给你买个貂皮大衣，可以说够昂贵了吧。但是这一辈子我只让你穿这件衣服，你会不会烦？

Here the writer, the wife, meets her husband and he says to her, “what every man wants, or fantasizes about being, is a king. Kings believe that power can conquer men, and conquering more women–conquering their bodies–is part of that same quest. Every man must share this impulse. Some men (and here they go in to some historical examples) use their looks or sexual ability as the ‘capital’ needed for their conquest, while others rely on money. My husband then said to me “just because I am with other women doesn’t negate what you are: for example, say that I spend one million to get you a jaguar fur coat–you could say that was quite
expensive. But if i told you to wear that thing the rest of your life, wouldn’t you find that restrictive?

再说了，男人，如果戴了绿帽子，原谅老婆会被人笑话是懦夫。女人，如果原谅老公的出轨，往往被视为美德。

Here the author says “if a woman cheats on a man, he would be considered a fool to forgive her. However, if a man cheats, the wife is considered virtuous for forgiving her husband.

That’s a cliche but i think that it certainly has a bit of merit in modern Chinese life, at least from what i know anecdotally…and see on TV.

Anyway, nothing special there. Just your run of the mill battle of the sexes stuff…like the whole bit about the king though…I can’t imagine saying that to any girl i have dated or would marry without her slapping me so hard in the face that my teeth rattle.

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I haven’t watched too many Oshima films but judging from Etsuraku (I really dig his style, especially the cinematography. There’s just something about the film stock that they used over there in the 1960s – plus Oshima loves nothing more than a dark and moody palette where faces and body parts are outlined in a distant light, as if they were fighting, struggling to emerge out of the darkness that envelops the rest of the frame.

There is also some fairly “radical” techniques, such as a method of framing certian shots such as they decenter the subject though those are actually a small minority of the shots. What I really loved were the montages: one of them was a girl smiling behind a glass (windshield…) you can see the skin on her hands. This one is not really a montage or double exposure type of thing, it’s more just a clever and poetic shot, photographic virtuosity if you will. The other one is more of a double/triple exposure type shot, where you have a close-ups of a woman’s face overlapping with each other, melding and shifting into and out of each other like a strange lipsticked hydra of desire.

It’s these kinds of sensibilities, plus the whole 1960s Japanese style of clothing (those suits with skinny ties are BOSS) that makes me love this film. The story is a bit meh … well, it’s not the tabla that counts, it’s how the story is rendered onto film. The acting is a bit garish in places, and I don’t if that’s a result of the style of the film or whether or not those were just the general acting conventions in the Japan of the time.

As for other films that Oshima has made: glancing through his IMDB the only one that I have seen for sure is the sensationally infamous In the Realm of the Senses, which is NC-17 up the wazoo, with real penetration, fellatio, etc. Another movie of his that I have not seen but which seems really intriguing is Mao Tse-Tung and the Cultural Revolution, which appears to be some 50 minute TV…documentary? Who knows. Would be awesome to get my hands on that…but I doubt it’s on DVD in China (my DVD dealer would have told me right quick if it was).

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I actually watched this a couple of weeks ago but never got the chance to write about it: There’s a Channel4.com review which sums it up nicely:

For Blier, the surreal agent provocateur who would make a career out of winding up the bourgeoisie, the film’s male aggression, absurd black humour and absence of any clear moral perspective proved both a calling card and a template. The characters are meagre and obnoxious but there’s something playful about the determination to cause outrage, and Stephan Grapelli’s whimsical score introduces a lyrical undercurrent which events, on their own, can’t muster.

Verdict
Blier’s rude and rambling farce occupies a similar position in 1970s French cinema as Trainspotting in 1990s Britain. It’s chaotic and obnoxious, but executed with a fair degree of Gallic swagger.

“Gallic swagger”! Love that phrase.

One can definitely see how, at the time, this movie ruffled some feathers. The sexuality isn’t overly explicit, but the film and the characters are quite frank about their sexual needs.

I don’t have much to say about this film, not that I didn’t enjoy it. I will mention two things that struck me. First, the young Gerard Depardieu. I had never seen a film of his from this far back (1974) — most of the films that I have seen him in are from the 1980s onwards, and probably mostly those from the 1990s and early 2000s. So of course, seeing him
this young, giving what the Channel 4 reviewer calls a “ferociously energetic performance from a rangy young Depardieu”, is a real revelation. And I agree with that description as well, the young Depardieu is just bristling with energy, sexual and otherwise. Even in the very first scene when his character Jean Claude and his friend Pierrot are tormenting a poor bourgeois woman they are going to rob, you can see it in his eyes. This is no actor is lower-class drag, your eyes tell you — this is the real thing. There is something menacing in his eyes, his posture, the way he carries himself. He’s much more the loose cannon than is Pierrot. Maybe he can afford to be, because Pierrot does get shot in the balls in the beginning, and soon Jean Claude becomes his friend/steward (and maybe gay lover?). Jean Claude is clearly the brains of the operation, the one that comes up with the ideas (he’s always saying “I’ve got an idea”), the one that launches them into all these madcap adventures.

You feel that his anger and his hurt is the most real: what is more revealing than the eternal hunt for pussy is the inchoate rage he hurls at rural, suburban France. There is one scene where they are wandering through a remarkably drab town where even the flies seem to be on siesta. It’s a gray, overcast day and they are walking around this ghost town and Jean-Claude says something like “town of shit! This place is such shit” (I don’t remember the line, and I don’t speak French). And then there’s the scene where Marie-Ange, Jean-Claude and Pierrot take the young rebellious teenager (Isabelle Huppert in one of her first roles) and “rescue” her from her stifling bourgeois parents. The Channel 4 reviewer mentions that director Bertrand Blier has made a career out of winding up the bourgeoisie, and I find this interesting, both within the film itself and also in the sense that I wonder why more filmmakers don’t take the piss out of the bourgeoisie more often, that being, after all, the holy and eternal right of angst-ridden young people in developed countries throughout the world.

The other thing worth mentioning is the Jeanne Moreau, the Eternal Feminine of postwar French cinema. There are never enough superlatives in the dictionary for women like that, or should we say that the extant ones are deficient for capturing the essence of what a woman like that is.

Jeanne is just released from prison. They stalk her. Cajole her. Eventually she gives in. Two men and a woman they share… sound familiar? Throughout she’s like a mime; there isn’t much dialogue. She’s just been released from jail. No one knows what she is thinking. Certainly, she wants some delicious food and a side order of young cock. But what lurks behind the guarded smiles?

If you’ve seen the movie, you know: she gets her food, gets her menage-a-trois on, and then shoots herself in the head. It’s a strange episode within the movie, almost self-contained, and few scenes hence, the boys are back on their adventures. They do find her son, but that’s about all that ties the latter part of the film with the Moreau scenes. Maybe I’m just morbid, but I liked this “episode” or a least it stood out above the rest of the film.
Or maybe Jeanne Moreau just has that kind of effect on me!

french, cinema, movies, films, depardieu, valseuses, jeanne moreau, 1970s, sex, sexuality

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MBA相亲会数百人参加 女性怨男性“素质低”(图)_网易新闻中心 via kwout

Hmmm it seems that kwout is having problems with Chinese character encodings…oh well. The link is to an article about a marriage, dating meetup that paired some highly-educated lasses with some not so tall men. Some men complained that they were afraid of women who were too well-educated, saying that they were picky and were too lofty in their goals for life and love. The women said that barely any men were over the height of 1.75. There is hope for me yet.

marriage, MBA, single, sex, china, chinese, guangzhou, society

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Spurred by the possibility of some hot pictures, I clicked on the link to a Chinese article about the pleasures of sex without penetration.* The article talks about we often place too much emphasis on genitals and penetration, oblivious of the body’s other erogenous zones, ignorant of the polymorphous pleasures that we’d unlearned in the process of accepting certain social definitions of sex and sexuality.

The People’s University has a famous sexologist—Pan Ruiming—who conducted a survey on the sex lives of the Chinese, and the article reproduces (pun kinda intended) the following results: men felt that oral stimulation from women could raise their pleasure 35%, while using their mouths to pleasure a woman could raise pleasure 45%–though it’s not clear who is on the receiving end of that raise. I think it’s the men. For the gals, kissing can raise their pleasure 43%, while receiving genital area stimulation could raise their pleasure 64%. What surprised me most was what came next (pun kinda intended): touching their own breasts and nipples could raise pleasure by 74%, but if they do it “fully”, they can raise their pleasure 212%.

This is no doubt of great succor to the all the men in the world that are lousy in bed. 212 percent, and all you have to do is to remind her to do some of the work herself. Who said there’s no such thing as a free munch in this world?
Here’s the passage in Chinese:

中国人民大学性社会学教授潘绥铭2000年完成的中国人性生活调查发现，男性主要通过采取各种新鲜的性交方式来增加快感，被调查男性认为妻子用口刺激自己可以提高35%的快感，自己口刺激妻子可以提高45%的快感。女性需要的则更多是各种爱抚，在性生活中接吻可提高43%，丈夫抚摸自己的外阴可提高64%，抚摸自己的乳头提高74%，爱抚很充分的话可以提高212%。由此可见，有时单纯的皮肤摩擦都能擦出炽热的火花。

*don’t worry people, I’m fine. And healthy.

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New Scientist Short Sharp Science Blog: South African squirrels: well-endowed via kwout

There is intense sexual competition among males in the South African squirrel population. They leave their semen in and around the females to make sure that other males don’t try to impregnate them. And they use these monster cocks to get the job done.

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First of all, I swear I wasn’t googling Nanjing+penis when I stumbled up on this article from just a few weeks ago about a strange incident involving a lonely man, his schlong, and an eel. Thirty-year old Wang recently found himself feeling a bit lonely one night and grabbed one of the eels he (or the people he lived with) had just bought and put in the bathtub, and proceeded to play with it around his penis. He didn’t expect that the eel would eventually crawl into his penis and not come out. Wang thought that he’d be able to piss the thing out, but after 2-3 days nothing happened and he started experiencing pain in his abdomen and difficulty urinating.

He went to the hospital and there they discovered that the eel had made it up to his bladder area and then died. It was still hard to get at, but they used one of those cystoscope things that goes up the urinary tract and manage to hook the thing after an hour and pull it out.

Some people just have to learn their lesson the hard way. I am thinking I should buy this guy a subscription to some porn site or magazine. Just wank it—now that’s a motto to live by. Interspecies romance ain’t all its cracked up to be.

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Let me say that I am big fan of the Harold and Kumar enterprise, if only b/c yes, it is nice having some non-white, and not especially handsome boys as the leads. The same dynamic and humor is there, John Cho being the uptight choad and Kumar getting all the gross-out jokes. I have to say that what sealed the deal for me was the one brief shot of Kumar masturbating where you see him come over his own face. God Bless America and our sense of humor.

The bit in the south with the KKK and the in-bred child (a cyclops) is a bit hackneyed, but yeah I still laughed. The homeland security chief grew on me. At first he seemed like your typical whiteboy homeland security prick, but they gave him good jokes to wrap it around, like when they bring in Harold and Kumar’s parents, and speak to the former in Korean. The translator squeals something remotely Korean and, when the parents reply in English, clearly audible to everyone–the translator turns to the homeland security guy and says “they’re using some strange dialect.” Later the homeland guy turns to the translator and says “are you sure you know how to translate?” The translator replies, “I have a Master’s in Romantic Korean literature” to which the homeland guy replies “that’s good enough for me.”

So you know there’s nothing new in there, just some good old-fashioned white, hetero, liberal humor. In fact it’s very “Stuff that white people like.” You get weed, hot chicks, whores, a strange relationship with homosexuality (eg the “cockmeat sandwich” torture at Guantanamo as well as the choice of casting openly gay Neil Patrick Harris as a (hetero) sex maniac who likes to “rock out with the cock out.” Sounds like we’ve got a repressed/closeted scriptwriter.

What else? Not much. Keep your expectations low. Laugh hard, laugh honestly. You will enjoy the movie.

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Violence, in most movies, is pretty standard—you get shot in the face by Scarface, your neck broken by Steven Seagall, or eaten alive by sharks. How many time have you seen a man thrash about as he is nearly decapitated by a bear trap? That’s Straw Dogs, a movie that must have been much more shockingly violent for the audiences of 1968 than it was for me (or us).

The film follows David Sumner, an American mathematician, and Amy, his English wife, as they leave the Vietnam-era maelstrom of the US for the bucolic Cornish countryside. There’s a sense of foreboding from the very beginning of the film, when you see the local mens’ lascivious stares at Amy’s chest—she’s a “liberated” woman who doesn’t wear bras. Throughout the movie, the locals—and I mean mostly the men—come off like they either think with their fists or their dicks or some combination thereof.

Of course, hostilities and misunderstandings accumulate, Sumner’s masculinity is questioned. The piece de resistance of the movie, if you can call it that while ignoring your body’s squirm, is the protracted rape scene. I don’t know how many rape scenes I have seen in films over the years—not a lot, I think—but there are two that stick in my mind the most: one of them is the rape of Monica Belluci’s character in Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible and the other is the rape of Amy in Straw Dogs. I can definitely see how some would accuse this scene of being a male chauvinist fantasy—the man attempts to rape the woman, but before you know it, she stops resisting it and starts wanting him. Of course, unlike Irreversible the rape scene in SD is a “double-rape”–its when the second man, Norman, rapes her.

Following a tip from Aric Queen I took a look at director Sam Peckinpah’s wikipedia page, and yes, the guy was a quite a character. Coke fiend, alkie, and talented director. But for that very reason, his patched career is much more interesting than those middling directors that neither lead interesting lives nor make interesting work.

The last scenes of Straw Dogs, where David successfully defends his house, woman, honor, and dignity from the local mob is a classic by any standards, and is, in the words of Aric Queen, a cross between Home Alone and True Romance–not the comparison I would have or could have thought of, but funnily effective as a description of the movie. Hoffman’s transformation from mild-mannered mathematician to defender of his homeland security is a bit far-fetched.

I haven’t read that many reviews of the film, but there is a thorough, lucid, and intelligent look at the movie by Dan Schneider, both on his site Cosmoetica as well as on the Alternative Film Guide. I think the last few paragraphs of that DVD/movie review are worth quoting here:

Straw Dogs, for its part, is plagued by a simple-minded script, unrealistic characters and situations, thus wallowing in gray mediocrity. Worse yet, lesser films on violence are almost invariably dull. Straw Dogs proves the rule. In fact, its own self-importance is what makes Straw Dogs far less enjoyable than, say, Last House on the Left or Night of the Living Dead. The former is so silly and unpretentious that its images and violence lodge in the viewers’ mind — such as the infamous fellatio-biting scene — while the latter is simply relentless pedal to the metal violence that is inexplicable.

Straw Dogs should have been more grounded in reality, or more campy, or more straightforward in its naked bile for mankind. As it is, it sits on the fence, and it is so predictable that it becomes
tedious. There’s not a moment where a viewer can get into any of the characters and identify with them — let alone care for what happens to them. Note that Peckinpah will show the beginning of acts of violence, but never the results — e.g., we see no real penetration of Amy, and we do not see David’s actual violence. The camera always looks away — even when he is tossing grapefruits at his cat. While this may seem commendable on the director’s part, it also neuters the visceral effect of the violence, so that we get in effect a serial killer of a film tidied up for children, showing all the “fun” of violence with none of the consequences. Thereby, Peckinpah’s set-up is not a statement of ethics, merely an unjustified and poor artistic choice.
In short, being controversial does not always equate with quality, and Straw Dogs feels increasingly like a puerile attempt to shock viewers (something it no longer does), despite its pretensions of offering something deeper. Ultimately, it no more than a passable B-movie with a pedigreed director and A-movie production values. Ironically, the very lack of such pretensions is what makes something like Last House on the Left work better, while a film like Night of the Living Dead touches far deeper into the human psyche.

Schneider’s two major points are interesting: the first is just that the film isn’t all that good, by the standards of Peckinpah’s oeuvre as a whole, or when compared to other movies exploring similar themes and made around the same time. The other and more subtle point is that the film is amoral—that this is an anarchy, where anything goes because no one really gets punished for it. And if, as Schneider says, you never see the effects of violence (he mentions, correctly, that you never see the cat getting hit by the grapefruit)–then what Roger Ebert asserted about the moral outrage of the film ought to be questioned.

The meta-issue of why films get misinterpreted is another can of worms. Schneider’s most acerbic criticism is for the film scholar that does the commentary on the movie, but also for others like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own point of view, but Schneider is quite precise in laying out what he thinks is wrong with other critics’ interpretations—where their use of words and assertions fail to describe the film in front of us.
I really admire the intelligence of Schneider’s essay, and it humbles me to know to think about how, despite watching so many movies over the last few years, I have not developed the incisive analysis and insight into movies that I had wished for.

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The sexologist Pan Hai has called for one of the idyllic islands off Zhuhai–Miao Wan Island–to be turned into a nude island. The blog post, written on July 15, is titled 中国应有裸泳海滩 (China ought to have a nude beach) and lays out some of Pan’s reasons he believes it’s about time for China’s own nude beach. As you might expect from a sexologist, he decries China’s puritanical sex culture, which he traces back to the Tang dynasty. What’s more interesting is what he says the ‘class structure’ behind sexual relations in China today–that is to say, sex can be openly bought, sold, and enjoyed by high officials–including Mao himself–but to do so, while preaching sexual prudishness to the masses, is nothing less than hypocrisy:

尽管统治者（包括我们的伟大领袖毛主席）自己从不禁欲，但他们却严格地限制老百姓的性欲。结果，整个中国社会，千百年来便形成了对于性的“二元化态度”或称“双重标准”。即：统治者可以荒淫无度，可以糜烂奢侈，而普罗大众则稍有“出格”，便会遭受道德、舆论甚至国家机器的制裁。

不是么？贪官污吏使用公款或者借用贿资包养情人（长期并多个），非但不受惩处，反而成为权势者的荣耀；小小百姓花一点儿小钱找“小姐”一乐，却时时受到专政机关的威胁，轻则罚款，重者拘禁——同样性质的男欢女爱，对于不同的国人竟有如此不同的“待遇”。这不仅深刻反映了当代中国“性道德”的虚伪，更反映了中国民主政治建设的一大或缺——缺乏实事求是的态度、缺乏一视同仁的公正！

Specifically, Pan mentions that while corrupt officials use their ill-gotten gains to keep several lovers, the little guy on the street trying to get a little action with a xiaojie gets fined and punished. Pan goes on to rail against that the development of Chinese sexual culture has been all but neglected, and what needs to be done to keep this from further slipping into abeyance is to make sure that “sexual development” get incorporated into official policy and pronouncements, so that people understand they have “sexual rights” and ought to strive to build “Socialist sexual culture with Chinese characteristics”* :

因此，当“以人为本”的理念连续写进最近几次党代会的报告之后，人们有理由要求执政者，重新审视自己的性观念，深刻认识人民群众的性权利，重新制定与性相关的政策法规，把“性文明”与精神文明、物质文明一起，列为人类文明的三大建设领域，与“经济、政治、文化、社会、生态”等五大目标一起，列为“建设小康社会”的共同要求，积极而又认真地打造“中国特色的社会主义性文明”，从而使十七大报告所讲的“科学发展观”，真正能够实现“以人为本”，真正能够实现“全面协调可持续”，真正能够实现“统筹兼顾”——既兼顾资源保护，又兼顾经济增长，更兼顾人的全面自由发展。所以，建设健康型的裸泳海滩，应该没有什么难以逾越的障碍。

Now what makes this island so special? Well, located some forty nautical miles or more from Zhuhai, these little islands are fairly isolated; only a few fisherman families live there. The beaches can be easily isolated so that you can limit the nudity and not be afraid that this strange habit will spread to the point that everyone feels obliged to walk around in their birthday suit.

Of course, there are plenty of priggish people that are opposed to this idea. Some of those who have criticized Pan object to his use of “linking up with the world” (与国际接轨）: just because the French and a whole bunch of other nations have nude beaches doesn’t mean that the Chinese have to in order to prove that they are on the same level. The writer linked to above thinks that the whole idea of sexologist is crazy, and to even make such suggestions is to defile five thousand years of Chinese history and culture. “What is a sexologist anyway? Shouldn’t they be trying to heal infertility?” the writer asks.

中华五千年的文明就这样被糟蹋，被诋毁，中华优秀的传统与作风被亵渎，这专家安的什么心？研究什么“性学”，你怎么不去治疗男女不孕？说什么裸体活动，疯子专家一派胡言。

Personally, I don’t know much about Pan Hai, but he’s definitely been a prolific writer/researcher on all matters sex, so might be worth reading if that’s your thing.

The above picture is from an internet survey on the issue of nude beaches in China. In case you were wondering, I am pro-nude beach, and after I submitted my vote these were the survey results that I received. I don’t know if they are accurate, real-time stats, but in any case, you can see that there is still a healthy margin by which the pro-nude beachers lead the anti-nude beachers.

I have to admit that my interest in this island is piqued: if it really is the Maldives of China, and has been relatively unspoilt by the Midas touch of Chinese tourist development, then I hope to go there before that all changes. The idea of going to a tiny island where there are few people has always appealed to my escapist tendency, but I had never considered anywhere within Chinese borders when fleshing out that fantasy.

*what a fucking mouthful

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