From Mao to Viagra: what a long, strange trip it's been

Journal of Sex Research,  May, 2003  by Kathy Sisson

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Farquhar goes on to censure survey research and "enlightened, modern" sex education for their political ideologies, and condemns their imposition onto Chinese culture. Farquhar perceives survey research and sex education as tools in a modernizing national pedagogy. She suggests that surveys, like fictional texts, possess the power to both reflect and create experience, and that survey research has forced an erotically diffuse Chinese sexuality into a narrow range of modern Western concepts. Chinese sex education, Farquhar argues, transmits nationalist propaganda because "national progress and development are and always were [its] goal" (p. 227). However, because Western concepts of sexual health also inform Chinese sex education, Farquhar criticizes it as "cultural imperialism" (p. 232).

In her last chapter, Farquhar examines Chinese "bedchamber arts" and finds sex education's nationalist political ideology reflected in popular sexual literature. By reinterpreting ancient Chinese sex manuals and medical treatises, contemporary sexual texts establish historical precedents for modernized sexual practice and emphasize its unique Chinese heritage. Unfortunately, as Farquhar points out, these texts also normalize androcentrism. Modern images rework and popularize the classic personage of a "hypermasculine" sensualist "with special expertise in techniques and disciplines that both express and increase 'Chinese' superiority" (p. 269). "The female remains in the shade, unarticulated as such, accorded little agency ..." (p. 281).

Somewhat predictably, this renewed emphasis on masculine performance has spawned increasing concern with male sexual dysfunction. Farquhar notes that "impotence has become an 'epidemic of signification' in China in recent years" (p. 268). Chinese men have enthusiastically embraced Viagra, and prior to its release eagerly sought other treatments ranging from surgical implants to mechanical stimulators and aphrodisiacs. Farquhar analyzes two texts that focus on the metaphorical potential of male sexual performance, suggesting that impotence serves as a trope for the collective disenfranchisement of "Maoist asceticism" and virility as a trope for the individual empowerment inherent in capitalistic hedonism. Farquhar displays her unfamiliarity with sexual dysfunction by referring to the "disease of impotence" several times throughout her discussion.

Appetites may delight cultural theorists, China scholars, anthropologists, literary critics, and sociologists. Farquhar's textual analyses delve deeply into a variety of sources spanning 50 years of Chinese social transformation. She outlines the book's contents concisely and clearly, and avoids gratuitous social science jargon. Her personal experiences provide entertaining anecdotes while contributing to her arguments.

Sexologists, sex researchers, and sex educators may be less enamored with Appetites. The book is only marginally about sex, and takes a dour view of sexology, survey research, and Western-influenced sex education. Farquhar's concern with Western hegemonic trampling of indigenous sexual culture is valid; the current debates over clitorectomies and "dry sex" practices in Africa, for example, reflect the difficulty of balancing cultural custom and Western ideals of sexual health. However, given her own citation of skyrocketing STD rates in China, her focus on sex education's political ideology may prove frustrating to those involved with sex on a more practical, public-health level.