"Person-demons," part 2

Remember this post wherein I translated a couple of tales about gender-transformed men, or "person-demons," and promised I'd get to talking about their bizarre circumstances? Well, it's taken me about 2 months, but here I am, getting to it! (Mostly because I have just discovered another version of the infamous "Bear Wife" story and want to talk about it badly, but would feel overburdened with guilt if did not present some thoughts about person-demons first.) Spoiler hint--if you haven't read that previous post, might want to jump there for a quick peek. I promise it's exciting--mushroomy penises, long silky hair and all.

First, these two tales are very interesting because they break down, component by component, the assemblage known as "gender." Now, I can't claim to be a strict constructionist in the old "social construction or biological inheritance" squabble, but I do think that packaging is at least as important or "meaningful" as what's on the ingredients list, if you will. (And if you've ever eaten something sketchy but colorfully wrapped from a Chinese convenience store, you definitely will.) So, in "False Woman" and "The Legal Case of the Person-Demon," we witness some decidedly acquired characteristics that were, within the universe of the stories, apparently very good at making everyone around the impersonators think they were bona fide women. A recap [of course, both wore women's clothes]:

in the red corner, Hong the Heroic (from Zi bu yu):
-delicate, soft voice
-hair down to the floor
-15" waist
-jadelike skin [NB: I think in reference to the white, not green, variety]
-Adam's apple-less throat
-bound feet
-sewing and embroidery

aaaaand the challenger, in the blue corner, Sang the Salacious (from Geng si bian):
-groomed brows and face
-tri-parted hair w/ hairpiece
-cooking, embroidery, and sewing

All very well and good. With an understanding of modern human physiology, one might dispute that an Adam's apple-less throat could be a sign of "real" intersexuality, viz. hormonal or genetic variation from the norm. Nonetheless, it's pretty clear that the men deliberately imposed these abilities and characteristics upon their own bodies; in Hong's case, he actually confesses to growing out his hair and binding his feet as a young boy. Sang Chong's meager arsenal, even more so than Hong's, seems to point to a certain ease in becoming a woman: just get the right amount of hair in the right place and learn to sew.

But even with Hong's commendable self-modification, masculinity turns out to be not so easily erased. For both "person-demons," it is sex--more directly, their possession of a penis--that confounds their carefully cultivated feminine identities. Both have had sex with women but end up being "outed" by men; their judgment in the court of law is entirely concerned with the former, but not with the latter. Thus, the phallus is the hinge upon which both stories turn.* But Sang is an evil monster while Hong is a chivalrous hero, though both went around sleeping with women illegally. Why the distinction?

For one, Hong's seductions were consensual, "affairs," not black-magic-induced rapes. Where Sang's story linked its protagonist to a lineage of dangerously heterodox and socially destructive rapists, Hong is portrayed as an isolated case, inspired by an amorous widow/foster-mother.

For another, the authors' backgrounds seem to have been at odds: Yuan, though fairly successful in the imperial exams, retired in his 30s to become an aesthete and poet who dallied with young men and women "students." Lu, on the other hand, served many terms as a county magistrate and was famed for his commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Zuo Commentaries.** Their moral outlooks, judging by these pieces, were quite different: where Lu was concerned about the transvestite's power to disrupt the normative relations of the family and (with the secret-cult component) maybe even the state, Yuan's focus was on celebrating the ultimate supernaturally-aided triumph of "free love" over prejudice and ignorance. Hence all the time devoted to relating all the grisly details of just how Sang made his numbing powders, and, on the other hand, to giving us the incident of Hong's remarkably "enlightened" male lover.

But there's a lot of entangling ambiguity here, too. You could almost read Lu's account of how Sang assembled his repulsive roofies as a "recipe" for the audience--"pretty young widow of your friend catch your eye? Fret no more!" And, lest we all start imaging Yuan Mei to be some kind of Love-n-Peace hippie king from 1760,*** Hong, in relation to the other young men penetrated by other men in Yuan's stories, seems vindicated and heroic only because he "proves" his manhood by penetrating women. cf the village boy who, having some decent looks, never repelled a would-be suitor and ended up being humped at by a mallard in the pond, which he was obliged to beat to death lest it fulfill its lustful purposes.****

In short, there's much to be gleaned from reading these apparently crazy stories. They remind us that, despite the passage of time, some of our ideas about sex and gender and other human beings have been plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. For the historian, they can be invaluable in tracing the contours of a mental landscape of "uncanny valleys" and freaky bear-women in caves and murderous nannies--as parts of everyday life, not so dissimilar to using tabloids or blockbuster films to chart the anxieties and desires of people in more contemporary contexts. Plus, they're creepily intriguing. Also, make for great if somewhat nerdy party chitchat (might be better than talking about the time the elven ranger in your D&D party screwed up big-time and aggroed a DR13 rok that ate the cleric and the dwarf).


*Let's not dwell too long on that image.
**Some of the other parts of that terrifying beast they call the "Confucian canon." Yes, there were things in there apart from the Analects and The Way of the Mean.
***Admittedly that would be awesome.
****To make matters even more traumatizing, the villagers gathered 'round and laughed instead of helping out. For the rest of his life he was called "the duck's lover."

A truckful of quizzes

For self-knowledge is the first step to self-improvement! (Or more probably in my case, complacency.)

1)The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test

Your result for The Sublime Philosophical Crap Test ...

N-S-R

You scored 100% Non-Reductionism, 33% Epistemological Absolutism, and 33% Moral Objectivism!

More specifically, I'm an Epistemological Idealist and Moral Subjectivist. Hooray!

2)The Greek Mythology Personality Test

Your result for The Greek Mythology Personality Test ...

Dionysus

33% Extroversion, 33% Intuition, 72% Emotiveness, 86% Perceptiveness

"Although deeply emotional, you are extremely lacking in self-knowledge. You are somewhat needy, and when bored, may become very hedonistic. Your life is a quest for meaning, above all else. ... You are, at heart, a good person. You are very affectionate, and you are very loyal to your friends and family. ... Famous People Like You: John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Hefner."

I mean, flattering that I'm the eternally youthful, ravishingly attractive god of wine, but...what? Britney Spears?! Michael Jackson?!

Also, it told me that "You are very reluctant to burden others with your own problems, to the point that this in itself can become a problem for the people who care about you." This is a complete lie. *Suspicion*

3)Which Roman Emperor Are You?

You Scored as Augustus You are Augustus! First emperor of the Romans and one of the greatest statesmen in the ancient world. You brilliantly eased the old Republic into the Principate and set the path for an empire that would last for centuries and form the underpinnings for all western civilization. Hail Caesar! Augustus 75% Hadrian 71% Marcus Aurelius 64% Antoninus Pius 61% Domitian 61% Claudius 54% Nerva 54% Trajan 54% Vespasian 50% Tiberius 50% Vitellius 46% Nero 29% Commodus 14% Caligula 4%

Fairly awesome. I note that my second possibility was Hadrian. :)

4) The What Kind of Reader Are You Quiz
To no one's surprise:

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people's grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Book Snob
Literate Good Citizen
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

"Last stages of a Ph.D" eh? Hmm.

Hmm...

Bit of news from Jeremiah: apparently bodies of six people with long queues have been found in Xinjiang. He's got a pic from the Daily Mail linked, and I was going to paste it here but it is a bit icky if you're not into preserved corpses.

My first reaction was "what if they're faked?", which is really sad. Then again, considering the recently leaked photos of what at least seems to be a shopping center with all-fake stores (see here), maybe that initial cynicism is well-warranted.

If the bodies are authentic, however, I'm excited! They could be an excellent chance to do some historical forensics and object-driven history in the late imperial period, the novelty of which continues to surprise me.

A call for equal-opportunity ogling

Happy New Year!
Just a quick pop-media post (I swear I'll get back to more, um, "weighty" things some day): tonight I watched Chihwaseon, or Painted Fire, a 2002 South Korean film about the 19th-century painter Jang Seung-up, also known as Ohwon.* The film's title is literally "drunken painting immortal," which gives you some idea of its protagonist's major activities [being an immortal painter version of King Arthur. Another, which is my primary concern here, is his third hobby--having sex with, or at least ogling, just about every female character who appears in the film.

Now, I have no problem with looking at beautiful ladies acting in fairly frank sex scenes. It is quite hot. (The only detraction was that I was watching the movie with my parents--even someone who wants to spend time being paid to spout off about penetrative hierarchies has problems watching sexy movies with the folks, which probably indicates something.)

The problem arises when the female parties all look like the same lissome twentysomething with pearly teeth, fine brows, dewy complexion, and liquid eyes, while their male counterpart, particularly in closeups, resembles a leathery potato incised with human facial features. I mean, it is a rugged, interesting face, to be sure, and its owner does some fine acting. But the contrast was terribly obvious. Such sex-based double standards of attractiveness and talent aren't a revolutionary revelation, but in this case they must've particularly gotten to me because lately I've been thinking over certain examples this trend in reverse, by which I mean attractive, youthful-appearing men to match the by-default superficials of their leading ladies in heavily-funded projects. The popularity of Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Carribean franchise, for one. As much as I shudder to mention its name on this blog for my utter hate of just about all it stands for, Twilight for another. More excitingly still, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Vintner's Luck--in production, and hopefully will join the small selection of highbrow movies with LGBT themes--both feature impressively good-looking actors.*

I am following this trend with enormous excitement, not just for the increase in the raw amount of beautiful men I get to see, but also because it may be a marker of a deep shift in Euro-American society: now viewers can actually have the chance to ogle equitably. That there is an association between equal-opportunity ogling and LGBT topics makes a lot of sense, when one considers how central the "desiring" role is to our (and many other patriarchal societies') definition of masculinity. In other words, the only desiring position is a masculine one. Thus, if anyone who did not consider hirself a man desired a man, the nearest approxmimation would be the male "homosexual."* So, there's an overlap between movies with gay themes, movies with beautiful men, and movies that have broad appeal to people who love men, because of the way desire itself is defined (or, dare I say it, constructed).

Anyhow, male objectification seems to be on the rise. Along with the nubile boys come more objectionable things. Young men are reporting body-image issues in increasing numbers; "men's magazines" are plastered with stupid diet tips and weight-loss-quick schemes just like those marketed to women. Clearly not good. Of course our goal should be to promulgate health and self-confidence for every individual, regardless of sex or gender. Yet I can't help feeling that the aestheticization, on parallel terms, of the male body is a necessary first step toward such utopian possibilities, given our race's much-less-than-ideal previous trajectory. People desire, whatever gonads they have, and sexy beautiful men in the movies can help move us toward a broader recognition and acceptance of that fact.

*By the way, it's a pretty interesting movie, if a bit stiff and dry-feeling. The 1890s' tumultuous history of the simultaneous presence of Qing and Japanese troops, the Donghak Revolution, and the fall of the royal house and the yangban are all there, and not just serving as a quiet backdrop, either.
**But don't take my word for it:***

***(Imagine #2 with some wings and other suitably divine haberdashery, svp.) If the powers that be, aka the studios, decide to tickle my horrifying period costume/angel fancy any harder, I may combust.