I. How do you view the current situation and trends in the development of sexual culture? What are the prominent changes in the sexual concepts of contemporary Chinese people? How do we look at them?

There is an old Chinese saying: "When you are full and warm, you want to eat. When the problem of food and clothing is not yet solved, the biggest problem is the problem of eating. After the problem of food and clothing is basically solved, people will put forward further demands to pursue physical and spiritual pleasure, and the issue of sex then becomes important. During the 31 years from 1976 to 2007, the change in sexual culture is an important aspect of social change in China.

All societies consider sex to be important, even in societies where it is repressed. Some people think this is because sex leads to procreation, but sex is also important in tribal societies that do not understand the relationship between sex and procreation. Sex is important for three reasons; first, it can lead to great physical pleasure; second, it is extremely closely related to one's ego; and third, it is related to one's right to freedom. Therefore, it is a resource that no power will ignore. Since sex is an area that power seeks to regulate, it is also at the forefront of the struggle between individual freedom and power.

The greatest influence on modern sexual cultural change was the sexual revolution that took place in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. The main manifestations of the cultural change in sexuality include: a significant relaxation of sexual norms; a dramatic decrease in the age of first sexual intercourse for both sexes, more so for women than for men; a significant increase in premarital sexual activity, especially among women, the majority of whom are no longer virgins at the time of their marriage; a dramatic increase in teenage pregnancies and out-of-wedlock childbearing, which has been offset by a decrease in the rate of married childbearing, with a resultant decrease in the overall Decrease in fertility rate; increase in the number of sexual partners per person; legalization of abortion; increased sex education; increased availability of contraceptives; decrease in marriage rate; dramatic increase in divorce rate; increase in unmarried cohabitation; the term adultery outside of marriage is no longer used as a legal term due to the prevalence of non-marital sex; the treatment of incest between siblings is gradually changing from arrest to education; and, since most "decent" women are still virgins, there has been an increase in the number of children born out of wedlock, but this has been offset by a decrease in the number of births outside of marriage. Prostitution has tended to decrease in size as most "decent" women no longer resent premarital sex; pornography is widely distributed with little legal interference; and social tolerance for non-coercive consensual deviant sexual activity, such as anal sex between consenting heterosexual couples and homosexual activity among adults, has been reduced in many countries and in many states in the United States. countries and in many U.S. states; increased emotional ties between couples; weakened neighbor-relative ties; increased sense of personal independence and the right to personal freedom to pursue pleasure; weakened sense of connection between sexual pleasure and sin; and increased desire for personal bodily privacy. The above behaviors and concepts were first developed in Western societies and then spread to all corners of the world through mass media means such as radio and video.

Premarital Sexual Activity

Of all the sexual activities, premarital sexual activity has seen the greatest changes in all countries of the world, including ours. If there is a sexual revolution in our society, then one of the main indicators is the increase in premarital sex.

The process of increasing premarital sex did not happen suddenly, but began in the early years of the 20th century. For example, data from the Kinsey U.S. Survey showed that only 8 percent of women born before 1900 had had premarital intercourse by the time they were 20 years old; the percentage of women born between 1910 and 1919 who had had premarital intercourse by the time they were 20 years old had risen to 23 percent, three times as high as in the past. A Playboy magazine survey of married women in the early 1970s showed that only 31% of the over-55 age group had had premarital intercourse, while 81% of the youngest age group had. The most extreme figure came from Sweden, where 95 percent of both sexes had had premarital sex.

A Beijing random sample survey I conducted in 1989 showed that 15.5 percent of the sample had had premarital sex, regardless of whether they were in a committed relationship or not. This figure is close to the situation in Japan in the 1970s and may be related to the close cultural background of our two countries. According to the latest survey, premarital sex reached 69 percent in Shanghai and even higher at 86 percent in Guangzhou.

With the change in the way the general population has been having premarital sex, the demand for virginity when people get married has also changed dramatically. In the United States, statistics on the 18 criteria for choosing a spouse show that in the 1930s, the importance of virginity was listed in the 10th place; by 1977, women ranked it as the 17th (the penultimate) and men as the 18th (the penultimate). According to a survey of about 10,000 people in 33 countries, virginity is most highly valued by Asians, Middle Easterners, and South Americans, such as Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Iranians, and Israelis; and least highly valued by Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Dutch, Germans, and French. The United States also places less value on virginity, but not to the same extent as the Nordic countries.

People with a positive attitude toward premarital sex believe that the beneficial aspects of premarital intercourse include: in the sense that sexual intercourse exists, it is conducive to health, both physically and psychologically, because the urgent need for human beings cannot be delayed until adulthood, and there are still about 10 years from the time a person reaches puberty to adulthood. Some people marry much later or even do not marry, and it is difficult to ask them to remain virgins. Currently in both the United States and France, those who remain single must make up about a quarter of the population, and it would be totally unrealistic to ask them to remain virgins. Regardless of how severe the societal norms are for premarital sexual activity, as more and more people participate in this practice, the norms will have to change, and premarital sex, which used to be considered a violation of societal norms of sexual behavior, will gradually become accepted by societal norms, albeit reluctantly in many societies.

Extramarital sexual activity and cohabitation

Extramarital sexual activity is also a major form of change in human sexual behavior. Sociological studies on extramarital sexual behavior have found that extramarital sexual relationships range between 20% and 50% among men and between 10% and 69% among women in the United States. In England, Scotland, and Wales: 45% of men and 42% of women; in Finland, 44% of men and 19% of women. According to a Beijing random sample survey I conducted in 1989, the percentage of respondents in the sample who admitted to having had an extramarital affair was 6.4 percent.

In Western countries, the most significant change has been a greater increase in extramarital sex among women. In the United States, for example, the proportion of women having extramarital sex in the Golden West survey was 26 percent, and has now increased to 30 to 36 percent. The percentage of men having sex outside of marriage has remained between 40 and 50 percent.

One particular form of extramarital sexual relations is non-marital cohabitation. It differs from typical extramarital sexual activity in that the cohabitating parties are mostly single, rather than having at least one partner in the marriage, as is typical in extramarital relationships. Cohabitants are characterized by maintaining a one-to-one relationship, and the strength of the relationship is sustained primarily by cultural rather than economic factors. The division of labor in a two-person relationship is less pronounced than in a marriage, and mutual sexual gratification is one of the main goals of cohabitation. Cohabitation has proliferated in modernized and subsequent societies. In the United States, where only the lower classes would cohabit during the Golden Age, there are now many cohabitants from all classes.

According to a 1990 survey, 40-50% of young women in the U.S. would have experienced cohabitation by the age of 30, and 4% cohabited that year in 1988. Cohabitation has increased in the U.S., but not nearly to the extent of Sweden, where 90 percent of adults have experienced cohabitation. Ninety-nine percent of married people have cohabited before marriage. In France, the phenomenon has assumed a statistically significant size in quantitative terms. a survey in May 1977 showed that 10 percent of the 18-19 age group were cohabiting. In the same age group, 30 percent of those who were married had cohabited before marriage.

Many Western countries have created new responses to the growing number of cohabiting relationships, urged by practical necessity and interest groups. 1989 saw the passage of a New York state law authorizing cohabitants to register domestic partnerships, and a number of other U.S. cities have recognized such relationships, with the goal of giving cohabitants similar rights to those of married people, for example. Other cities in the United States have also recognized such relationships in order to give cohabitants rights similar to those of married persons, for example, by treating a cohabitating couple as a married couple for the purposes of insurance. Proposed legislation on domestic partnerships has also been approved in Sweden, Denmark and France. Under the domestic partnership law, homosexual couples would have the same rights as heterosexual couples, except for adoption and custody of children.