Erotic Fantasy. Hans-Jürgen Döpp

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      Later on, Christianity played a negative role in favouring these iconoclastic practices. What had survived all of these eras was finally destroyed during the Maoist cultural revolution. These philosophical detours can no doubt go some way to explain the delicacy of Chinese eroticism. Like a mantra, these pieces of information are repeated again and again in books about China. And yet Asian eroticism still remains very enigmatic to western understanding.

      As Europeans, we cannot help but wonder how sexual ecstasy can be combined with a technique that is so precisely worked out and that is controlled by such a myriad of instructions and recommendations. Does it not lead to a loss of spontaneity in one’s feelings and passions? Is this whole culture of delicacy, of the small and the pure, perhaps obeying a process of distancing things from reality and idealisation? Is what is really happening actually a change in the opposite direction? Does this oh-so-subtle control of natural impulses perhaps indicate repressed anguish hidden by the official and ideological explanation of love?

      For a man to avoid having an orgasm is clearly in this day and age a very reasonable method of birth control, but when this practice is advocated because of the loss of vital energies, one suspects quite another motivation. Is there not here a fear of orgasm, in the form of a fear of the oneiric dilution of one’s self?

      Orgasm, indeed, means “little death”, because during an orgasm the barriers of the individual are broken down for a moment. To flee death… would that not mean, in this male-centred sexuality, fleeing union with woman? Does the fear of death really mean a fear of women’s power? Chastity can only be dangerous, but seeing the loss of sperm as the loss of the very substance of life is no less so.

      If a young man neglects his sexual life, he will be haunted by phantoms which will rear up in his dreams in the form of seductive young women. If he gives in to them, they will suck out his vital energy. It is exactly on this point that Chinese and European traditions meet. In this dream, it is the unconscious which is reclaiming its rights. Thus, regular sexual relations are recommended.

      In this sense, Chinese sexuality seems to be held hostage between two distinct fears: on the one side, there is the fear of losing one’s vital energy because of sexual abstention, and on the other is the fear of losing one’s vital energy by ejaculating.

      Sharing, as we all, do the human condition, that is, having all been born of a mother and a father who, in one way or another, have been able to come to terms with the Oedipus complex, sexuality can only consist, even in China, of a mixture of pleasure and pain. It is exactly these elements that one must seek behind these endless affirmations of eternal harmony.

      What, for example, is the significance of that fact that, in hundreds and hundreds of depictions of the sexual act claiming to offer a complete guide to all conceivable sexual positions, I have only found two or three images of cunnilingus? Was this position forbidden? In 1,000 erotic images, only three represent this theme. Isn’t that strange?

      18. Wedding book illustrating love positions, 19th century. Japan.

      Likewise, another theme can give us an insight into repressed fears: In all the images that we have seen, women wear their shoes, even if they are naked. Unshod feet are never shown. For the Chinese, these feet, enclosed in their embroidered shoes, represented the most sublime erotic quality, and small feet exerted a very specific charm over men which we find difficult to understand today. During the Ming period, the custom of foot-binding developed rapidly. Concubines, courtesans, and also simple, mainly peasant women, had their feet broken in childhood and then had them bound for the rest of their lives. Any refusal of this custom was considered shameful. When in 1644 an attempt was made to abolish the custom, the women of Manchuria practically revolted. Indeed, this sign of nobility was held particularly dear among the poorest elements of the population. The bound foot represented at the same time the most powerful taboo: if a woman allowed her foot to be touched without resisting too strongly, one could hope for anything from her.

      This custom was finally abolished by Mao Tse-Tung in 1949. Some authors have posited the theory that this ‘walk of the golden lotuses’ tightened the vaginal muscles, but there is no medical proof to sustain the idea.

      Etiemble suggests that the bound feet of Chinese women “has nothing to do with what was, and still is, the essence of Chinese eroticism: the theory of Yin and Yang, the coitus reservatus, the respect for the partner’s orgasm and the naturalness of feelings.” But perhaps we are seeking to separate things that are in fact connected. If one thinks about it – a clubfoot acquired through appalling pain, flattened ankles which sink into stockings filled with painful ulcers: this has nothing to do with Chinese eroticism. Is it not a symbolic castration of woman? A castration which found redress only in the woman’s toe, the phallic significance of which was swiftly identified?

      And what about the treatment of the female body during the nineteenth century? Does trussing women up in wired corsets not have some connection with European eroticism? The female body, sadistically laced up and suffocated by handcuffs and belts: is that not a fundamental indication of man’s primal fear of woman?

      It is clear that there persists a kind of ideology which glamourises Chinese sexuality but which is, however, nothing more than a misplaced sense of conscience. As Bougainville wrote in 1771, in his Voyage Around the World, as well as in other exotic accounts of the eighteenth century, people often remark that Chinese sexuality criticises our “fallen and decadent state” while hiding their own sexual conservatism and their outmoded morality.

      Perhaps I, too, am nothing more than a desperately decadent European who will never be able to find the path to the noble art that is love.

      19. Wedding book illustrating love positions, 19th century. Japan.

      20. Images of Spring, coloured shunga, 18th century. Silk on card.

      21. Images of Spring, coloured shunga, 18th century. Silk on card.

      Between the Sublime and the Grotesque

      Japanese Erotic Engravings

      In contrast with classical Japanese art, books of Ukiyo-e woodcarvings show “images of a changing, ephemeral and perishable world.” We know them under the name shunga, which means “spring picture.”

      The term “shunga” originally came from Buddhism and is associated with the idea of the painful vanity of all earthly things. Soon, however, its meaning changed as it gradually came to signify the joyful, carefree delights of everyday life, and a playful and unconcerned СКАЧАТЬ