Sex at Dawn полностью

But the arm-twisting had little lasting effect. Travel writer Cynthia Barnes visited Lugu Lake in 2006 and found the Mosuo system still intact, though under pressure from Chinese tourists who, like Marco Polo 750 years earlier, mistake the sexual autonomy of Mosuo women for licentiousness. “Although their lack of coyness draws the world’s attention to the Mosuo,” Barnes writes, “sex is not the center of their universe.” She continues:

I think of my parents’ bitter divorce, of childhood friends uprooted and destroyed because Mommy or Daddy decided to sleep with someone else. Lugu Lake, I think, is not so much a kingdom of women as a kingdom of family—albeit one blessedly free of politicians and preachers extolling “family values.” There’s no such thing as a “broken home,” no sociologists wringing their hands over “single mothers,” no economic devastation or shame and stigma when parents part. Sassy and confident, [a Mosuo girl will] grow up cherished in a circle of male and female relatives.. When she joins the dances and invites a boy into her flower room, it will be for love, or lust, or whatever people call it when they are operating on hormones and heavy breathing. She will not need that boy—or any other—to have a home, to make a “family.” She already knows that she will always have both.¹

The Mosuo approach to love and sex may well finally be destroyed by the hordes of Han Chinese tourists who threaten to turn Lugu Lake into a theme-park version of Mosuo culture. But the Mosuo’s persistence in the face of decades—if not centuries—of extreme pressure to conform to what many scientists still insist is human nature stands as a proud, undeniable counter-example to the standard narrative.

Mosuo women (Photo: Sachi

Cunningham/

www.germancamera.com)

Despite societies like the Mosuo’s in which women are autonomous and play crucial roles in maintaining social and economic stability, and plentiful evidence from dozens of foraging societies in which females enjoy high status and respect, many scientists rigidly insist that all societies are and always have been patriarchal. In Why Men Rule (originally titled The Inevitability of Patriarchy), sociologist Steven Goldberg provides an example of this absolutist view, writing, “Patriarchy is universal.. Indeed, of all social institutions there is probably none whose universality is so totally agreed upon.. There is not, nor has there ever been, any society that even remotely failed to associate authority and leadership in suprafamilial areas with the male. There are

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no borderline cases.” Strong words. Yet, in 247 pages, Goldberg fails to mention the Mosuo even once.

Goldberg does mention the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, but only in an appendix, where he cites two passages from others’ research. The first, dating to 1934, says that men are generally served food before women. From this, Goldberg concludes that males wield superior power in Minangkabau society. This is as logically consistent as concluding that Western societies must be matriarchal because men often hold doors open for women, allowing them to pass first. The second passage Goldberg cites is from a paper co-authored by anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, suggesting that the Minangkabau men have some degree of authority in the application of various aspects of traditional law.

Minangkabau woman and girls (Photo: Christopher Ryan)¹⁴

There are two big problems with Goldberg’s application of Sanday’s work. First, there is no inherent contradiction between claiming that a society is not patriarchal and yet that men do enjoy various types of authority. This is simply illogical: Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night is not a “yellow painting,” though there is plenty of yellow in it. The second problem with this citation is that Peggy Reeves Sanday, the anthropologist Goldberg cites, has consistently argued that the Minangkabau are matriarchal. In fact, her most recent book about the Minangkabau is called Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy.¹⁵