Slut Shaming and the Concubine Culture

There is a virtue to abstraction. As a rhetorical tactic it worked well for Freud.

When he wrote about sexual repression and sexual repression his young readers believed that he was offering them more hookups. They flocked to him.

When the sexual repression issue is articulated in terms of an attitude toward adultery, things immediately become more complex. As I explained in my book The Last Psychoanalyst, when Freud bemoaned civilization’s repressive attitude toward sexual desire, he should have noted that some cultures are more repressive than others.

Those that seem to be least repressive tend to countenance adultery while those that seem to be most repressive tend to condemn it.

Roman Catholic countries in Europe have always accepted a certain amount of adultery. Even today, in a place like Italy, adultery is commonly practiced and more-or-less accepted.

New York Magazine reported:

“We are a republic founded on adultery,” the Italian author Guia Soncini writes in her book, I Mariti delle Altre (“Other Women’s Husbands”), where she compares mistresses to polygamous wives and considers whether Italian adultery could be more ethical than America’s “carefree divorces.” The book is equal parts memoir and cultural study, drawing on Soncini’s childhood memories of her father’s mistress; her life as an unmarried 41-year-old; and history and the arts. Soncini, who also writes for La Repubblica and Gioia!, explained her preferences for married men and Starbucks coffee to New York sex columnist Maureen O’Connor, as part of the Italy in 30 Days’ Exchange Rates conversation series.

One doubts that too many people are going to take solace from the notion that in a culture that condones adultery marriages tend to be more stable. One would ask about the quality of those marriages, how loving they really are.

In Puritanical America adultery is often condemned. In the past, we all know, adulteresses were shamed by a scarlet letter.

And yet, truth be told, the crackdown against adultery has been led by women. However much Puritanical culture seems to be patriarchal, it was one of the first to introduce love marriage—as opposed to arranged marriage—and adultery and love marriage do not very readily mix.

Italian women might be wildly insouciant about their husbands’ adulterous liaisons. American women, less so.

Even less are today’s Chinese women. We know that China has had a long history of men having concubines. And we know that Maoism was anti-sexual to an extreme. Apparently, with China’s new prosperity and new political influence has come a new concubine culture.

Wives have been sorely offended. Recently, an adulterous woman was attacked on a street in Eastern China… by her lover’s wife and three of her lover’s wife’s friends.

For this story we turn to the Daily Mail:

She was violently stripped naked and beaten senseless by a mob of women on a busy shopping street ... but the police never came. 

Indeed, nobody intervened as Lin Yao Li, 38, was kicked in the groin and breasts as she writhed screaming in agony on the pavement. 

The reason, onlookers said, was that it was an 'argument of the heart' - she didn't deserve help because had slept with another woman's husband.

It is only the latest in a number of similar incidents in which it seems there is placid acceptance in Chinese society of such humiliation, as long as the victim is seen as deserving in having caused a man to cheat on his partner. 

I will spare you more details.

It certainly sounds like one of the more extreme instances of slut-shaming. It is worth emphasizing, yet again, that the impetus for slut shaming comes primarily from women.

We do not know how this wife and her friends dealt with the errant husband, but it is interesting, at the least, to read that these women chose to hold the husband’s mistress responsible for her actions and her decisions. They did not treat her as the victim.

One does not know, from the information provided, whether the marriage in question was a love marriage or an arranged marriage, but one suspects that it was the former.

The moral of the story is that when society takes women’s interests into account it is more likely to practice love marriage and is more likely to shame adultery.

One tends to think that such a grim patriarchal culture fails to respect women’s voices. Apparently, this is not the case.

If concubine culture is not women’s choice, under normal circumstances, hookup culture isn’t either.