No means...?

At least in the United States, rape and date rape are extremely sensitive and serious subjects. According to the Bureau of Justice (1992), one in four college women have suffered rape or attempted rape. Of these women, three-quarters know their rapist or attempted rapist, according to a survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice. The statistics are shocking, and the literature provided on the topic of rape and acquaintance rape, I feel, do a good job of communicating what the issues are and that it is NOT okay. Perhaps it wasn't the same in the past, but at least now, my personal impression is that issues like rape and date rape are taken seriously, and people are educated on them.

I've been disturbed, though, by what seems to be a strange laxity on quasi-rape and acquaintance rape in Chinese media. In my limited experience with Chinese movies, I remember at least three that include scenes of sexual harassment but no scenes of litigation or even outrage in response to the rapes. For example, in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Zhang Ziyi plays a princess who is captured by a vagabond ninja of some sort. In his desert cave, he ends up forcing himself upon her. In the movie, 方便面 or Instant Noodles, there is scene of a man and woman who have been seeing each other. They are sitting at the man's house, and the man forces himself upon the woman. And thirdly, in a recently released movie about the AIDS villages in China called 最爱, a man and a woman who know each other are sitting together on a roof and the man sexually harasses the woman.

In all three movies, the men and women know each other, the man forces himself upon the woman, the woman resists in some way, the man disregards her, and despite all of this, on the next day, the man and woman remain friends and even sometimes become lovers. There is no anger on the part of the woman; there is no sense of being defiled or taken advantage of. There is no sense of rape. In the case of 最爱, the woman even seems to be charmed by the man and giggles and smiles sheepishly at him the following day.

Seeing this one time could just be an exception, but seeing it three times in three different movies implies something more. I asked my Chinese roommate about it and explained that such behavior in the U.S. would definitely be unacceptable and punishable by law. She then related to me the Chinese saying, “欲拒还迎”。Basically, it means that one acts like one is refusing sex, but what one really means is that one still welcomes it. Because of traditional Chinese culture, proper women should not desire sex and to act like one wants it would be very unbecoming. So, in order to save face and remain the shy, pure girl that society expects of her, she must always act like she refuses sexual advances. In fact, my roommate explained, if she were too welcoming, the man probably wouldn't even want her to begin with; she would lose her feminine charm and purity. So, in order to win both, the woman resists the man just enough to come off as the innocent female, but not quite enough to battle off the advancing male.

It really is sickening. And this is just one manifestation of a much larger Chinese cultural tradition. The whole virtue of "saving face" and "double talk" is so important here that things like honesty and propriety are frequently sacrificed. Even though, if the woman really wants the man, I guess that means it's not rape....but they both go through the motions of rape. The woman resists, the man fights - and all for the sake of appearing like the woman is the traditional good Chinese girl. I've come to embrace a lot of things about Chinese culture, but I don't think and hope I never will embrace the culture of "saving face".