Sociologist Huang Yingying: How Should We Look at Sex, a Topic Both Everyday and Distant — and What Do We Miss? | Interviews

Her new book asks who tells the stories about sex — the everyday ones and the hidden ones — how they get told, and how they go untold.

In nearly 20 years of work in the sociology of sexuality, Huang Yingying has been drawn to two pairings of "mainstream" and "marginal": the marginal bodies of mainstream people, and the everyday lives of marginal people. She works her way into particular stories to get at norms, power and daily life — above all at how people survive, and the logic by which they live.

Huang graduated from the sociology department at Renmin University of China, where her graduate advisor was Pan Suiming. She had never set out to study social questions about sex. It was her advisor's specialty, and she herself "didn't object," and so, with a good deal of uncertainty, she began doing fieldwork in red-light districts and the like. She had to live in a red-light district for a stretch, build everyday ties with the people there, listen to them tell their own stories, and watch how peers, neighbors, sex workers and clients talked to one another.

Getting inside a red-light district was one thing; working out what it meant was another. The meaning surfaced slowly, at conferences and in conversation with other scholars. "Why do they see xiaojie that way? Why is that so different from what I felt in the field? What kind of problem is xiaojie in China, really?" Her interests gradually settled on those questions. (Xiaojie, literally "miss," is the common euphemism for a woman who sells sex.)

In 2017, Huang, Pan Suiming and others published I Was There (《我在现场》), which recorded a world their red-light-district fieldwork had turned up, one that did not match the mainstream imagination. Pan hoped readers would try standing where sex workers stand and understand them, rather than rushing to a moral verdict.

In her new book, Sex/Gender, the Body, and the Sociology of Storytelling (《性/别、身体与故事社会学》), Huang and her students interviewed college students, middle-aged and older women, people living with HIV, breast cancer patients, transgender people and others, trying to show who tells the stories about sex — the everyday ones and the hidden ones — how they get told, and how they go untold. Apart from sexual practice itself, she says, it is largely people's everyday storytelling that decides "how knowledge is produced and how ideas are shaped."

She wants talk about sex to stop running in fixed grooves, and she keeps pointing to details other people skip. Take the other side of life for a woman living with HIV: "She is living — and not just living to stay alive. She has to live well. The rest of us all need that, and of course she has a world like that too."

This humanist stance, sharply unlike "scientific discourse," runs through 20 years of Huang's research. Over those 20 years, Chinese attitudes to sex and gender, and the talk around them, have changed a great deal — on the whole, more open and more varied.

But she has new worries.

She has noticed activists trying to persuade policymakers and the public with numbers like "how many gay people are there in China," and asks: "If we measure whether a right exists by how many people hold it, then when we win rights for one group, where does that leave the people who are fewer still?" She has noticed how often the movement against sexual harassment calls for new law, and she fears that heavy state intervention and one-size-fits-all legislation would flatten the truth and complication of daily life, tear society apart, and even harden long-standing narrative structures such as "strong men, weak women." She does not much like being interviewed. Sex has become a media favorite, she points out, but the discussion has grown shallower rather than deeper, and the heat around any one case dies fast.

"Every kind of sex and gender story ... is constantly being 'discovered,' created, re-created, blown up, forgotten ..." That tangled state of affairs may explain why Huang is so careful when she talks about any of it.

On July 8, the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai held a talk for the new book. Scheduled for an hour and a half, it ran two and a half, because the audience would not stop asking questions. Many of the questions were well informed, but what stayed with Huang were the ones from people puzzling over themselves, and the strain that showed as they tried to put it into words. They did not belong to the marginal groups the book is about, and to Huang that was exactly the point: so-called marginal questions are not always marginal.

Q: QDaily H: Huang Yingying

Q: This book shows the stories of some "abnormal" people — breast cancer patients, women living with HIV, transgender people. Why are you interested in their stories?

H: We carry a lot of prejudice about certain groups, some of it simply the prejudice of not knowing. So as a researcher, what I want is to take these people's lives, and the way they understand their own lives, and — if I can't present them well — at least get people to notice them.

Take my original reason for studying women living with HIV. Plenty of people do notice people with HIV, but they don't tend to notice the lived side of things for women with HIV: their feelings, their personalities, their marriages. Those get overlooked, and they matter enormously to these women's lives. We see only the disease, only the medicine. That's important, but it isn't enough. Especially now that the disease is becoming part of ordinary life: she is living, and not just living to stay alive. She has to live well. The rest of us all need that, and of course she has a world like that too. That angle gets ignored, I think. So when I look at women living with HIV, I pay particular attention to the more ordinary, lived side.

Breast cancer patients too. In the mainland Chinese context, discussion of this group is mostly medical, and what's missing is any account of what a changed body image actually does to these women, and how they cope strategically, remake their bodies, rebuild a life. We can argue about how much room they really have to act, of course, but their effort in this direction gets overlooked. As for transgender people, the media does cover them, but mostly in a spirit of curiosity-seeking.

Marginal groups tied to sex and gender should not "be made absent." That, to me, is the most basic point. But there's another important one: presence isn't automatically good. What entry point, what angle, what stance brings them into view — or lets them bring themselves into view — matters a great deal. Because much of the time it isn't that the subject is banned, or that nobody is paying attention. That isn't what's going on, and sex isn't a banned subject in China either. You have to look at who is talking, what they are talking about, and how. It isn't that we can't see these people; it's how we see them. Are we all carrying prejudice, all holding stereotypes, all bringing a particular attitude, a particular stance? Everyone has a stance. I set mine out plainly in the book's introduction.

Q: Yesterday you made a point I found fascinating — that the split between "marginal" and "mainstream" is deeply problematic. Mainstream women, mainstream people, may in fact be held to stricter social norms, and yet their volume gets turned down in the current discussion of gender.

H: I think so. We know every binary has problems, of course, but some binaries have been challenged more openly — one strand of body studies in the West, for instance, questions the mind-body split. We can also see the trouble with the man-woman split easily enough. But with mainstream and marginal, sometimes even I slip into the binary as I talk: "look, yours is mainstream research, mine is marginal research." Take the concepts seriously and you find they're quite complicated. So when I talk with my students I often say: don't assume that getting into Renmin University makes you mainstream, or that anyone else will call you mainstream. Think it through. When I say xiaojie, when I say transgender people, when I say people living with HIV, many people still feel these are marginal, far from themselves. But bring up another set of people — the sexuality of older people, or of college students, both of which the book discusses — and that's the people right beside you, or your own future. We still have questions, still have sides of the body, that get ignored, or in other words marginalized.

In fact, if everyone thought about it, there are ideas and desires in their own lives they don't dare say out loud either. Take SM. Is it marginal? As a subject it's marginal, but SM is very often an orientation, a desire, of so-called mainstream people — so is that marginal or mainstream? The so-called mainstream has plenty of marginal sides to it, and the daily lives of marginal people aren't really any different from the mainstream's. But because sex and gender have been pushed to the margins, we block out that whole part of them, or let one role cover everything else — the xiaojie role, say, covers every side of a woman's life and stands in for her entire cluster of roles.

Everyone's life has some marginal part to it. Take marriage — right now that's a question that touches everyone. You're very "mainstream," but if you're 40 and unmarried you'll feel pressure; if you're married and childless you'll feel pressure; when you're old you'll feel pressure too. What we call marginal really just means you've run into mainstream social norms. And these norms don't act only on marginal groups — mainstream people, if anything, get more of them, through the school system and through socialization. The reason heterosexual people sometimes have it worse is that people are always watching you, right? People are always trying to educate you into someone who fits the mainstream picture perfectly, who meets social norms, telling you to "behave yourself" — your whole emotional makeup, your whole behavior, pressed into one mold. Marginal people, by contrast, are just left out there, running wild, and may well end up challenging the norms more.

Q: Interviewing transgender people seems to have been very hard. Are some people's stories simply harder to tell? Is there an order of discourse inside gender questions themselves?

H: Right, there are two questions there. Since you said "order," let's take that concept first and come back to "hard to tell" afterward.

On order, I often cite Gayle Rubin's book and her concepts. Rubin is an American anthropologist; she wrote an essay back in the '80s called "Thinking Sex" that was enormously influential. It contains the concept of sexual hierarchy — in Chinese it's usually rendered xing dengji, though some translate it as xing jiexu. There's nothing especially deep about it, but she stated it very clearly: every society, and every person's mind, holds a hierarchy. What kind of sex do you think sits at the top, most accepted, most in line with the norms; what's in the middle; what's below that; and what do you find least acceptable, least tolerable? What standard is the ranking based on? The social norms a particular society forms in a particular period. Heterosexual, monogamous sex for the purpose of reproduction — missionary-position sex for children — tends to be the most mainstream in a lot of societies. Further down, I don't know, maybe premarital sex. Further down still, some people would raise pedophilia, along with SM and necrophilia; certain subjects are barely tolerated at all. Every society builds a hierarchy of ideas out of some moral code, and everyone is influenced by it to some degree, though each person's ranking differs a little, depending on your capacity for criticism and on what you've lived through. And the way sexual hierarchy divides things differs across historical periods, of course. It changes.

The hierarchy also decides what you consider legitimate and what you consider a problem, and that's where storytelling comes in: what do you think can be said? First, you may have a desire but not dare say it, because you know that saying it will get you attacked, you know it's morally "incorrect" and will draw all sorts of constraint, so you don't dare say it, don't even dare think it, and you put a lot of pressure on yourself. You can hear it in a lot of people's questions — they're under pressure themselves, they know "what I do isn't accepted." Try to talk with them about it and they'll have all sorts of reservations; without a certain level of trust they won't tell you. It's precisely this constraint of social norms, this construction of a sexual hierarchy, that makes some things easy to hear and others impossible to hear.

In my research I run into two kinds of situation. One I call "unsayable," the other "I want to talk." The unsayable includes "I don't want to say it," and also "I don't know" or "I can't put it into words." This connects to the ranking of subjects I just described. "I don't want to say it" means I know saying it could cause trouble, so I'd rather not tell you. "I can't put it into words" points to a longer-term cultural constraint that leaves me not even knowing how to describe something. Human expression has plenty of limits in itself, of course; we have to admit that. There are things you may not be able to get into language, and some people say them better in poetry or in art than in words. But language matters enormously, and some things people simply cannot say. We meet this constantly in interviews. Talk about sex with a woman living with HIV and it's really not that she's unwilling — she's glad to help — she just feels there's nothing to say. Or take a woman in her fifties, past menopause: she says she doesn't even have "sex" anymore, this thing doesn't seem important in her life, and she doesn't know what to tell you. But behind that "can't put it into words" there are social and cultural factors. We've long avoided talking about these things, or haven't thought them important, so the language for it is missing — even the vocabulary is missing.

One more thing. "I don't want to say it" isn't only about subjects that carry stigma and get built up as "not good." It also touches another kind of historical and cultural construction: the way we build certain things into the sensitive, the private. The more modern and civilized a society, the sharper this privacy question becomes; it wasn't like this before. Look at the 17th and 18th centuries Foucault examined, so unlike now, or Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process — people didn't have much privacy before, and it's been changing. Yesterday I was talking with a friend about Shanghai's longtang alleys: there wasn't much privacy there either, and now it's a very big deal, everyone cares about privacy. In fact privacy, to some degree, widens the distance between people — if I don't quite trust you, why would I tell you a thing like this? Why would I hand over my private life? So that's another side of "I don't want to say it." We can improve our methods somewhat, of course; we can build a better setting for talk, one that lets us say these things.

Q: But you've said more about the "I want to talk" kind of people.

H: Yes. These people come looking for you; they write in as readers. Sometimes when I'm recruiting interviewees, plenty of people run over on their own to tell you about their sex lives. That brings a different challenge: they've usually already settled into a way of telling it, a formula. They feel, first, that telling it this way is safe; second, they have their own purpose — "I want you to carry my voice." In research you can invent all kinds of tricks for the unsayable; the challenge from formula is bigger. Some researchers think, "You're willing to talk, wonderful, I'll record it, whatever story you tell I'll write down." They think, "Look, this is the subject's own voice, because the interviewee said it and I only recorded it." That seems to carry a certain legitimacy. But how did the interviewee's voice come to be formed? It, too, was shaped by all sorts of things, and it, too, runs to formula.

Take Sister Wen, the transgender interviewee in the book. It's not that the interview was hard to arrange; a friend introduced her, and she's quite willing to talk. But she's very good at picking holes, very challenging. Because she's been through so many interviews, she is clear about where the assumptions in our questions sit, and she's wary of narrative formulas — formulas that often come from the mainstream. What struck me most was this: in oral history we like to start from childhood, but the moment time came up, when the interviewer asked Sister Wen about her past, she got very sensitive. Are you trying to tie my childhood to my transition? Are you looking for a cause? Do you think I transitioned because of something in my childhood? We're all far too used to that logic of attribution now, many of us think that way, and she would pick at exactly that assumption of yours. To some degree she was challenging researchers' narrative formulas, challenging the media's narrative formulas. But on the other hand, you could also watch her building a formula of her own — talking with us she'd say, you should cover this side, you should tell my version of it. She was forming a formula too.

So the question becomes: relative to what is a narrative formula a formula? Where's the problem with it? I generally think the problem is that once a formula forms it tends to repeat, and repeat, and drift further and further from lived experience — whether the formula came from researchers, was shaped by mainstream society, or was produced by the interviewee herself. Your actual life may be nothing like that, but for the sake of a particular conversation you settle on an account, and that account may end up very far from what you originally lived. To me, the important thing about so-called authenticity is its connection to lived experience.

The other problem with formulas is that as more and more people tell it that way, a fixed understanding sets in. The deadliest version is when only one understanding is possible: a different story comes along and everyone says that's wrong, that's not how it is, something must be off about it. Everyone accepts this one understanding, and that understanding is gradually treated as the truth. But the lived world is complicated, it has many voices, and even if some voices are problematic, not politically correct, not worth promoting, they are still part of lived experience. If one story, one discourse, becomes overwhelmingly strong, what happens to the other voices? Are they even allowed to exist? The trouble with formula is that your grip on so-called truth gets simpler and more rigid over time.

Q: You mentioned "institutions that train people to tell stories." What did you mean?

H: I've had emails, and I've seen training sessions that teach you how to tell a story. But they won't say they're teaching you to tell a story; they'll say they're teaching you to express yourself, to speak up. It used to be things like the touring speeches of model workers, but now there are plenty of tech platforms giving you space to present yourself — so how should you talk? How should you advocate? How do you speak from your own experience? How do you tell the story so it moves the audience, drawing out their tears the way a film does? Step by step, emotional truth ends up covering over lived truth.

But my research has also turned up something else, which I call the professional interviewee. It comes out of my work on HIV/AIDS. Originally, doing xiaojie research, we generally borrowed anthropological methods for fieldwork. Once AIDS became an epidemic I took part in a lot of AIDS assessment projects: you arrive in an unfamiliar place without the time for proper anthropological fieldwork, and the local people, from the CDC say, take you to a few sites where they run interventions and find you someone to talk to. You can tell at once that this person has been interviewed many times, that whenever anyone comes down from above she is the one who receives them. You hear a very strong narrative formula, so I call these people professional interviewees. It also covers a kind of celebrity interviewee. Sister Wen, for instance, has been interviewed so often that she has become, to a degree, a professional interviewee, and over time she is bound to form a formula — unless your question can jab at that formula from an angle she hasn't thought of, she'll give you the answer you expect. Ask a xiaojie why she became a xiaojie and she already knows the conversation cold: "my family was poor."

Q: You began working in the sociology of sexuality about 20 years ago; even earlier, in 1995, CCTV started airing a program like Half the Sky. Over roughly these 20 years, what has changed and what hasn't in how Chinese people tell stories about sex, in daily life and in the media?

H: I started paying attention to sex-related questions around 1999. In 1999 I did my first fieldwork on xiaojie. I'd just started graduate school, and a graduate student needs an advisor, right? I ended up with Professor Pan. Professor Pan works in the sociology of sexuality, so once I joined him I dealt with sex-related questions much more. It really has been close to 20 years.

In my first book, Body, Sex, Sexiness, I laid out four kinds of discourse about sex. One is a thoroughly mainstream medicalized discourse. People say sex is taboo on the mainland, but I don't think so, because back in the '90s a group of doctors already founded a sexology society, and later a lot of commercial outfits joined; it had tens of thousands of members at the time. The sexology society is still an important force today. Intellectually it belongs to sexual scientism, to sexology, and it remains very strong, though it has of course become steadily more commercial.

The second kind of discourse concerns women's sexuality and bodies. Ten years ago most of the voices still stressed women's oppressed bodies, women's oppressed sexuality, placing women in the oppressed position within the relationship between men and women. That discourse was fairly common, but it's changing now, growing more complicated.

The third can be called the discourse of sexual revolution — Professor Pan Suiming, Professor Li Yinhe, some media — which looks at how much Chinese sexuality has changed in a mere two or three decades. The change is considerable. You don't even have to go back far; compare it with the Cultural Revolution years. Since the 1980s, ordinary women's clothing, body image, and the sex-related figures thrown up by large surveys have all changed enormously, and so has the language. This body of talk can be called the discourse of sexual revolution.

And there's a fourth: there is still a voice of resistance, calling for a return to tradition, for keeping oneself pure. That book was actually written in 2005, and that's when I laid out these four kinds of discourse.

In the new book, in the chapter on the sexual politics of conferences, I look again at how these have shifted over the past decade, and I find it has grown more complicated. The medical and scientific discourse of sex is still very powerful and commands a great many resources. We think the ideas behind that are wrong. A lot of people criticize sexology and sexual rights as if they were one thing, when in fact they are very different. What we engaged and questioned early on was the medicalized discourse of sex; we stress the humanist and social-science angle, whereas medicalized discourse turns people into objects and into patients, and it tends to sit close to commercialism and to marketization in general.

Q: Can you give an example?

H: You now see any number of sex-toy shops, all kinds of training programs, and, earlier on, STD clinics. I am quite critical of scientism and commercialization, of course, but you'll find that sometimes commercialization and medicalization make a certain space for you. Once, at the biennial International Conference on Sex Research in China, someone came down from above to check on it: "Huh, what's this conference doing here?" The manager stepped in and headed them off — "Oh, they're doing science, no problem." So "health," "science," "medicine" have to some degree become an umbrella. You can't simply say capital is bad. When politics tightens, capital can bring you an opening — though you also have to watch out for too much capital, too much market. I don't talk much about political economy, but as background it matters a great deal.

On the discourse about women, you can feel how much it has changed in the past couple of years. What I call the new feminism, this younger cohort, has thrown itself into questions of sex much more actively. What they talk about has grown more complicated too; some are more concerned with autonomy — like the sexual assault case that broke yesterday. There are far more of these voices than before, and they're more varied, but I still have a quiet worry. It isn't that I think opposing sexual harassment doesn't matter — obviously it does. My worry is that some people, the moment they start on sexual harassment, jump straight to demanding a mechanism, especially a mechanism of legal intervention. That's what I'm wary of. Because once you go to legal institution-building, it brings a lot of problems with it. I'll come back to that.

The resisting voices are getting stronger too — the anti-sex dama, the "aunties," are a case in point. When Professor Pan started doing the sociology of sexuality, some people questioned him as well, but on the whole the questioning was very weak, while the voices of Professor Pan and Professor Li Yinhe were actually fairly loud, few as they were. Now that there's more public talk about sex, the resisting voices have grown in step. And there are certain forces behind the anti-sex aunties, in fact. They get shaped into this very respectable image of "mothers," but behind it lie certain ideas, certain organized elements.

Q: Has anyone studied the anti-sex aunties?

H: No careful research. I only wrote a short piece about it at the time, first published online and later put into the book. Nobody has yet taken it up as a proper object of study.

Q: In your new book you draw an analogy between the recent anti-sexual-harassment movement's calls for legislation and legal feminism in Europe and America in the 1970s, and you're wary of it.

H: Legal feminism touches a more specific question, the debate over pornography. Pornography hasn't yet become a clearly drawn line of argument in mainland China, but you should know that in the "sex wars" inside American feminism in the 1980s, pornography was absolutely central. Around that argument, feminism split internally into a women's-rights camp and a sexual-rights camp. A very famous figure in legal feminism is Catharine MacKinnon, who stood, of course, in the anti-pornography camp, holding that pornography was men's oppression of women. She held that women are necessarily oppressed in the relationship between men and women, and even argued that sex between men and women amounts to men raping women. She was also a lawyer, so she took very readily to legal institution-building. They pushed that kind of legislation through in Canada at the time, but it couldn't be sustained in the United States afterward, because people saw how the framework joined up with the right wing to form a new kind of oppression. After running into a great deal of criticism and second thought in the United States, MacKinnon went off to sell her theory around the world; she has students in Hong Kong and Taiwan too.

Now, the moment sexual harassment comes up, many people call for legal institution-building, and that follows much the same line as MacKinnon's. You're welcome to discuss it, there's nothing wrong with that, but you also have to let the objecting voices be heard, and see why people at the time questioned what MacKinnon was doing. You can't simply say "mainland China is different," "mainland China doesn't even have the basics," and use that to refuse to think again. If problems have shown up elsewhere, I think you need to think those problems through, and stay wary about the direction you're pushing. You can't treat this society as a testing ground, because the cost can come back in very ugly forms.

I'm not against institution-building, but it depends what institution. Now a lot of people, the moment institutions come up, demand legal intervention, citing the United States without mentioning the objections raised in the United States. I don't know the U.S. that well myself; I've picked up some of it through reading — Carole Vance's "Danger and Pleasure," Rubin's essays, and of course the accounts of scholars like Josephine Ho and Naifei Ding — plus my own thinking. Discussion from several sides is a good thing, but you can't assume from the start that institutions are good, that legal intervention is good, and stir people's feelings up to the point where not the slightest objection is tolerated, which ends up making the question, to a degree, unsayable.

Q: You write in the book that we need to discuss sex and gender inside a specific context, and look at the language some people use when they tell stories about sex — xiaojie, for example — rather than reaching for a blanket word like "oppression." You seem fairly optimistic about individual bodily autonomy?

H: Sometimes what I'm talking about isn't the individual but the group, the level of mutual aid. In a given situation I'd call it grassroots power. Take xiaojie, or other groups labeled grassroots, lower-class, marginal — we need to pay attention to their power, and their power doesn't necessarily show at the level of the individual. In arguments about feminism, treating one position as equivalent to stressing the individual and the other as equivalent to stressing the collective is far too crude a division. You want to challenge some structural factor, gender inequality say. Obviously that matters. But what strategy will you use to challenge it? In a concrete situation, what strategy is workable, what strategy has force? At the very least, strategies at the level of the individual and the group can't be ignored. People think of power and immediately think of the state; I don't think that's right. Grassroots power is formidable, and there are many places in daily life where it can be dug out. Snuff it out and a person becomes a pawn, going wherever the structure puts them. If you don't build your own power, then the structure that can give to you can take it away again. What power is, what autonomy is, what structure is — all of it is worth thinking through.

I won't talk emptily about the group, or the state, or structure. Leave out actual people and all of it is hollow. We all know that in concrete life a person's own strategies matter enormously, and that even when structures do change, that takes time. Plenty of people's arguments are far too utopian. While legal inequality and the inequality between men and women can't be changed in the short term, how are they — xiaojie and other marginal groups — supposed to live? Do they have to wait until you've finished liberating them before they can live? Every day she faces the risk of being robbed, of being laughed at, so of course she develops her own strategies, and the grassroots power she's learned to reach for can handle what's right in front of her immediately. I mentioned yesterday, too, the protection and mutual support among neighbors, "mommies" and xiaojie. It looks like small change, but for a xiaojie's own life it matters enormously — "those legal changes of yours are a long way off from me!" And there are cases where the law changed without doing much for people at the bottom. Some people always start from the big things and neglect the small ones, but the small ones can matter enormously, because they're tied to daily life. For me, for instance, relations with neighbors matter a great deal.

Q: When you stress individual strategic resistance and grassroots mutual aid, some people — urban women especially — push back at once and say this doesn't match their own experience, or the experiences they've encountered through the media. They may run into sexual harassment on the way to work, everyday risks like that.

H: Then we have to talk about the different problems women in different social positions have to handle. Take sexual harassment on campus. Of course you'd demand that the university, the whole institutional system, punish the professor involved; that's certainly one side of it. But we're sometimes also concerned with how women students and women office workers — men too — deal with these things. That line of thinking often gets attacked as victim-blaming, but I think it's very close in importance to the way so-called marginal groups reach for grassroots power. Relying on institutions to punish the perpetrator, and strengthening a person's own power: personally I think both matter. But look at the discourse and you'll find most people talk about the first, while the second — so-called empowerment — is much harder to talk about.

Socially and culturally, that second side raises the question of what counts as harm. People in modern cities are getting more and more delicate: if I say something that makes you uncomfortable, you count that as sexual harassment. But is sexual harassment a matter of degree and of feeling? Between "I made you a bit uncomfortable" and rape there is in fact a whole range of states in between. Should those be separated out and discussed one by one? Which ones do you think need the law, which ones do you think should be left to relations between people, which ones could go to some intermediate mechanism? People hold a fixed picture of sexual harassment; they hear "harassment," they hear "assault," and assume harm follows no matter what.

Some reporting draws attention, and can even push the discussion forward in practice, but I really do think that as a narrative strategy it calls for care. Cases of harassment between teacher and student, for instance, often — and more easily — get told through a story of weakness and victimhood: look, because of this one teacher she's lost all faith in scholarship, her whole life has been badly damaged. I don't like that story, because who ends up the victim of it? These women again. They come to feel "I'm finished," "my life is ruined." Why do so many people jump off buildings? It has to do with rape, with sexual harassment, of course, but very often it's because public opinion has told them, "there's no hope left in your life." The weak-victim story stirs people up easily, sets everyone's anger on the perpetrator easily, but the pressure it creates lands on these women all the same. So I have to insist: we need to look at our bodies differently. I'm going to punish you, but this — being violated — is not my problem, and I can go on living afterward just the same. Whereas overstressing the victim story can easily leave you feeling weaker and weaker, more and more in need of protection. Protection by what? By public opinion, by state power, by the law? Does any of that actually empower you? That's where the problem lies, I think. Be very careful with this narrative structure, very careful about the unintended consequences it may bring. At the very least, some wariness and some discussion on this front are needed. I know this conversation is hard, and I hope it won't be read as malice, as criticism for its own sake.

Q: If that story is a problem, how do you think a person should tell her own gender story well, in daily life and in public?

H: I may not answer this well; it depends on the case, obviously. Since what I know best is the world of xiaojie, I'll probably use that. How should their stories be told? First we have to ask: who are we talking to? What is the mainstream discourse now? What's wrong with that mainstream frame? What does it simplify? What can't it see? All right: the mainstream discourse now either finds you immoral or finds you utterly wretched, and against that, what we need to say is this. Our lives are not that wretched. We are not all powerless. We are not confined to that one story of being oppressed. We also have ways of handling violence and discrimination.

I say that on the premise that we already agree about the social and structural background xiaojie face — the anti-vice crackdowns, the violence, the discrimination, gender inequality included. And from my research and my understanding, a narrative structure that activates grassroots power is, right now, more effective at handling violence and an unsafe place to live and work. The wretchedness story, by contrast, tends in the end to strengthen the case for banning prostitution, or for punishing clients while sparing sex workers, and it often adds fuel to the crackdowns and makes that environment worse — even if only as an unintended consequence.

So this is a conversation; it isn't the absolute, whole truth. Kenneth Plummer has a concept, contested truth, and everything has more than one side. As I said yesterday, among xiaojie we do also meet cases of cheating and fraud, but when I tell the story I usually don't stress that part, because what I'm talking back to is the discriminatory attitude toward xiaojie right now. I have to work out how people's understanding of xiaojie goes wrong, and which parts of their lived experience I'm going to bring into the conversation.

Put simply: life always runs on more than one channel, and you have to see which channel is being ignored. To some degree what I have to do is find room to show several channels at once, to show possibilities other than the formula. The story has to be left to the reader to judge in the end, of course, but judgment here means I give you several channels and you decide which makes more sense.

Q: In the past couple of years the discourse of moral progressivism seems to have produced a dramatic reversal: asexual people get stigmatized, sorted into the "conservative," "backward" camp. Incels (involuntary celibates), for instance, may be labeled misogynist or even terrorist. What do you make of that?

H: First, asexuality is itself a recently built concept. Pick at it and we could ask: what counts as asexual? Is it having no sex life, or having no sexual desire? So the concept itself needs discussing. What worries me more is that a concept appears, a label gets slapped on you — bang — and you take it on yourself. Sometimes you may have no interest in certain things, and you may well find you're interested in others. Don't let asexuality harden into a fixed category. However people use it, if the story it sits inside leaves people feeling pressure, that's a problem, I think. In the past you might be looked down on for having had sex at 18; now it seems that if you're 30 and still single, still without a sexual partner, you feel pressure. We sometimes speak up for xiaojie, speak up for sex, and some people say flatly that we're preaching sexual liberation, sexual freedom — but that doesn't mean your life is over if you don't have sex. If you're living comfortably, that's fine. Just don't hold others to your own standard, let alone oppress them with it.

How should people discuss the concept of progress? As I understand it, a better story isn't there to sort out which side is progressive and liberated and which is backward and conservative. I won't judge along that axis. Good storytelling, I think, lets different voices come out, gives the voices that are usually ignored a chance to be present. And sexual autonomy strikes me as a good term, where autonomy means control over your own body, the right to protect it, a grip on it. You can choose your own way of living, and choose it without being stifled, without being oppressed. But again: don't casually hold other people to your way, to your moral standard.

Footage from the book talk at the Rockbund Art Museum: Tencent Video

The cover image is from the film Ida, via: Douban

The wide cover image is a detail from Édouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass.