Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine by Vivienne Lo

Author:Vivienne Lo [Lo, Vivienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415830645
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

The case of ‘doctor sex’: the modernisation of intimacy

To illustrate further these cultural and political dynamics, we can take the emblematic case of Zhang Jingsheng 張競生 (1888–1970), one of the most notorious Chinese intellectuals from the Republican period (Leary 1994; Peng 1999; Zhang Peizhong 2008; Rocha 2010b, 2015). Zhang was a philosopher who received his doctoral degree from the University of Lyon for his dissertation on Rousseau’s pedagogical thought, and was a professor at Peking University in the 1920s. In 1926, Zhang published Sex Histories (Xingshi 性史), one of the most sensational and controversial books in the Republican period, which earned him the nickname ‘Doctor Sex’ (Xing boshi 性博士). Sex Histories contained seven sexually explicit autobiographical confessions that Zhang Jingsheng solicited from the public. As befitting of a disciple of Rousseau, Zhang believed that the modernisation of the Chinese psyche had to begin with the liberation of the sexual self via confession. At the end of each confession in Sex Histories, Zhang appended his sexological commentaries, written in the vein of British sexologist Havelock Ellis’ (1859–1939) magnum opus Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928, 6 volumes). Zhang presented his book as a self-help manual that would teach China about sexual hygiene. He prescribed a ‘correct path of sex’ (xing de zhenggui 性的正軌) that, he claimed, would lead to a fulfilling marital relationship; produce quality offspring and prevent the spread of ‘perverted’ and ‘deviant’ acts, such as masturbation and homosexuality, that were corrupt wastages of a person’s vitality (Zhang 2006, 2008: 154; Chapter 22 in this volume). In short, Sex Histories was supposed to push its readers towards modernity and civilisation by revolutionising their intimate practices.

Zhang Jingsheng’s ‘correct path of sex’ revolved around his concept of the ‘Third Kind of Water’ (disanzhong shui 第三種水). Zhang suggested that a woman’s genitals could secrete three kinds of fluids: from the labia, the clitoris and the Bartholin’s glands. He argued that a woman had to release all three kinds of fluids in copious amounts, via extensive foreplay and penetration. All sexual secretions had to be absorbed for their health-promoting effects; a woman had to absorb a man’s semen and the man had to absorb the precious ‘Third Kind of Water’ from his female partner. Moreover, Zhang recommended that a man had to discipline himself to delay ejaculation so that his orgasm could coincide exactly with the woman’s climax and her release of the ‘Third Kind of Water’. A child conceived at the moment when a man and a woman reached simultaneous orgasm, with the ovum and the sperm surrounded by the ‘Third Kind of Water’, would be physically stronger and more intelligent. By regularly engaging in such a ‘perfect’, pleasurable form of intercourse, Zhang argued, couples would feel physically and psychologically satisfied, and husbands would, therefore, be less likely to seek out prostitutes and to contract venereal diseases, like syphilis, while wives would become less prone to developing ‘hysteria’. In one stroke, Zhang connected ‘good sex’ (always already heterosexual and heteronormative) with a

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