Master’s thesis – Social and Cultural Anthropology
“Taiwan girls are easy?”
Casual sex and social expectations of women in Taipei
Source: Official music video from the song 我討厭你 by Cosmos People
Supervisor: Dr. Yatun Sastramidjaja Student: Helena Nordberg Second reader: Dr. Olga Soodi Student number: 11222174 Third reader: Dr. Rachel Spronk
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Abstract
In this thesis I explore how young middle-class Taipei women who practice casual sex negotiate their sexuality in the face of Taiwanese neoliberal, nationalist and most of all patriarchal social expectations of them, following two main strategies both involving sexual interaction with foreign men. I first describe how they get around some of these expectations by combining casual sex and cultural exchange in their relationships with foreign men. Moreover, I suggest that those young women, to have more freedom as sexual agents, are in the process of creating a new sexual script alternative to the traditional Taiwanese female sexual script, in which they assertively pursue foreign men for casual sex. Those ethnosexual relationships are met with resistance, by both Taiwanese society and some foreign men, and are accompanied by ambivalent feelings by those women over their own sexual practices. This thesis aims at showing the creative adaptations by these women to remaining patriarchal social values which are limiting sexual emancipation in Taiwanese society.
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Declaration on plagiarism and fraud
I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy
[http://student.uva.nl/mcsa/az/item/plagiarism-and-fraud.html?f=plagiarism]. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any version of it, for assessment in any other paper.
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Acknowledgements
There are many people without whom I would not have managed to write this thesis.
For that, I first want to thank all my Taiwanese participants and friends. Thank you for having taken the time to meet with me despite your busy schedules, for trusting me with stories from your personal life, and simply for your company. You all have made my fieldwork not only captivating but also extremely fun. I would particularly like to show my appreciation to Lily, Patricia, Kate, and Ariel, who have been present all along my fieldwork and have become dear friends. I also wish to thank my friend Han, for your patience, useful criticism and cultural and linguistic insight which have been very helpful for this thesis. I feel deeply grateful to Pin, for generously making your home mine too during my first week in Taipei, helping me settle in this big city! A special thanks to Lica for your encouragement messages and Chinese medicine advice during the writing of this thesis.
I am also very thankful to my supervisor, Yatun Sastramidjaja, for giving me such thorough constructive criticism all along my project, while still giving me the encouragement I needed. I feel like I have learned a lot with your help in such a short amount of time.
I thank the University of Amsterdam. Without its pre-master program, I would not even have been able to study anthropology and write this thesis.
A big thanks to my family for their support, especially my sister Fanny, who was with her partner Paolo my Amsterdam host once a week this past semester. I very much appreciated our quality time together during those evenings. Your mindfulness advice helped with finding the motivation to keep on writing! I also thank my mother Sophie for her delicious biscuits de
Savoie which are the tastiest form of moral support.
Finally, I am grateful to my partner Fernando, without whose encouragement I might not have even dared to pursue my interest for anthropology in the first place. I also value the sharp skills you deployed during the writing of this thesis as patient listener and as scrupulous “accountability buddy”, which was no easy task. Thank you for being there.
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Content
Introduction ... 6
Fieldwork and Participants ... 9
Theoretical approach ... 13
1. Lifestyles of contemporary young Taiwanese women ... 18
1.1 Finish work at 8, curfew at midnight ... 18
1.2 “Taiwanese men don’t like me” ... 25
2. Cosmopolitan women and nationalist men ... 34
2.1 Outdoor activities is the new sexy ... 34
2.2 “Taiwan girls are easy” ... 42
3. Hunting and being hunted ... 54
3.1 Hunting foreigners ... 54
3.2 Being hunted ... 64
Conclusion ... 71
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Introduction
During my fieldwork in Taiwan, I met Shaoyu, a member of the Gender Equality Club of Zhengzhi University in Taipei. Members of this student association have been leading campaigns on the university’s campus to promote gender equality and sexual freedom. She explained to me that sex outside of long-term romantic relationships is still very much stigmatized in Taiwan, especially for women, and that the club’s attempts to change conservative views about it had been challenging:
Honestly, it was difficult to organize events, because students who don’t agree with us would report the events to Facebook and get them suspended. We had to get creative, and gather people directly on campus with word-of-mouth. We once put posters all over campus, which showed naked people lying down surrounded with condoms and the slogan ‘yuepao is not a crime’. 1 We wanted it to start a conversation. Professors took
down the posters, they said it wasn’t appropriate…so we printed them as postcards and distributed them instead!
I was surprised to hear that casual sex was generally not that socially accepted, as the first time I was told about young women’s sexuality in Taiwan, I had heard a very different story. It was in early 2016, and I was travelling around several Asian countries including Taiwan, mostly with the purpose of trying new food. One evening, I was sitting in a dim-lit karaoke bar in Hualien, Eastern Taiwan, with J. An Indian man in his late twenties, J. was also my Couchsurfing host who had now been living in the town for a few years. Over a beer, he described to me how his single life had been like in Taiwan. He went through pictures on his phone of him partying with friends, at this very bar. He pointed at several women in the photos who he claimed had been casually sexually involved with him, or wished to be. He described Taiwan as a bachelor’s paradise, where his “exotic” looks guaranteed him special interest from multiple women, whether they were acquaintances or strangers partying in the bar. He continued:
Although it’s been great, I must say that sometimes, it’s almost a burden. They can be very insistent. One time, a girl was sitting over there with a group. She came up to me, made out with me and then returned to her table. Her boyfriend was sitting right there, and he saw the whole thing, so he started arguing with her. Then, she slapped him! End
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of discussion. Another time, I was coming out of the bathroom, over there. A woman pushed me against the wall, wrapped her leg around my hip, and French-kissed me. I didn’t know her, and she didn’t even say a word to me first. She just saw something she wanted, and she took it.
It puzzled me that women practicing casual sex could be so frowned upon in Taiwan but that at the same time so many women in J.’s life were (supposedly) very publicly expressing and acting on their sexual desire towards him. Did they not fear judgement from their peers? Or were they doing it despite receiving judgement? Did it have anything to do with J. being a foreigner?
For Taipei women today, single life seems more and more attractive compared to the constraints of married life (Adrian, 2003:89). In the past two decades in Taiwan, sexual relationships have been less and less related to marriage and reproduction (Davis and Friedman, 2014:4), while casual sex is becoming more and more common (Ho, 2007). The Mandarin word which best describes casual sex is the slang word yuepao which more or less translates into “meeting for sex” (without strings attached). In 2016, Taiwanese newspaper Apple Daily ran a poll on the topic among students, as the phenomenon is most common in universities, according to which 95.5% of Taiwanese students knew what yuepao was, 64.5% would like to practice it, and about 23.5% did practice it, which is twice as much as 14 years earlier.2 It is argued that Taiwan has been the setting of a period of female sexual liberation in the past few decades (Moskowitz, 2008).
The rising popularity of social network sites and dating apps have also had a big role in the growing practice of casual sex in the Chinese world.3 Chinese instant messaging app Momo,
which allows users to chat, and send each other audio notes and pictures was called a sexual revolution after it mostly became used to meet casual sex partners.4 Indeed, Taiwan’s new
phenomenon of today’s youth meeting in clubs (Moskowitz, 2008) or online for casual sex makes a stark contrast with their parents’ generation, for which premarital sex was considered much more shameful (R. Yang, 2011). For many young women, this sexual liberation is a sign of feminist equality (Ho, 1994) and modernity, and of differentiation with the previous generations. Yet young women’s parents still value female virginity before marriage as a moral conduct (Moskovitz, 2008), and as we will see in Chapter 1, part of Taiwanese society including
2 http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2016/04/29/2003645102/1 3 https://cpianalysis.org/2016/08/01/yuepao-apps-and-casual-sex-culture/
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8 younger generations consider sexuality as inseparable from love and commitment, as Farrer found for the People’s Republic of China (Farrer, 2014). In short, new generations of Taiwanese women are more and more attracted to practices such as casual sex, yet part of Taiwanese society’s expectations of them go against it.
The aim of this research is to show how young Taiwanese women practicing casual sex negotiate their sexuality in regard to social expectations in contemporary Taipei. Negotiation of sexuality was observed through contradictions, both between what Taiwanese women do and think and other people’s opinions, and within Taiwanese women’s own discourse, showing their doubts and dilemmas. Their negotiation could be recognized as their choice of action in certain situations as well as their rationalization of those actions. By contemporary Taipei, I refer to the city as a social setting shaped by phenomena influencing most of our globalized world nowadays, more precisely neoliberalism, patriarchy and nationalism.
Although anthropological research on sexuality has long been ignored due to the taboo surrounding it, sexuality has been a rich topic of study in the field since the 1970s. With the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s, sexuality research took a turn towards public health issues which justified sexuality research, but associated sexuality studies with disease and social development (Vance, 1991). Later research turned to sexual identity, the relationship between gender and sexuality, and theorizing agency inside normative systems, which are still central topics today (Spronk, 2014). Moreover there is currently a focus on intersectionality and attempt to understand new forms of sexualities that are appearing (Aggleton, 2012). This thesis aims to add to anthropological knowledge on the intersection between sexuality, gender and race but also between sexuality and nationalism. It documents the gendered patterns of new sexual practices linked to globalization and to the growing number of migrants moving from the global North to the semi-periphery in the South (Lan, 2011), by looking at the casual sexual relationships between young Taiwanese women and foreign men. This thesis offers an ethnographic insight in how casual sex is lived day to day by some of these women in today’s Taiwanese society, adding to the few ethnographies written in English that touch on sexuality in Taiwan (Adrian, 2003, Moskowitz, 2008; Lan, 2011; Wong and Yau, 2011).
In the following sections of this introduction, I will describe the research methods I used to conduct my fieldwork, and give an overview of the theoretical framework that will help develop my arguments. Chapter 1 will present Taipei’s social and economic situation and how it translates into my research participants’ lifestyle, describing the context of neoliberal and patriarchal regimes with which they interact. Chapter 2 will show how some young Taiwanese
9 women attempt to get around such regimes through a shift from the local to the foreign men’s sexual field and exchanges of sexual and cultural capitals with foreign men. Lastly, Chapter 3 will illustrate Taiwanese women’s challenge of patriarchal sexual scripts in an attempt to reach empowerment in their sexual practices.
Fieldwork and Participants
“It’s an interesting project you’re doing, but I worry you won’t find anybody else to talk to!” These words were pronounced by the first interviewee of my fieldwork, after we finished a semi-structured interview. There wouldn’t be enough women in Taipei who practice casual sex, who would be ready to talk about it, and who would be able to talk about it in English. It was a fair worry, especially the language aspect, which I will explain later influenced my research. Nevertheless, I had the chance to interview twenty-one Taiwanese women, five foreign men (European and North American), and one Taiwanese man, some of whom I met again many times after our initial interview. I was able to meet quite a few people in the short three months of fieldwork by combining the usual snowball sampling method with using the dating app Tinder to find potential interviewees. With a description of my research project written on my profile, and by “swiping right” on all women (and later men) I was presented, I received a high exposure to potential participants that I would have never reached only through word-of-mouth. As a result, I met most of my research participants thanks to the app. The choice of Tinder over other apps used locally (Skout, Beetalk), was simply because the interface was familiar to me, and was more English-speaker-friendly.
The main focus of my research are young middle-class Taiwanese women, living in Taipei, who practice heterosexual casual sex, and can speak English.5 My participants are aged eighteen to twenty-seven, an age bracket that encompasses students and young professionals. Most of the participants seemed to be part of the middle class, which I didn’t ask, but inferred from their consumption pattern: they were all able to afford having coffees and eating meals at foreign restaurants, and paying club entrance fees weekly, but also from their education level: they all had (or were on their way to) at least a bachelor degree, and had tertiary sector jobs (for
5 My group of study is defined through multiple factors which would be cumbersome to repeat every time
I mention it in this analysis. For that reason in the rest of my thesis, I will refer only to the Taiwanese women who participated in my research as “my participants”. Even though the men I have interviewed are also participants following this logic, I will refer to them as “the men I interviewed” or call them by their name.
10 those who were already working). To describe “casual sex” I refer to the following definition: “any (ostensibly consensual) sexual activity, coital or otherwise, that occurs between two people (e.g., strangers, recently met acquaintances, friends) outside the context of a committed, romantic, or longer-term relationship” (Paul et al., 2000). One-night stands, friends with benefits, fuck buddies and booty calls are the main recognized practices under the umbrella of casual sex (Farvid and Braun, 2017), but the casual sex practices of my participants also included less defined and fluid sexual relationships, while still outside of a committed or romantic relationship. All of my participants used Tinder to find casual sex partners, but some combined this method with other dating apps and/or going to clubs and socializing.
One of the limitations of my research was that I do not speak Mandarin nor Taiwanese. One of the comments I received most often when “pitching” my research to Taiwanese acquaintances and friends was that by only interviewing English speakers, my results would not be representative of the general population of Taiwanese women. I do not pretend to represent all Taiwanese women with my results, but rather the very specific group I described above. Although it’s only representative of a small number of people, I believe the phenomenon I observed is worth recording and analyzing. There are Taiwanese women who practice casual sex but who do not speak English, and might not be able to (language-wise), or be interested in meeting foreigners to practice casual sex. The negotiation of their sexuality in that specific context would certainly provide interesting results as well, and could be the subject of further research for Mandarin-speaking anthropologists.
It is important to note that my lack of Chinese-speaking skills did skew my research, leading me to use Tinder, a “western” app, in English, and to only speak with English-speaking participants, most of whom had been somewhat “westernized” by having studied in the United States or Europe, travelled abroad or consumed western media. Most of my participants practiced casual sex with foreign men, and there certainly is a link between their interest for them and their familiarity with the English language and foreign cultures.
From their descriptions, the majority of them was western white men, very often American or British, but they sometimes were also involved with non-white western men, or men from other regions of the world such as South America, South Asia or the Middle East. The group of men I interviewed was composed of three Americans, one Brit and one Frenchman, from the same age group as the female participants, mostly English teachers in Taipei, who, just like my participants, used a mix of Tinder and socializing in clubs to meet casual sex partners. Two of these men had had sexual relationships with two Taiwanese
11 participants (respectively). I also have interviewed one Taiwanese man who uses only Tinder to find casual sex partners.
In my attempt at entering the field, myself being a woman in my twenties towards the end of my studies, it seemed easy for my female Taiwanese participants to relate and get along with me. Being western and white also played a role in my key participants being willing to spend so much of their often limited free time with me, since having friends with those characteristics was something they were aiming for, as I will explain in Chapter 2. My main method of data collection was semi-structured interviews. Themes that I attempted to discuss in all interviews include my participants’ living arrangements, working life and work-life balance, their relationship with their family and friends and how they combine their casual sex lives and the views of their social circles on casual sex, their relationship to their casual sex partners, their experience practicing casual sex, contraception and protection against STDs, the sexual education they received, their sexual practices alone, and a reflection on their own views on sexuality and on themselves. Considering my main topic of research was casual sex, observation was not possible, but I did observe how my participants behaved in groups with foreign friends, especially men, and with men in clubs and bars. I also had many fruitful casual conversations with the research participants I regularly spent time with.
During the month of August – after two months of fieldwork, just as I was feeling like I had reached the point of saturation in my interviews with Taiwanese women, and started interviewing foreign men – an event in the city of Taipei stimulated public debate on casual sex between Taiwanese women and foreign men. It was a ten-day international sports competition called the Universiade. It is similar to the Olympics, but instead involves student athletes from all over the world. The event, which brought to Taipei about 7000 young foreign athletes, was the center of national news but not for its athletic feats only. Rather, most attention went to a young Taiwanese woman who posted on a forum describing her casual sex experience with a foreign athlete. This sparked nation-wide debates between women’s and men’s rights activists on the topic of casual sex. It gave me the perfect opportunity to collect articles discussing it, but also to ask my own participants about their feeling and opinions about the various responses by Taiwanese society on the topic. This is the general method I used to get the best insights possible, which was to share (anonymously) with my participants what other participants had said, and asking them if they agreed or related to those statements. It was a constructive way to find patterns, to get precisions or deeper explanations, and personal opinions on certain topics. Most of the time it worked well, although sometimes it created tension when they would
12 disagree with a statement, and thought I accepted it as a single truth. For example, I once shared with a participant that several other participants said that Taiwanese men were boring. She answered, “but I know interesting Taiwanese men!”, to which I had to clarify that I did not mean that it concerned all Taiwanese men, nor that it was my own judgement.
Due to the sensitive content of my participants’ personal lives, all of my participants will be referred to by first name only. Some of my participants’ names have been changed, while others have kept their English name for this thesis, as it doesn’t reveal their Chinese name and keeps a certain level of anonymity. Others do not mind having their original name given here. It is common practice in Taiwan for people to have a chosen English name to introduce oneself to non-Mandarin-speakers, which explains why very few Chinese names are mentioned in this thesis. The reader does not need to remember the names of all women mentioned in this thesis to understand its points. However, one of my participants will be referred to repeatedly throughout the thesis and needs to be introduced. Not only was she my closest participant for the length of my fieldwork (and close friend to date), she has also had a variety of experiences which represent many of my other participants’ experiences but united in a single person’s life, making her central for telling their stories.
Lily is twenty-three year old. She majored in English in university, and studied in the United States for a year, from which she brought back her fluency in English and her bleached dark blond hairstyle. Now she works as a sales person and lives with her family in the suburbs of Taipei. We met via Tinder at the beginning of my fieldwork, and as we got along very well during our first interview, we started spending a lot of time together chatting over coffee, satisfying food cravings, and clubbing. Lily is quite talkative and during the length of my fieldwork, she liked to share her knowledge about Taiwanese food or traditions as well as talk about what was happening in her life. When discussing difficult situations she had been or was going through, she could sometimes be very vocal about it while sometimes she expressed her feelings more discretely as to not seem to complain, which sometimes shows in her stories presented in the thesis. Before I share her stories in the following chapters, I will introduce the theory on which I will base my arguments throughout the thesis.
13 Theoretical approach
Sexuality and gender roles
One key concept employed in this thesis is the concept of sexual scripts. Although originally a psychological theory, it has proven useful in the social sciences by showing that sexuality, like other social processes, is socially constructed (Kimmel, 2007, p.ix).
In Sexual Conduct, sociologists Gagnon and Simon (1973) introduced their sexual script theory aimed at better understanding people’s sexual behavior, based on the idea of social scripts:
Scripts are metaphor for conceptualizing behavior within social life. Most of social life most of the time must operate under the guidance of an operating syntax, much as language is a precondition for speech. (Simon and Gagnon, 1984:53)
Thus, Simon and Gagnon suggest that sexual scripts are the social syntax that allow people to know how to behave, to respond to other people’s behavior during and around sexual interaction, to follow sexual acts in a certain order, to understand new situations and to make the link with their non-sexual life (Gagnon and Simon, 1973:17). It helps them construct meaning from their sexual interaction (Wiederman, 2005).
The scenarios on which people’s scripts are based are internalized from mass media, government, law, education and religion (Gagnon 1990; Simon 1996), but they are also built through interaction with each specific partner(s), and personal fantasies and mental rehearsals of sexual behavior (Wiederman, 2015). Those three levels of scenarios – cultural, interpersonal and personal – are related, as they can influence each other (Wiederman, 2015). The cultural sexual scripts dictate what acceptable behavior is, and are strongly gendered, mirroring the dominant gender roles in one’s culture. In heterosexual sexual interaction in the western world, a male script is for example to be an insistent initiator of the sexual relationship and a woman’s script is to be a “gate keeper” of sex, refusing it or accepting it passively (LaPlante, McCormick, and Brannigan, 1980). Indeed, the man will gain in status and earn self-esteem the more intercourse he practices, while the woman might lose self-esteem by risking being shamed for it. One of men’s sexual scripts is their detachment between sex and emotional investment, while women’s corresponding script will expect them to associate sex and feelings, and to seek a relationship with her sexual partner (Wiederman, 2005). The man is expected to be a skilled lover, while the woman is expected to look attractive and be responsive to the man’s sexual performance (Wiederman, 2005).
14 If both partners follow their sexual scripts, it allows them to feel less anxious as the scripts offer a certain predictability of feelings and behavior for themselves and their partner. People know what to expect, and little communication or negotiation is needed (Wiederman, 2005). Nevertheless, dominant sexual scripts based on constructed ideals of masculinity and femininity are rigid, and in practice, personal and interpersonal scenarios can lead to change in cultural scenarios and offer new sexual scripts (Simon and Gagnon, 1986). However, those changes are often accompanied by conflict:
On an interpersonal level, misunderstandings about behavior and intentions, coercion, unsafe sexual practices, and confusion over whether new or old scripts are ‘in play’ create frictions and difficulties in relationships. At a social level, the creation of new roles, rules and sexual scripts unsettles the socially shared expectations about the cultural environments, values and behaviours that inform sexual behaviour and the acting out of gendered roles. (Sanders, 2008:401)
Not only can unmatching scripts undermine the potential benefits brought by new sexual scripts (Wiederman, 2005), they can also lead to ambivalence in choosing to follow certain scripts. For example, for men, a tension can arise between a dominant script of sex separate from emotions and an alternative one of emotional intimacy, by fear of vulnerability (Wyatt Seal and Ehrhardt, 2003).
While this theory has been developed based on western societal conditions, the concept of sexual scripts can also be applied to Taiwan’s context. Indeed, parallel to western Christian ideas on gender, in Taiwan men’s sexual drive is considered natural and uncontrollable, women’s virginity and purity are still valued (Moskovitz, 2008). Dominant Taiwanese sexual scripts which I will describe in more depth in Chapter 1, also expect women to be rather passive but responsive to their male partner’s actions, and men to be the instigators and the active protagonist in the sexual act. During my fieldwork, I realized that Taiwanese women craved for their sexual desires to be recognized by society. Using sexual script theory, I argue that, as a result, Taiwanese women challenge dominant sexual scripts by setting aside the traditionally female sexual script and instead creating a new script by practicing what could be seen as actions from the traditionally male sexual script. In Chapter 3, I will describe how young Taiwanese women perform this alternative script both during the courtship process and partly during casual sexual acts with foreign men. I will further describe how this often results in discomfort or even retribution from some foreign men who are not ready to let go of their dominant male sexual script.
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Sexuality and the social construction of desire
Even though sexual script theory is a useful tool to understand how people’s sexual practices take shape, it does not offer a systematic framework to study the specific social circles and places in which sexual interaction is pursued and practiced. It also doesn’t account for modern phenomena such as globalization, which creates new “erotic worlds”, or environments in which new sexual interactions appear (Green, 2008), such as interactions between Taiwanese women and foreigners in Taipei. Therefore, I will complement it with a Bourdieu-inspired framework of sexual fields and sexual capital (Green 2008; Levi Martin and George, 2006; Gonzales and Rolison, 2005), to account for the recently appeared interethnic sexual context of Taipei. Farrer, who used the same frame to analyze sexual relationships between western men and Chinese women in contemporary Shanghai defines it as such:
We can define a sexual field as a field of possible sexual relationships structured by social and political institutions as well as cultural and social boundaries to sexual contact. Sexual capital refers to a person’s resources, competencies and endowments that provide status as sexual agents within a field. (Farrer, 2010:75)
Fields refer to a network of social relations, rather than places, although actors of a field project their sexual desires in ones, both physical (such as bars, clubs…) and virtual (such as dating apps and websites). Bourdieu’s theories of field and capitals are useful to present desirability as a socially constructed and locally-defined notion, rather than a natural, generalized one (Levi Martin and George, 2006; Green, 2008). This framework suggests that from one sexual field to another, a person’s desirability in the eyes of potential sexual partners can vary. What makes someone attractive in a field, nonetheless, is not simply their immutable physical characteristics but also their acquired ones (Green, 2008).
Butler’s idea of gender performativity can complete the concept of field in this context. She argues that gender is constantly being reproduced through a continuous performance in everyday life, including working on one’s physical appearance, which is usually compared to a normative ideal of what feminine or masculine bodies are supposed to look like. Nevertheless this ideal can be subverted through non-normative ways to present one’s body (Butler, 1993). Normative ideals of beauty are culturally specific, and gender performance can be adapted to a new ideal of beauty in order to “play a field”. The concept of field also implies that within a sexual field, sexual capital can convert into other forms of capital, such as social or cultural capital (Farrer, 2010). For example, a Taiwanese woman, by performing femininity in a way
16 that is attractive to a foreign man during a Tinder date, can turn this sexual capital into cultural capital, as he might offer her to practice her English with him, or he might tell her about traditions or social practices from his home country that she did not know about and will be able to discuss in future conversations with friends.
I will argue that in Taipei there is an interracial sexual field, in which some Taiwanese women and (mostly white) foreign men interact and “exchange” sexual and cultural capitals. I suggest that in those interactions, these women perform femininity in ways that appeal to foreigners in this interracial field instead of attempting to perform mainstream Taiwanese femininity in the Taiwanese sexual field to have access to more potential sexual partners, and they are successful at it. More in-depth descriptions of what sexual and cultural capitals consist of in Taipei’s interracial field will be discussed in Chapter 2.
Sexuality, gender and nationality
Theorists of sexual capital agree that sexual status is stratified in sexual fields (Gonzales and Rolison, 2005; Green, 2008; Koshy, 2004; Levi Martin and George, 2006). Race and gender have proven to be two factors in this stratification. Gonzales and Rolison (2005) show that in the US, white men benefit from higher sexual capital than black women and men, and white women. Similarly, western and white men have access to a “high” sexual capital in Asia (Farrer, 2010; Kelsky, 2001:148), to which western and white women don’t (Farrer, 2011). At the same time, through accounts produced by western men, Asian women have developed a “high” sexual capital in the western world (Koshy, 2004). To account of the intersectionality between race and gender, I find Nagel’s (2000a) concept of ethnosexual frontiers useful. She explains:
Ethnic boundaries are also sexual boundaries – erotic intersections where people make intimate connections across ethnic, racial, or national borders. The borderlands that lie at the intersections of ethnic boundaries are “ethnosexual frontiers” that are surveilled and supervised, patrolled and policed, regulated and restricted, but that are constantly penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic “others.” (Ibid: 113)
This control is not a legal one, but rather an everyday regulation of performance of sexuality, gender and race as normative (Nagel 2003:8). It enables an ethnic group to maintain the community’s respectability (Nagel, 2000a).
17 My research showed that Taipei is a tense ethnosexual frontier. Some Taiwanese women and foreign men cross it in their casual sexual relationships with each other. It is through those sexual practices, at these ethnosexual frontiers, that some Taiwanese women write a new sexual script. In my analysis, I argue that both Taiwanese women and foreign men take part in its regulation, by constantly negotiating their role and the other’s role in their relations. However, the main actor in the policing of these interracial sexual relations is Taiwanese society, mostly some Taiwanese men who see such relations as a betrayal to the Taiwanese national and ethnic boundaries. Before I explain further what the negotiations around those ethnosexual relationships entail, I will give a description of those women’s lifestyle and of the limitations it brings to their sexual life, which will shed light on their decision to engage in those ethnosexual relationships.
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1. Lifestyles of contemporary young Taiwanese women
We do not wish to see that in ten years, Taiwanese youths will still live the life of the 22K! We believe that Taiwan is a place where youths can realize their dreams of starting their own businesses, opening a coffee shop or a company, a paradise for ventures [chuanye] where anyone can succeed in becoming an ‘owner’ [toujia] by one’s sheer hard work. (318 Manifesto,
2015 [2014], quoted in Wang, 2017)
Taiwanese students’ 2014 Sunflower movement was not simply resistance against a trade agreement with China, but rather an opposition to all that China represents for Taiwanese youth, including a barrier to national independence, as well as a neoliberal threat, only leading Taiwan further into work precarity and social inequality (Wang, 2017, Tseng, 2014, Lin, 2016). One can wonder what the link is between neoliberalism and some Taiwanese women practicing casual sex. To really understand these women’s negotiations in their sexual lives, one has to first be aware of the context in which they live daily.
In this chapter I will advance that my participants and other young Taiwanese women’s day-to-day life is regulated by two regimes that affect most of the contemporary world: neoliberalism and patriarchy. I will first attempt to briefly describe Taiwan’s current neoliberal context, and present how it shows at the level of young Taiwanese women’s lifestyles with illustrations from my conversations in the field. Later I will define how patriarchal pressures are translated in the context of Taiwanese society, again with examples from my participants’ experience. I will conclude by analyzing how these regimes present challenges to some Taiwanese women’s sexual practices. I do not pretend to be able to represent in such few words the complexity of Taiwan’s political, economic and social history and current situation, but rather hope to give the reader some idea of what connections can be observed between bigger systems and young Taiwanese women’s lives nowadays.
1.1 Finish work at 8, curfew at midnight
Context
Along with Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, Taiwan was named an “Asian Tiger” in the 1980s for its rapid development and economic growth since the 1950s. While Taiwan attained political democratization in the mid-1980s, its government which had previously been
19 very interventionist reduced its market regulation while allowing international trade and investment (Williamson, 1993). This process of joining the liberal world economy was mostly due to pressures from the United States, and to a lesser extent from owners from large local businesses, who would benefit from market deregulation (Tsai, 2001). As a result, many of the country’s businesses have relocated to China, and facing strong foreign competition, local businesses do not receive much investment, leading to a slower, less innovative economy than before. This has led to stagnant salaries for the past twenty years, while the cost of living kept increasing (Dou and Hsu, 2012). It is a reference to those low salaries that the above Sunflower manifesto makes when mentioning the “life of the 22K”. “22K”, or 22 000 Taiwanese dollars, refers to the monthly wage of many college graduates entering the job market (W. Chen, 2014).6 Meanwhile, the deregulation of the housing market has led to high levels of speculation by private developers and an extreme increase in housing prices. Indeed, since 2005, housing prices have doubled, while the average wage has gone up a mere 3% (Y.L. Chen, 2011).
In short, housing prices are out of reach, salaries are just enough to get by in spite of a tertiary education, the economy is stuck in a vicious cycle of low investment and low competitiveness, combined with an aging population and fertility decline. As a result, today’s young Taiwanese people have been named “the collapsing generation” (bong shidai) by scholars (Tseng, 2014), for having to face innumerable crises stemming from three decades of neoliberal policies.
In practice
After Lily graduated from college, she started working in an office with the title “sales assistant” in the car industry. She described to me the pressure she felt at work, as her boss was constantly watching over her shoulder to check if she was not doing anything else than work. She explained how tired she was from working a daily one and a half to two hours overtime, which was unpaid, and how her superiors did not acknowledge her hard work. She also mentioned how quickly new employees would quit, discouraged after one or two weeks. She lasted eight months, before quitting, disillusioned about overworking without reward in a field she was not interested in.
Lily: So, like, my gums were hurting, turns out it was because of all the stress from work! But anyways, I had a dentist appointment to check it out, so I told my supervisor that the next day I
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had to go to the dentist…and that the clinic was available at night, but I still needed to leave the office earlier than usual. My supervisor said “then you have to come to work at 8 or 8.30 instead of 9am”and I said “ok”, and the next day I went to the office one hour earlier than usual. When I had to leave, it was around 6, I asked my supervisor if I could go to the dentist. And then she said “well, the boss is still in the office, so… I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to leave”. And I was wondering why? Why can’t I leave? I did all my work for the day already. So I stayed until the usual time, and because I came an hour earlier, I ended up doing one extra hour of work… Why come early if I couldn’t leave at the end of the day? What you can do all depends on the boss’ mood and behavior…
Me: Why did you have to do overtime every day?
Lily: Well, in Asian society… if you don’t work overtime, if you leave on time, most of the boss will say “why did you leave early? Did you do all your work?” They think maybe you’re not such a hard worker. This is why everybody stay at work, that’s why everybody pretends they’re doing stuff even when they’re finished with the work for the day!
I heard very similar accounts among my participants who are already employed. I learned that unpaid daily overtime is the norm, as well as unpaid sick days, and very few holidays (generally between 8 and 11 paid days off a year, apart from national holidays). Several of them complained about not getting sufficient training when first arriving in a new position. They subsequently struggled to reach the goals they were set and felt guilty about “going too slow”. Some also complained, like Lily, to be constantly monitored by their boss. Lily’s dentist situation shows how neoliberal ideology turned into hegemonic beliefs about productivity, following the path of Japan. Indeed, overtime seemed to be widely accepted as unavoidable, whether it is necessary or not, to the point that even an exceptional leave at the regular time for a doctor’s appointment can be refused.
Intrigued by this idea that nobody was questioning the long working hours, I discussed it on Facebook with Ariel, another participant with whom I enjoy discussing political and social issues. I suggested to her a theory that the Taiwanese government and companies are using nationalism as a discourse to encourage people to work a lot and not demand more rights. She answered:
In my point of view, nationalism is not the reason why Taiwan people don't fight for their right. But because they can survive at this salary level, even though they are worth more. Also, people tend not to argue, I think it's because of the culture that the peace between people is the most
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precious thing, which is just nonsense though. Take me for example, I hesitated to argue with my boss for a long time, I did it finally with the help of alcohol XD
This lack of communication and confrontation in the office for fear of breaking harmony has also been reported to me by several women, and seemed to be a source of tension and anxiety. There is no doubt certain employers take advantage of this tendency for conflict avoidance to abstain from making changes in favor of their employees, even though it often leads to avoidable high employee turnover which might in the long term hurt their company’s interests. While my working participants face long work days in adulthood, life was often not much more relaxing when they were younger. Many were sent by their parents to cram schools (buxiban) in the evening to study some more the topics that had been seen in school during the day, and went to summer schools when they were off from regular school. While not every young Taiwanese person has been to a cram school in their childhood and teenage life, it seems to be the norm more than the exception. My participants thus used to face a strict study regime, followed by a harsh work regime, with university years as an in-between break, as long as they did not have to work on the side of their studies.
A direct link between the low salary-high housing cost combination and young middle class Taiwanese women’s lifestyle is that despite having been to university and working a qualified job, many cannot afford to move out of their parents’ apartment. The only participants in my research who live alone or in flat shares are not originally from Taipei, and have no choice but to rent a place. Even though it is often a strain on their finances, it does give them more privacy than Taipei women who live with their parents. Indeed, by living under the same roof, parents tend to maintain a certain level of control over their daughter’s life. Chantal, a 24-year-old professional who lives with her parents explained to me:
Chantal: When you grow up and you turn into an adult, and you feel like you wanna have your own privacy, and freedom, to a certain…degree, but you know, [my parents] only have one child, so they put all the focus to you, and I think another reason is that the Asian parents are like that, no matter how old the child is, he or she is still considered a child.
Me: Do your parents expect you to tell them what you’re doing in your free time?
Chantal: They used to. And then, we sort of… underwent some argument, then they sort of…step back. They realized that I’m actually a grown up now, so I should… have my privacy. Yeah. But they feel like I should be home before 12. Every day, even for weekends. Yep. […] So this 12pm thing, I know they are doing this for my own good, but it’s too protective sometimes, to be honest.
22 Many of my participants living with their parents had a midnight curfew. Some did not but were still expected to come home every night, while others not only had a midnight curfew but also had to write to their mothers regularly during the day to give them an update. Two of my participants took a picture with me during our interview so they could send it to their mothers to prove to them they were with a friend.
Implications
Many of my participants, when speaking about sex, made the analogy between sexual needs and being hungry. Sometimes, they need to eat, and sex will satisfy their hunger. Yet, Taiwan’s neoliberal regime leads them to work hard and for long hours, and prevents them from being able to afford their own housing. As a result, they are left with little free time, little energy and little privacy to act on their sexual needs.
Because of shortages of free time in the past and present, the current generation of young Taiwanese people seems to face another consequence: not having had the opportunity to truly develop interest and hobbies. Laura, a 24-year-old student majoring in Spanish, is very critical of this aspect of Taiwanese society:
Laura: Most people don’t know how to dancing or drinking….So, every time I want to go out, I wanna go to Korner, or listen to electronic music, and dance, I just… I think about my friends and I remember that they don’t know how to dance. 7
[…] Last time, I went to a punk festival with my friend, actually she introduced that festival to me so I think she might quite like it, and then when I brought her to the festival, all the sudden, she’s scared, she’s afraid to talk to people, and when I’m dancing she keeps staring at me, maybe because she doesn’t know I would dance. First time she saw people dance! And also, the punk festival is two days, so I saw a lot of people playing skateboard outside, so I think it’s fun to play with them. So the next day, I brought my skateboard, and I play with them, and they teach me skills, and my friend tried to play, and she “broke” her arm, yeah. And she’s terrified, and I think it was a little twist, the bone is fine, and she went to the hospital two times to check if it’s fine. My point is, that’s why I think Taiwanese people have no life. I have a theory that most Taiwanese people are white rabbits.
Me: White rabbits?
7 Korner is a nightclub playing techno/house music defined as a “hidden club for open-minded people” on its
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Laura: Yeah, they are scared of lots of things. And education, I think, destroy their self-value too much, they don’t believe in themselves. Yeah.
During our interview, Laura did not directly criticize young Taiwanese people for being shy and scared of trying new things. Rather, she blamed the Taiwanese education and labor systems for shaping people into having to align their identity with their success at exams, and later financial success, which makes it difficult to develop a full personality outside of this frame. She suggested that this focus on success is a direct consequence of people’s fear of being unemployed, without receiving any welfare from the government, or earning a working class wage, which is, in her own experience, very difficult to survive on, and can easily lead to homelessness. This confirms Ong’s argument that “neoliberal competition mobilizes constant optimization of one’s skills and resources to avoid falling into the realm of devaluation and abandonment” (Wang 2017, referring to Ong 2006).
As I initiated conversation with many people on Tinder when looking for research participants, I noticed that many of them complained about being bored. Here are some short extracts from typical such conversations:
Me: So what brings you to tinder? F: My life just too boring lol
Me: What are you going to do today? I: Nothing to do
Me: What about your friends, what are they up to? I: Work work work
Me: So why did you choose to join tinder? :) P: My life is little bit boring
Me: Why is it boring? :) P: No one interesting. Haha
Me: How are you?
C: Haha quite bored but good
Me: How are you?
A: I’m now extremely bored during my summer vacation x( Me: Didn’t the summer vacation start, like, 3 days ago? ^^
A: Yup and I came back home yesterday afternoon. But I’m already get bored here :( Me: Actually can I ask, what are you looking for in tinder? :)
E: In the beginning, daily life was bored. Tinder is bored now :D :D
Not only did my conversations with people randomly selected for me by Tinder show that many people seemed bored, but some of my participants also expressed boredom. Many aspects from
24 their life was branded as boring, such as their job, for being repetitive or straining, or their Taiwanese friends. They often reproached them their unwillingness to try other social activities than dinner at a restaurant, such as going to concerts, bars or clubs, as well as their emotional unavailability, which seemed like a recurring problem. Their friends would be so worried or focused on their job that when meeting, they would not have much to talk about, and have little patience when listening to each other’s problems.
To better understand young Taiwanese people’s feeling of boredom and what they would seek to get rid of it, it is useful to take a look at existing literature on the topic. Only a few ethnographies have discussed boredom (see Musharbash, 2007; Jervis et al., 2003; O'Neill, 2014; Condon, 1995; Condon and Stern 1993; Herzfeld, 2003). Musharbash (2007), in her research on residents of an Australian Aboriginal settlement and their experience of boredom, suggested that what they expressed as boredom was a feeling of entrapment in their daily life. Similarly, in their observation of boredom on a Native American reservation, Jervis et al. (2003) found that the reservation’s population was identifying more and more with dominant American values, including the idea of happiness being an entitlement. They considered themselves as deprived of the pleasure they felt was being experienced elsewhere (a feeling coming from their pop culture consumption). It is this lack of excitement supposedly found elsewhere which was expressed as boredom.
I find that there is a parallel to be seen with the case of young Taiwanese people. Indeed, among my participants, there seems to be “fear of missing out”, or the nagging feeling that others seemed to be doing many “interesting” things and they were not. During my fieldwork, my key participants spent extended amounts of time on Instagram, looking at other people’s pictures and posting their own. Once, Lily showed me the Instagram account depicting the life she claimed she wished she could have. It was that of a social media “influencer”, a fashionable young Taiwanese woman who was studying overseas and regularly posted polished pictures of her holiday trips, surfing or relaxing in beautiful settings. Jervis et al. (2003) suggest that what is considered exciting or interesting is culturally defined. Among my participants, “interesting” activities seem to involve international travel, eating foreign food, enjoying night life and doing sports in nature. Most of these activities seem technically doable for young middle class women, despite long work hours. However, their friends are usually not available or willing to join them. As a result, they often express boredom in their lack of practice of “interesting” things. This boredom of others seeped into my participants’ dating life, as several complained about the
25 boredom of dates with Taiwanese men. This is how Jenny, a 24-year-old professional, describes it:
They talk about work, or do you like work out, you know, some…just work mostly I feel, like, they…they wanna talk about the work… I can’t even remember! Or your dog, or cat, something cute, I don’t know.
Indeed, my participants’ boredom is felt through their conversations with others. Just like with friends, being around men who cannot talk about what they deem interesting is considered boring. Because they find Taiwanese men boring, many of my participants gave up on attempting to meet them for romantic or sexual purposes.
In short, on top of not having much time, energy or privacy to pursue sexual relationships in their free time, my participants often feel bored in their free time, including in their interaction with Taiwanese men who cannot talk about anything but work, leaving unmet both their need for sex and for entertaining leisure time.
1.2 “Taiwanese men don’t like me”
Context
Previous research on gender roles in Taiwan (A. Lee et al, 2004; A. Lee, 2009) shows that, as Taiwan saw rapid economic development in the second half of the twentieth century, women’s role in Taiwanese society changed drastically. They got increasingly educated and many joined the workforce, gaining financial independence. However, economic development did not only bring opportunities for women. Existing patriarchal values about gender roles endured in Taiwanese society and adapted to changes in the economic structure (A. Lee et al, 2004:359). As more and more white collar jobs appeared, low-paying ones were gendered towards women and high-paying ones towards men, inequalities that still show today. Moreover, as women joined the workforce, they carried on with their previous activities, thus having to take on the infamous “second shift”. This involved taking care of their children and their husband’s elderly parents, and doing house chores. Nowadays, according to my participants, living with one’s husband’s parents has become rare, which relieves women from the task of taking care of them daily, and couples tend to have few children, which also reduces women’s second shift’s workload. Nevertheless, house chores are still overwhelmingly the burden of women in Taiwanese couples today (Davis and Friedman, 2014:244). Meanwhile, men have been offered
26 more freedom, particularly in the realm of sexuality, where patriarchal values are also still at play. Indeed, husbands’ extramarital affairs remain much more common and condoned than wives’, although infidelity is becoming less accepted and has become one of the leading causes of divorce in Taiwan (Ibid:279). Moreover, men have been encouraged to have sexual experiences before marriage while women have been expected to remain virgins until marriage (Ibid:14), which tends to remain the case today, as I will show later. These different gender roles for men and women in sexuality can also be seen in the Taiwanese society’s dominant sexual scripts.
Through in-depth interviews, Wong and Yau (2011) asked Taiwanese (heterosexual) men and women (their age was not specified) about gender and sexuality. A finding was that there was a general association in participants’ discourse of men with a biological and physical need for sex, which was uncontrollable. Men’s sex drive was compared to an animal instinct (such as being hungry and looking for food). Female sexuality was considered cultural (as a show of love, for example), spiritual, non-necessary, controllable, non-ordinary (a more rare and thus special occurrence), and human, as opposed to the male animal-like behavior. The discourse of this research’s interviewees considered male and female sexuality a clear dichotomy, which they did not see as socially constructed but biological (Ibid.).
Because men are believed to have strong sexual needs which are less controllable than women’s, the sexual script of men actively pursuing sex, and leading and being in charge of interaction, when initiating and during the sexual act, was considered natural. The Taiwanese male script also entails to be able to perform during the sexual act, which research participants identified as practicing vaginal penetration for a certain period of time and changing positions regularly, with the goal of sexually satisfying their female partner. One aspect of that script that seemed crucial for the male participants was for their sexual partner to reach an orgasm in order for them to feel achieved. Moreover men are expected to have extended sexual knowledge and experiences, from watching porn, masturbating and starting to have sexual relationships as early on as possible, whereas women are not. Meanwhile, the dominant Taiwanese female sexual script dictates a woman must be a “recipient” of sex: wait to be sexually initiated, let the man lead the sexual act, but she must also by the end of the sexual interaction become as much of an “active and engaged” partaker of the sexual interaction as her male partner, at which point she is expected to have an orgasm (Ibid.). These sexual scripts show how precise each gender’s role is in the sexual interaction, giving little leeway for exploring other sexual practices during and around the sexual act.
27 Patriarchal values have thus thrived in the past few decades in Taiwanese society, giving men and women different roles in society, generally in a way that disadvantage women. How do these values translate in the daily life of young, unmarried, urban women nowadays? My participants not only face expectations due to a neoliberal environment, such as having to work late, or following parental rules while living under their roof, but, as I will show in the following section, they also have to deal with patriarchal social pressures, especially the importance given to them to remain virgins, as well as heavy beauty diktats that are difficult to uphold.
Expectations of virginity and purity and implications
Taiwanese traditional values include women remaining chaste until marriage (T.Y. Lee et al. 2014), although women have earned more freedom in this respect in the past few decades (Moskowitz, 2008). This expectation is still to a certain degree present in Taiwanese society, and while young men are encouraged to have sex, young women’s sexuality remains unacknowledged. One evening while chatting and eating xiao long bao, Delilah, a 26-year-old professional shared:
When my brother turned eighteen, my parents gave him condoms, and told him “be safe”. When I turned eighteen, they didn’t give me or tell me anything… What a double standard, right?
Almost all the women I interviewed told me their parents expect them to remain virgins until marriage, or at least until they are in a long-term committed relationship. As I stated earlier, some parents are very protective and somewhat intrusive of their daughter’s personal life, including asking their siblings about their dating life, checking their phone and searching their bags. This control is aimed at limiting their daughter’s possibilities to “fool around”, and being able to reprimand them and put them back on the right path if they still do. Nevertheless, those cases are limited. Adrian (2003:84-88) suggests that in Taiwan, there is usually an unspoken agreement between daughters and their parents that their dating habits would not be acknowledged. As I found out, this approach is also applied to sexual habits, and seems to be wide-spread, as Lily suggested during our first interview. She explained that although their parents expect them to remain virgins until marriage, all her female Taiwanese friends have sex with their boyfriends. They simply hide it from them. She does it too, and has techniques not to raise her parents’ suspicion:
Lily: Every time I would hook up with a guy, I would just say hey, I’m sleeping over at my friend’s house. I just spend most of the time at home, so… they don’t think I’m out dating with
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a guy or something. And I also tell them like, “hey, introduce some boys for me, your daughter wants a boyfriend” like this, kinda like making a joke, so they won’t find out.
But she also suggested that ultimately, parents are aware of those sexual relations, they simply do not confront their daughters about it.
Then, [a friend] told me: “My parents know I have sex with friends but they just don’t wanna say it. We’re both pretending really well”. Just like her mother tell her, like, “you’re not gonna get a tattoo on your body.” But then she got a really big tattoo, and one day her mother found it, and she just told her “oh no, this is just temporary, that won’t last forever” but few months after, her mother saw it again and say, “I actually already knew it’s a real tattoo, I just didn’t wanna say it”. Yeah. So probably parents know it, they just don’t wanna say they know. Me: Why do you think they don’t wanna say they know?
Lily: Because they still want their daughter to be like… pure, before getting married or something, but they know they just can’t stop it. They can’t control everything.
Indeed, the most common parents-daughter interaction about sexuality seem to be to follow a “don’t ask, don’t tell” arrangement. Women do their best not to show clues of their sexual activities to their parents, as to avoid disappointing them, and when in doubt, parents look the other way, as to not face the reality of their daughter’s “impurity” and have to scold them for something they are likely to keep doing anyways. While parents generally allow their daughter a certain level of sexual freedom this way, silence around sex means daughters cannot ask parents for support if they experience a sexuality-related issue. Lily herself had that painful experience about a month after that interview, when tests results confirmed she had contracted a human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and genital warts. On top of not being able to share the bad news and accompanying worries with her parents, she had to hide from them going to her doctor’s appointments, taking her treatment, and feeling discomfort caused by the infection.
Lily expressed relief about being able to tell me about this hardship, as she could not share it with anybody else. Indeed, her own friends might have judged her for having had sex unprotected or with “too many” partners. Many women I interviewed confirmed that most of their Taiwanese friends are “conservative” and somewhat disapprove of casual sex. Some believe it is morally wrong to have sex without being in love, others think it is a risky behavior because of diseases and the partner potentially being “a bad guy”. As a result, sharing casual sex stories with friends is not always possible. One of my participants, Xiao-Yun, once attempted to tell her best friend about a one-night-stand she had.
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He said he really can’t stand condoms, so we didn’t protect ourselves. He said he was clean, that he was infertile… I just believed him. And then when my best friend found out that I had sex with the guy without condom, she was mad because I could have caught diseases. But she was mad at me! She blamed me for not forcing him to wear a condom, not him for refusing to wear one!8
Xiao-Yun’s case shows how she not only did not receive the support she expected from her close friend after sharing such a personal casual sex story, but her friend also participated in the double standard of placing the responsibility of safe sex solely on women’s shoulders. Interestingly, several women I spoke to whose close friends fall into the “conservative” category, resorted to strengthen originally distant friendships to be able to share their casual sex anecdotes with someone. They usually would identify which friends also practiced casual sex, so that when sharing their stories they could relate to each other and listen without judgement. Among Taiwanese friends, those were often men, especially gay men, who were more open-minded about the practice. They also built friendships with foreign men and women who were more familiar with the practice.
Even though some parents look the other way, and it is possible to connect with new friends with whom to talk about their experience, Taiwanese women who practice casual sex have to deal in their day-to-day life with remaining social expectations of virginity and purity, leading them to hide carefully their sexual activities from their parents – the very people they live with –, and leaving them stigmatized by their own friends.
Unreachable beauty standards
Yang (2004) argues that with the liberalization of the Taiwanese economy in the 1980s, foreign clothing and cosmetics brands flooded the Taiwanese market, with international women’s magazines explaining how buying those products, along with acting tender and submissive would give Taiwanese women the best chance to find a man, the missing piece to their life (F.C. Yang, 2004). Thirty years later, beauty and behavioral standards on young Taiwanese women are extremely demanding, and make finding a dating or sex partner difficult for those who can’t and/or refuse to reach those standards. Chantal, who told us earlier what it was like to live with her parents, explains what her Tinder experience has been with Taiwanese men due to her looks:
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Chantal: Even [if] I swipe Taiwanese guys right, I don’t really get a lot of matches. So I guess I’m not the type Taiwanese guys like. I do really think so. Yeah. So I don’t know if you’ve noticed that, but, usually, of course there are exceptions, but usually, the type that Taiwanese guys like are either white, or slim, or cute. And unfortunately, I’m neither of them. Yeah. To be honest, I’m not the type that wears colored contacts, or the fake eyelashes, or the super thick eyeliner, yeah, or heavy makeup, or you know, try to wear push up bra to show more cleavage… Some are really faking, [you can see it] at the first glance…at the girl. And for some reason, guys can never recognize that.
This extract is a good summary of what most participants in my research shared with me about the beauty ideal. Looking thin, fair-skinned, and “cute” by enhancing their eyes with fake eyelashes, eyeliner and blue or green contact lenses and by using rosy cheek powder and lipstick, was extremely important. I myself felt those pressures during fieldwork, even though I am usually comfortable in my own skin. After only a couple of weeks in Taipei was I truly able to see the beauty and sex appeal in Taiwan’s ideals of cuteness and fairness, which I had never understood before. In the Taipei metro, I would have the impression of taking up too much space compared to all the very thin women around me, and in the streets, I would compare my not-particularly-fashionable clothes, and lack of makeup and hairdo to other women’s cute pastel-colored dresses with frills on the shoulders, and impeccable hair and makeup despite the constant 35 degrees temperature. Eventually, I even started to wear eye makeup on a daily basis which I rarely did before. If those ideals influenced me so strongly after only a few weeks, one can only imagine how young Taiwanese women internalize them over a lifetime.
Moreover, they do not only face strict beauty standards, but also behavioral standards that go hand-in-hand with the expected look. Indeed, young women (until which age is unclear to me) are expected to look cute, but also act cute. Yueh (2016) suggests that Taiwanese women’s cute behavior, a result of heavy consumption by Taiwanese society of Japanese kawaii culture since the 1980s, and has become an inherent feature of the Taiwanese femininity ideal (Yueh, 2016:133). This practice is called sajiao (撒嬌). Young Taiwanese women are expected to sajiao, in other words, act “cute” and “childlike”, at different levels according to the settings and the social circles they are in. For example, they might not practice it in the workplace, but perform a light version of it with their girlfriends, by calling them “baby” or “honey”, trotting towards them and holding their hands as they meet. Situations that sajiao is most performed is with a woman’s boyfriend. Jane, a 23-year old professional, was very critical of this expectation of young Taiwanese women during an interview on the beach, while sipping our freshly-made watermelon slushies:
