Eroticism

Chinese romance, like Batman, is a creature of the night. It is a thing of darkened alleys and forgotten corners; night falls and gives light to the passions of 80,000 students. It seems like every open space is filled with silent couples embracing, single shadows with four feet, barely talking and barely moving, content to just be there, on that patch of earth, together. They are doing nothing that an American third grader would balk at, and yet here, in this place, I think it might be more intensely erotic than the most debauched film that Hollywood could ever produce.

In a country without private spaces, these young lovers have created an aura of privacy by pure force of will. Despite what my eyes tell me, I am not seeing a field covered with hundreds of students, but a series of couples utterly alone in the dark that just happen to be three feet from the next couple that is utterly alone in the darkness.

Somehow the pressures of Big-Brother politics and cultural primness have pressed out a diamond. Walking through campus, I see couples just … sitting there …, and yet I think I want that for myself far more than any of the acts of conquest that poker table conversations have rendered mundane. Denied the anything-goes milieu born of American liberty as well as the private spaces that might allow for deviant acts, Chinese couples are restricted to secret unseen touches and whispers in the dark: acts of romance so small as to be insignificant if not for the repressed intensity with which they were committed.

It makes me wonder. Can we pursue a liberty, gaining the freedom to do something, without cheapening the thing that we have freed? When the kiss moved from the bedroom to the shopping mall, did it become something else? More importantly, did it become something less? Have we, in our great quest for sexual liberation, in our war against Puritanical prudishness, inadvertently cheapened romance into something that isn’t worth having? Have they, with their rules and morays, with their stipulations and restrictions, inadvertently enhanced the very thing that they were trying to repress? Have they nailed down a carpenter and created a Christ?


(Aside) I in no way am wanting to inadvertently insinuate that Christianity is solely a phenomenon resulting from a poorly handled political situation. I am only trying to relate my hypothesis to a historical series of ecclesial events, as seen through an objective and non-religious lens.