The Mosuo

In the mountains around Lugu Lake, near the border between China’s Hunan and Sichuan provinces, live about 56,000 people who enjoy a family system that has perplexed and fascinated travelers and scholars for centuries. Their language is not written, being rendered in Dongba, it is the sole pictographic language still used in the world today. They have no words for murder, war, or rape. The Mosuo’s relaxed and respectful tranquility is accompanied by a nearly absolute sexual freedom and autonomy for both men and women.

In 1265, Marco Polo passed through the Mosuo region and being the macho Italian that he was, completely misread the situation. He misinterpreted the women’s sexual availability as a commodity controlled by the men, when in fact, the most striking feature of the Mosuo system is the fiercely defended sexual autonomy of all adults, women as well as men.

The Mosuo refer to their arrangement as sese, meaning “walking”. True to form, most anthropologists miss the point by referring to the Mosuo system as “walking marriage”. The Mosuo themselves however disagree with this depiction of their system. By any stretch of the imagination, sese are not marriages,” says Yang Erche Namu, a Mosuo woman who published a memoir about her childhood along the shores of Mother Lake. “All sese are the visiting kind and none involves the exchange of vows, property, the care of children, or expectation of fidelity.” The Mosuo language has no word for husband or wife, preferring the word azhu, meaning “friend.”

The Mosuo are a matrilineal, agricultural people, passing property and family name from mother to daughter(s), so the household revolves around the women. When a girl reaches maturity at about thirteen or fourteen, she receives her own bedroom that opens both to the inner courtyard of the house and to the street through a private door. A Mosuo girl has complete autonomy as to who steps through this private door into her babahuago (flower room). The only strict rule is that her guest must be gone by sunrise. She can have a different lover the following night—or later that same night— if she chooses(or the same lover for many years). There is no expectation of commitment and any child she conceives is raised in her mother’s house, with the help of the girl’s brothers and the rest of the community. In the Mosuo lingual the word Awu translates to both father and uncle. “In place of one father, Mosuo children have many uncles who take care of them. “In a way,” writes Yang Erche Namu, we also have many mothers, because we call our aunts by the name azhe Ami, which means ‘little mother.’”

In a twist that should send many mainstream theorists into a tailspin, sexual relations are kept strictly separate from Mosuo family relations. Custom prohibits any talk of love or romantic relationships in the family home. Complete discretion is expected from everyone. While both men and women are free to do as they will, they’re expected to respect one another’s privacy. There’s no kissing and telling at Lugu Lake.

Particularly libidinous Mosuo women and men unashamedly report having had hundreds of relationships. Shame, from their perspective, would be the proper response to promises of our demands for fidelity. A vow of fidelity would be considered inappropriate—an attempt at negotiation or exchange. Openly expressed jealousy, for the Mosuo, is considered aggressive in its implied intrusion upon the scared autonomy of another person, and is thus met with ridicule and shame.

Sadly, hostility toward this free expression of female sexual autonomy is not limited to narrow-minded anthropologists and thirteenth-century Italian explorers (like Marco Polo). Although the Mosuo have no history of trying to export their approach to love and sex, they have long suffered outside pressure to abandon their traditional beliefs, which outsiders seem to find threatening.

Once the Chinese established full control of the area in 1956, government officials began making annual visits to lecture the people on the dangers of sexual freedom and convince them to switch to “normal” marriage. In a bit of dubious publicity reminiscent of Reefer Madness, Chinese government officials showed up one year with a portable generator and a film showing “actors dressed as Mosuo…who were in the last stages of syphilis, who had gone mad and lost most of their faces.” The audience response was not what the Chinese officials expected: their makeshift cinema was burned to the ground. But the officials didn’t give up. They ambushed men on their way to their lovers’ houses and cut off essential deliveries of seed grain and children’s clothing... Finally literally starved into submission, many Mosuo agreed to participate in government-sponsored marriage ceremonies, where each was given “a cup of tea, a cigarette, pieces of candy and a paper certificate.”

But the arm twisting had little effect. Travel writer Cynthia Barnes visited Lugu Lake in 2006 and found the Mosuo system still intact, though under pressure from Chinese tourists who, like Marco Polo 750 years earlier, mistake the sexual autonomy of Mosuo women for licentiousness. “Although their lack of coyness draws the world’s attention to the Mosuo, “Barnes writes, “sex is not the center of their universe. She continues: I think of my parents bitter divorce, of childhood friends uprooted and destroyed because Mommy or Daddy decided to sleep with someone else. Lugu Lake, I think, is not so much a kingdom of women as a kingdom of family—albeit one blessedly free of politicians and preachers extolling “family values”. There’s no such thing as a “broken home”, no sociologists wringing their hands over “single mothers” no economic devastation or shame and stigma when parents part. Sassy and confident, a Mosuo girl will grow up cherished in a circle of male and female relatives…When she joins the dances and invites a boy into her flower room, it will be for love, or lust, or whatever people call it when they are operating on hormones and heavy breathing. She will not need that boy—or any other—to have a home, to make a “family”. She already knows she will always have both.

The Mosuo approach to love and sex may well finally be destroyed by the hordes of Han Chinese tourists who threaten to turn Lugu Lake into a theme-park version of Mosuo culture. But the Mosuo’s persistence in the face of decades — if not centuries— of extreme pressure to conform to what many scientists still insist is human nature stands as a proud, undeniable counter example to the standard narrative.

Excerpts from the book: Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha