ABSTRACT
The standard story goes that in the Maoist era, sex was only for procreation and was generally severely repressed. The overall result of this anti-sexual policy was to tie sex to marriage and to disconnect it from pleasure. The People’s Republic of China’s preached a new equality for women and the importance of sexual hygiene, promoting a policy that appropriate sex was to be adult, monogamous and practiced in heterosexual marriages. During the Cultural Revolution, there were claims of an unrelenting repression of sex, but actually, many young people were either sent to the countryside without parental supervision, or were roaming the country in mixed gender gangs, cohabiting and having sex. The policy of the Chinese Communist Party towards marriages, which had to be approved by the work units beginning in the 1950s, had the effect of equalizing sexual rights between women and men, and for officially sanctioning sex only for propagation.
