Mosuo

This article is a preview from the Winter 2017 edition of New Humanist.

How many of us haven’t in some idle moment imagined what the world might be like if it had always been run by women? Not that sexual equality isn’t the ideal, but it’s an interesting exercise to mentally erase millennia of patriarchy, start again, and picture life with female interests at its heart. Perhaps we wouldn’t now find ourselves on the brink of nuclear disaster. Maybe religiously motivated terrorism would be unheard of. Or possibly life would be just as it is now, except with the gender roles reversed. Who knows?

Imagination is all we have. There is the legend of the Amazons, and Hinduism’s mythical mother goddesses. But throughout the world, as far as anthropologists are aware, a true matriarchy doesn’t exist. If there has ever been one, there isn’t one now. Even in cultures in which women have earned legal equality and positions of power, they are still battling legacies of exclusion, sexual repression and gender stereotypes. Every glass ceiling hasn’t been smashed.

So, our visions of a woman’s world remain in our dreams, resting on the ever-changing parameters of what we perceive female nature and desires to be. If our dreams need a little fuel, there are a handful of real-life societies in which women rule in one way or another. In tribal communities in Meghalaya, India, women rather than men own property and land, and among the Akan people in Ghana and the Ivory Coast there are similar matrilineal patterns, with wealth passed down the female line.

But none come quite as close to being matriarchal as one remote, culturally isolated community in south-western ­China, known as the Mosuo. In this small tribe on the borders of Yunnan and Sichuan, near Tibet, children live in their mothers’ homes, and women practise what has been described by observers as “walking marriage”, choosing any number of sexual partners without commitment. The tribe worships a mountain goddess, named Gemu.

In her new book, The Kingdom of Women, Choo Waihong describes life among the Mosuo, swapped from that of a successful corporate lawyer in Singapore. ­Divorced and disillusioned, Choo decided to explore a community she had heard about only through whispers. Eventually, she built a house here, became godmother to a number of Mosuo children, and immersed herself fully in the culture, clothing and all. Her memoirs make for a tantalising insight into how it really feels to live in a historically female-centred community.

The Mosuo are not undiscovered by any means – they have been studied by academics and today experience heavy traffic from curious tourists – but her account is ­unusual in being that of an outsider who has become an insider. She is not an anthropologist or historian. She is simply a woman transplanted from one world into another.

In some ways, Mosuo culture is not so different from the one Choo left behind. Once they reach puberty, girls dress in skirts, in red and pink, while boys adopt trousers. The women tend to cook, and men are chosen to do the heavy manual work, although there appears to be little division of labour beyond these jobs. Gender does matter.

Everything else bucks the norm. At birth, a child belongs exclusively to her mother’s home. She is raised there, fed there. Her name, her identity, everything, comes from this family. Because of the practice of “walking marriage”, siblings often have different fathers, but this means little since the fathers themselves live away with their own mothers. This doesn’t mean that men aren’t raising children – they’re just not always raising their own. Their primary role is in supporting those in their mother’s home, including their sisters’ offspring.

Mosuo women enjoy a sexual freedom unheard of in China and most other parts of the world. When she comes of age, a young woman is given her own private “flower chamber”, in which she can welcome her male consorts – as many or as few as she chooses over her lifetime. This is her choice. It’s a world, in short, in which women have true agency.

This has a profound effect on behaviour and attitudes. Choo is quick to notice just how starkly the traditional stereotype of the meek, coy Chinese woman is overturned. “The Mosuo woman positively rocks with confidence. It is not an aggressive confidence but a self assurance that comes from deep within. I see it in her tall and straight-backed gait ... She even sits tall,” she writes, with a mixture of envy and awe. On a night out (and Mosuo women like to party, she adds), the girls are the ones who stride up confidently to the men, to introduce themselves and buy a round of drinks.

For the author, this is nothing short of a revelation. It’s easy to see why. From a Western viewpoint, it sounds radical. But coming from a strictly patriarchal Chinese society, the Mosuo exist in something of a parallel universe.

Nearly every cultural norm is reversed. Unlike in the rest of China, where the sex ratio is grossly skewed in favour of boys because of selective abortion and foeticide, the arrival of a Mosuo daughter is a cause for celebration. It means the matrilineal bloodline will continue. And Choo is astonished to find that in this community her voice is ­automatically respected because she is a woman – not despite it. “At no time have I felt the need to fight against a tide of ignorance or open animosity towards woman-friendly issues.” Having stepped through the looking glass, her outlook on the world shifts. She is finally awake. It took “a matriarchal tribe to build up the feminist consciousness in my native heart,” she writes.

More than anything, her experience is a lesson in what male privilege really means. What men in her own culture take for granted, for the first time, she can, too, because the tables are turned. Choo finds herself treated in a way she has never been before, for the simple fact that she now belongs to the dominant sex.

Used to hard work as farmers, the women are all lean and toned, she continues. “My adoptive Mosuo sister thinks nothing of hauling a 30-kilo bag of rice.” To be fair, most women in the world who endure subsistence living are lean and strong from backbreaking manual labour. But then, Choo has enjoyed a comfortable, relatively luxurious life in Singapore, so the ­Mosuo represent a change for her in more ways than one.

What is more surprising about the book is that she – a top female lawyer – finds life here in a small tribe so much more liberating than the modern one she left behind. “Almost every Mosuo woman exudes a natural aplomb that many women elsewhere in the world can only pretend to possess,” she explains. It’s a telling sentence, revealing how even the most powerful and successful women in the world are women in a man’s world. They are, in this sense, always interlopers. Power has come to them against the odds. For Mosuo women, power comes as natural. It is theirs by birthright.

This personal aspect makes her account particularly compelling. To watch a strong woman find true emancipation in finally being immersed in a society that doesn’t hold her back at all – that has never even known how to – is a reminder of just what limited lives we other women lead. We, not of the Mosuo, who, no matter what we achieve, will always be the “weaker sex”. All our power and strength is hard-won. Our history is one of struggle, of inequality.

Imagine instead belonging to a culture that has never known women as anything other than strong. A culture in which female sexual repression is unknown. A culture in which women have always had the same rights and freedoms as men. Through Choo’s eyes, we get a sense of just how intoxicating this must be.

Being a matrilineal society doesn’t mean that the men here are repressed, she adds. According to her, people are treated more or less equally, irrespective of age or sex. “The women would sometimes resort to using the occasional diminutive barb demeaning men or male behaviour, and there are many of these in the Mosuo language, but this is never elevated to an institutionalised, fossilised system of unequal treatment of men,” she writes.

But at the same time, it is a woman’s ability to give birth and be a mother that is prized above all else. The supreme deity is a mother goddess. When Choo enquires about ­homosexuality, the question is laughed away. There is none, apparently. The childless woman is pitied. This is not some enlightened utopia that has learned to float free of gender. Traditional roles still exist, it’s just that the balance of power is switched.

This is perhaps where the ideal of the Mosuo parts ways from modern feminism. The tribe doesn’t so much represent the opposite of patriarchy as an alternative with its own limitations. Women ­remain bound by the yoke of being baby vessels. The spectrum of sexual identity means nothing here. It is a simple ­existence, defined by simple rules.

Out in the rest of the world, life is more complicated. The direction of travel of today’s gender battles is very different. The fight for women’s equality is not just for parity with men, but also freedom from traditional gender expectations. This includes the freedom to sit outside a binary definition of sex, to shift the boundaries of femininity, to be childless without pity, to define oneself in any way whatsoever. As liberating as life might be for a Mosuo woman, it also has its constraints.

What the tribe does prove, though, is that common gender stereotypes are not rooted in biology. Mosuo women love to drink, gamble, joke and have sex. The notion that women are naturally monogamous is knocked firmly on its head. Given the choice – a choice that Mosuo women truly have, without judgement or fear – they prefer not to be tied down to one man. A large chunk of 20th-century research on human biology is predicated on the assumption that females are more passive and chaste, an idea ­endorsed by Charles Darwin himself. If only he had met a Mosuo woman.

The existence of human cultures with different patterns of living is crucial to dismantling old-fashioned ideas about what human nature means. It has been too easy for thinkers in the past to look around and assume that what they see is somehow the product of biology – that males are naturally dominant, for instance, or that the nuclear family is somehow the default human set-up. The Mosuo prove that humans actually exhibit far more variety than we think. We are not like our chimpanzee cousins, who naturally form male hierarchies. Male upper-body strength has not handed all men the gift of power.

The intriguing unanswered question in The Kingdom of Women is: how? How did this one community come to have females at its head? How did women secure this power for themselves, and why aren’t there more cultures like this one? The founding story of the Mosuo is one of myth and legend, making it impossible to know. Maybe societies like these were once more common, possibly even the norm.

The Mosuo no doubt hold many more secrets, but the tragedy is that their days are already numbered. As in all isolated human communities, prurient observers are encroaching in ever-greater numbers, pulling the Mosuo with them as they leave. New roads are being built to bring people here and take them away. Large numbers of Mosuo today work in tourism, and there have been ­repeated efforts to draw them into the same ­patriarchal traditions as the rest of China. Outsiders have tried to abuse “walking marriage” by pushing the women into prostitution. Gambling and drugs are becoming a problem as tourist money floods in.

Theirs will not be the first egalitarian society to go ­extinct. The Nanadukan Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines, who according to some reports by anthropologists in the 1980s, lived uniquely equal lives in which women hunted, have been all but completely absorbed into the farming communities around them.

For the Mosuo, a similar fate probably awaits. They are an anomaly in a country in which, in Choo’s own words, “women are debased”. In China, a daughter sits right at the bottom of her family. A single mother and her children are objects of ridicule. Already, young Mosuo are turning their backs on their traditions, seeing monogamous marriage as the morally and socially acceptable choice if they want to be part of modern Chinese society.

The extraordinary resilience of this small tribe and its matrilineal model is slowly fading against the lure of the shiny, exciting outside world. It is heartbreaking. When the Mosuo way of life is finally wiped out, the world will have lost more than another isolated tribe. It will have lost a dream.

“The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains” is published by I.B. Tauris