Harem Culture & Colonialism’s Dirty Little Secrets

It’s hard to agree on something in current Thailand. But there is one topic without controversy. Sex. With the words “something we can all agree on, sex,” he was recently introduced at the FCCT: Richard Bernstein, a former New York Times book critic and TIME correspondent in Hong Kong and Beijing. And author of The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters. The book about to be introduced.

It was one of those rare evenings that for once I didn’t feel like the oldest guy in the audience. The mostly elderly expat flock though was there to intellectualize something others obviously just do and don’t bother to think too much about. Historic and academic elaborations were about to be made how different the Oriental and Occidental cultures of love are. “Colonialism’s dirty little secrets,” as Bernstein puts it.

Bernstein’s didn’t loose his virginity in an Asian brothel, as the author confessed straightforwardly in the opening minutes of his discourse. Even though, he said, that wouldn’t have been something to be ashamed of. Still, some critics had denounced his book as a “sweaty, pseudo-academic justification for the author’s Asian-based” whatever. Bernstein couldn’t care less. But why would one research such a subject?

A “guilty conscience of an own past,” as another critic had accused him of? Or a “bleak confession”? Whatever. The book tells the “dirty little secrets of colonialism and post-colonialism,” Bernstein says. “The world since early renaissance has been divided into two different sexual cultures: into the Western with sin and monogamy, where the sanctuary of sexual relation only serves procreation, and is not for the fun of it. And into the Eastern.”

In the West, says Bernstein, there is always this feeling of “It’s not quite right.”

The opposite is the culture of the harem. Still quite conservative. Not an anything-goes attitude. But free of the expectation that it has to be accompanied by love and that men have to be monogamous. As a place available for men of wealth and power.

A culture, says Bernstein, that is actually deeply disrespectful of women. A harem is all about the controlling of the female sexuality. Sex on command.

So as colonialism goes along, Western men discover the sexual culture of India, China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East – all harem cultures according to Bernstein: “They have very different sexual cultures, but they all have the institution of the harem.”

“And while the Western world consumes itself with combat, the world of harem is the crystallization of perfect pleasure.”

While Christendom in the West preaches “monogamous infidelity,” the “pricing of the virgin doesn’t exist in Asian culture.”

It’s a Christ & Maria versus Lakshmi & Vishnu. A culture of renunciation versus a culture of voluptuousness. The Orient’s culture, says Bernstein, knows no contradiction between the sexual and the divine. Sex is like anything else, something that you can refine and do better. Just practice.

“Imagine,” says Bernstein, “how distant that is from any Christian theology.”

Marco Polo had a first description of the harem, how women were chosen and trained, describing it as a kind of “democratized brothel” where the “whore was made part of the family.”

The early explorers had experiences in the East that would have been harshly criminalized in the West.

Bernstein moves on to the nearer past and present, talks about Americans in postwar Asia, especially in Japan. Before, the Dutch were for a long time the only foreigners allowed to live in Japan, on an island. Once a year they were allowed to travel to Tokyo to express respect to the Shogun.

The early traders were also allowed to visit the Maruyama pleasure quarter – with signs “Only Dutch & Prostitutes Allowed.”

Bernstein moves on to Vietnam and then there is Thailand with the “vulgar, commercialized sex, but still a culture of the harem, taken advantage of by men who wouldn’t have the chance back home.”

During Q&A Bernstein was asked if, in the case of Thailand, he really analyzed the transition of harem culture correctly: “Aren’t the women having their harems here? Isn’t it the women having the choice?”

Bernstein seemed slightly confused, hesitated, but rejected the idea profoundly.

The harem culture is about sex and power, he says.

Hmm … well … still thinking.