The Strange Tale Pu Songling

Shori also challenges society’s fears about sexuality by taking sexual liberties with several partners, old and young, male and female. The

See bases the story of the book behind the three women who wrote The Three Wives’ Commentary. The book is split into three different parts, one part for each wife. The first wife, Peony, is the first to be brought to the light. She grew up in a wealthy family and was born after the fall of the Ming Dynasty. Peony is soon to turn 16 and is already betrothed to a suitor that her father has chosen for her, as followed by tradition. She is infatuated by the opera: The Peony Pavilion, which she is granted to observe, along with the rest of her family, behind a curtain, since at the time, unmarried women were not supposed to be seen. All she was allowed to do was read about the opera, but when she is given the opportunity to see it for herself, she becomes extremely enthusiastic. She becomes so mesmerized and entranced by the opera that she had to take a step outside to calm herself down. While she takes a walk outside, she meets with a male stranger also decided to step out during the opera. Peony knew she wasn’t supposed to be speaking with any male that wasn’t within her family, but she fell for him the moment she saw him. The opera was so long that it took three nights to perform, so they agreed to meet each other on each night. They both knew they were to be wed to another since they were both betrothed at the time, but little did they know they were actually betrothed to each other.

Main Idea: Continuing on top of the last chapter and adding a twist, Foster tells us that actually when a work of literature does involve an explicit sex scene, the event almost certainly contains layers of meaning that go beyond the act of sex itself. The action of writing explicit sex

Before telling the mail story, the narrator first tells a prologue story to the audience in “Fifteen Strings of Cash”. The prologue story is about a man named Wei Pengju who leaved his wife and went to the capital to take the examination. After he passed the examinations, he wrote a letter to his wife, “there being no one to look after me here, I’ve got myself a second little wife. I await your arrival in the capital to share the wealth honor with me”. Even though Scholar Wei was joking with his wife, his wife took this seriously and replied him by saying that she also got herself a second little husband and will go to the capital together with her second little husband.

The Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, collected and put into text by Chinese scholar Pu Songling, is a collection of tales of mostly alchemic, supernatural, and paranormal nature. One of the common threads that runs through the collection is that of the sexual encounters and sexual relations between people, people and creatures, and people and supernatural beings. These stories deal with the subject of sexual indulgence, and clearly connote sex as a negative and dangerous aspect of human desires. Stir-Fry, the last story in Strange Tales, however, forcefully deviates from that trend of the perception of sexual desire. In Stir-Fry, Pu glides over the topic of the dildo and treats it as if it were just any normal other object that would be ridiculous to cook and serve guests at dinner. A scholar’s sexual desires are no less strange than the tales of sex in stories such as “The Fornicating Dog,” “The Painted Skin,” “Snake Island,” and especially “Lotus Fragrance.” The sexual nature of the toy Pu ignores completely, and he enforces the idea that sexual desires or encounters are not as strange or taboo as Pu himself makes them out to be in his earlier stories in the Strange Tales collection.

In John Patrick Shanley’s play, “Doubt: A Parable”, and Paula Vogel’s play, “How I Learned to Drive”, both have strong themes of sexuality in the forms of sexual predation and pedophilia. Although these two stories are considerably different, the message is the same. “Doubt” is a play that concerns a mystery over whether or not a boy (Donald) has been raped by a priest, and “How I learned to Drive” is a play about a woman (Li’l Bit) who reminisces about the sexual molestation and the emotional manipulation she had to endure at the hands of her uncle. Although these plays both have main theme of sexuality, they each have vastly different settings, desires, and outcomes. In this essay, I will compare and contrast the theme of sexuality in both of these plays.

Since these wives were basically prostitutes under the guise of marriage, many people ignored the “taboo” and “deviant” nature of this version sex industry because it was difficult to understand. Vu Trong Phung not only clarified the structure of these marriages but also brought to light the dangers to the women. While highlighting the dangers, he also criticizes his own culture for essentially providing no other options for these women and then shunning them when they had enough (14). He even further objected to the condemnation of prostitutes by equivocating marrying for anything other than love was like receiving a life-long prostitute (14). By having these eccentric stories and radical beliefs, Vu Trong Phung was able to call attention to a subject no one wanted to talk about – let alone read

Known as the Two Sex theory, devised by historian Thomas Laqueur, female sexuality would be characterized purely by a woman’s reproductive potential, where the concept of an innate maternal instinct would become the new prioritized ideal. The female orgasm was renounced by a new essence of masculine superiority. This notion can be asserted with the Phallocentric inclination of the late 18th century, examined by historian Tim Hitchcock, as period characterized by penetration and precedence of the phallus. This “both encouraged and made possible the denigration of female sexuality and perceived passivity.” Consequently this caused the de-emphasis of female sexual pleasure and desire. However, female sexual identity would reemerge with potency, attributed to social flux, the emerging field of sexology and disposition of the interwar years.

The poem "A Song of Changgan" is very poignant, as it starts with a bashful girl who does not even smile around her husband and ends with her almost heartbroken, as her husband is far away. The poem shows the different stages of the relationship of the speaker and her husband, and it is an excellent example of long-distance relationships before modern communication systems.

By including marginalized and alienated characters of Manila’s subcultures (pimps, whores, sex workers, transvestites, sexual deviants), the novel comes very close to being pornographic in parts. The language and sexual situations are graphic, perverted, and offensive, so educators are cautioned to carefully consider the appropriateness of this novel for teaching purposes.

Tropp, Sandra Fehl., and Ann Pierson. D'Angelo. "Pornography (1983)." Essays in Context. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 543-47. Print.

In doing this Stoker illustrates the consequences of the abandonment of traditional belief, the dangers of female sexuality, homosexuality and fears of the `New Woman'.

Human sexuality is a common phrase for all, and anything, pertaining to the feelings and behaviors of sex for the human race. Sexuality has been a topic that has been discussed and studied for as far back as 1000 years B.C. and is still being studied today. As the discussion of sexuality has progressed through history, theories have been created based on research and experiments that scholars have implemented, based on their own perceptions of human behavior. Out of the many theories that pose to explain sexual behavior, Sexuality Now explained ten that are seemed to be the most overlapped, and built off of theories. Of these theories, two that were discussed in the text were the behavioral and sociological theory. These two theories cover some of the basic ideas of what could possibly influence a person’s sexuality.

Sexual harassment is one of the central themes in the novel The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan. Before Winnie gets married, she reads a book about sex, which provides her with information on what a husband likes and how often a woman needs to perform her duties. When she sexually active for the first time, Wen Fu is gentle and stops whenever she becomes afraid and screams too much, nevertheless, he constantly soothes her and persuades her to continue. Winnie first takes it lightly when he mentions that he is not satisfied with her and wants her to transition into a proper behaving wife. Then, he becomes cruel, making her say dirty words about woman’s body parts, which reminds her of a saltwater whore’s, the kind who would give her body to foreign sailors. When she refuses, he drags her towards the door like a bag of rice, opens the door and then pushes her outside into the corridor of the monastery, where anyone passing by, can see her naked. He beats her up in order to make her become afraid of taking other risks if she resists, resulting in her to submit her body to him instead. Relating to this, he makes her engage in sexualized games, where he makes her stand in the room naked and when he names a body part, she has to put her finger and touch herself on there. Winnie no longer feels that her body is a private space, rather a public space belonging to her husband.

“In men, in general, sexual desire is inherent and spontaneous” whereas “in the other sex, the desire is dormant, if not non-existent, till excited” (457). Greg’s terminology is extremely power-laden. “Spontaneous” has the connotation of energy and activity, whereas “dormant” and “victim” imply inactivity. An important concept is the assumption that men, the “coarser sex,” act on women, the “weaker sex” (457).