I don’t know when Chinese style leftover women became a trend, more and more older young women choose to be single, even if they also face added imposed pressure to live their own wonderful life. What’s wrong with being single? The single also has a single wonderful!
A website has come up with a “Leftover Cities List” with a sample of ten cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Dalian, Xiamen, Nanjing and Qingdao. The survey shows that there are actually more leftover men than leftover women. But while leftover men are not a big problem, leftover women are – and that’s the current reality in China.
Marriage used to be the only decent way out for women, which is why Eileen Chang said they were “female marriage workers. After the feminist movement and sexual liberation in the 1960s, gender equality became a reality in the West, women were given the right to vote, equal pay for equal work was at least legally guaranteed, and it became possible for women to choose to live as single people from Helen? Brown’s “Sex and the Single Girl” and later “Sex and the City” taught women how to enjoy the single life.
In China, Mao Zedong’s bold statement in 1968 that “women can hold up half the sky” kept pace with the West in promoting the idea of gender equality. But it wasn’t until women became financially independent – and by this time in the new century, with this group of women concentrated in large and medium-sized cities – that singleness became a trend. But Chinese single women also find themselves facing a contradiction between their perceptions and reality: they have accepted the concept of independence so deeply, but the reality is that a man who is 30 and unmarried and has a successful career is a diamond king, while a woman who is 30 and unmarried and has a successful career is a loser. But they are too poisoned by movies and TV shows like “BJ’s Diary” and “Sex and the City” to compromise with reality.
How single women live
Describing the lives of 30 year old single women in Sex and the City. Sex and the City”, which depicts the lives of 30 older single women. In the play Kellys wear 12-inch-tall Moro? ManoloBlahnik, appearing at fashion parties and famous galleries as if nothing could defeat them except breast cancer. They are role models for older, single women.
Only, even a dashing Kylie is waiting for Mr. Big. Beauvoir and Sartre, who enjoyed the world’s only male-female relationship, thought they shared absolute freedom with each other, but even the feminist Beauvoir sometimes couldn’t help but act like a sobbing, whining woman: in her novels “The Lady Bing” and “The Windy Celebrity,” she tries to put a third party to death. “Man is by nature what he chooses to be, and choice presupposes freedom; man is judged to be free and must bear the consequences of his choice alone.” This is what Sartre said. For single women who choose to be independent and autonomous, these words are especially meaningful.
What Western men think: Old maids are attractive too
On a cultural-psychological level. On a cultural-psychological level, the East and West treat “spinster” very differently. In China, the highest-ranking (and most vicious) term for a spinster is “Master Exterminator” from Jin Yong’s novel “Yitian Tu Long Ji”. Exterminator sees herself as the embodiment of justice, killing Ji Xiaofu and forcing Zhou Zhiruo. In the martial arts novels, these martial arts virgins are hysterical and ruthless after being wounded by love, most of them are narrow-minded and jealous, but also moralistic and ugly, women who are ugly to the core.
Western literature, on the other hand, has a large supporting cast of spinsters who wander around the circle of girls and married women, mostly a bit fussed over and often fainting. But people see them as harmless and in need of protection. The only drawback is the love of gossip, which also confirms the old adage: only if you are poor in life, you will be so interested in the lives of others. In the eyes of Western men, the clear eyes of a spinster have both the insight and cunning of an old woman and the innocence of a girl. It makes people think that spinsters also have just the right amount of charm. More importantly, the social circles in which spinsters live acquiesce to such well-intentioned lies. They give these women a wide berth without pushing them into extinction.
Eastern men: not getting married is “a woman thrown away by men.”
Sex in the City has many copycat versions in China. The reason for calling it “cottage industry” is that in addition to the fact that older single women in China don’t live as glamorously as Kellys, more importantly, the demands are very different. In the West, being single is a personal choice, but in China, Taiwan, and Japan, being old and unmarried is called “leftover women,” or “women who have been thrown away by men.
During the “May Fourth” period, the heroine of Lu Xun’s novel “The Hurt Locker”, Zijun, already shouted this declaration: “I am my own, and none of them has the right to interfere with me! None of them has the right to interfere with me!” But for Zijun’s parents, what frightened them even more was the end of Zijun: she died in depression after separating from Juan Sheng. In the Japanese drama “AroundForty,” the 39-year-old heroine is wise and powerful, stronger than a man at heart, but this older woman, who doesn’t seem to need a man’s care at all, still wants to get married and have children.
In recent years, the word “marriage” has been mentioned frequently in Japan. “Japanese sociologists believe that the increase in the number of single people will cause problems for the development of society, and that the aging population and the problem of fewer children in Japanese society are the consequences of people’s refusal to fall in love and get married. The famous Japanese sociologist Masahiro Yamada, who once named people who stay at their parents’ house instead of getting married as “parasitesingle,” co-authored a book with Momoko Shirakawa in 2007, “The Age of Marriage and Living,” in which he wrote, “Since everyone tries to sell themselves for work Shouldn’t marriage, which determines the happiness of a person’s life, be approached with the same enthusiasm?” This is typical of the Eastern attitude toward leftover women.
The phrase “gender equality” is one we’ve mentioned many times, but we have to admit that in Eastern societies, women are still defined by the same traditional roles as A group of people who are dependent on men. Once you don’t have a man by your side, the society decides that you are a failure. Because you don’t have a man to cling to, even if you’re happy on your own, you can’t avoid living with a mixture of contempt, disdain, contempt and gratitude from those around you.
Perhaps the increasing trend in recent years of all kinds of guidance for women on how to change themselves to get a man’s favor can tell us that women are tired of living without a man. This refers to having to keep stressing to others that I’m happy and I’m enjoying my life, and on the other hand, moreover, having to run around without giving in to the pressure to find a man.
Can leftover women live well without a man? Most of us are. Is that a contradiction? You can choose your own path.