Written by Hsiu-Yun Wang.
Image credit: #metoo by Prachatai / Flickr, license: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
In May 1959, Suching Lin, a 19-year-old tea-picking woman, was found dead on the Tamsui river bank. She was a shy young girl, a virgin as pure as flawless white jade, according to a newspaper article. Lin’s father accused a man by the name of Fu Zhong, the foreman at the tea field, who had allegedly “acted obscenely against” (tiaoxi weixie) her, resulting in her crying day and night and eventually taking her own life. Her last words were, “I have no face to see people” (Zhengxin Xinwen Bao, 1959/6/3). In the period between the 1950s and 1970s, this type of report was not uncommon. An even more routine occurrence was the “strange hands” (guaishou, meaning hands that touched inappropriately) on the bus, allegedly the most feared by young women students then (Lienhe Bao, 1962/5/29).
In late May 2023, a series of #MeToo posts—women’s and a few men’s self-accounts of sexual harassment and rapes—exploded on social media in Taiwan. Six decades apart, the terms used went from tiaoxi, guaisho, and chitofu to sexual harassment (xingsaorao), and individual victims went from suffering alone and relying on their fathers to seek justice to be able to find and commiserate with other women, take legal action, or use the informal yet open and uncertain channels of social media. Both the society and women’s experiences have gone through fundamental changes. However, there are lingering continuities.
Before the 1980s, tiaoxi (molesting), chidoufu (“eating tofu,” verbally or physically inappropriate behaviours with a sexual overtone), weixie (obscene act), and qiangbao (rape) were terms used for different degrees of sexual violence against women; they were the key words of sexual regulation before the term sexual harassment was introduced in the early 1980s. In 1976, Meihui Yang translated and introduced “little rapes” (Chapter 5 of Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson’s 1974 book, Against Rape) as “tiaoxi” in the China Times because she believed that “Chinese has the richest records of human activities… There is no need to recast words like ‘xiao chiangjian’ (a direct translation of “little rapes”)…. It [little rapes] is only different in degree from the ‘major rape’ that severely violates women’s bodies.” In other words, the term “little rape” was incorporated into the existing Taiwanese framework of tiaoxi, meaning minor inappropriate behaviours with a sexual overtone. Nevertheless, the translated essay did contain a call to action in the language of rights instead of in the language of property damage—a woman “should fight for her own rights and fight for her dignity, fight for her body, and fight for her time” (China Times, 1976/3/27). This paved the way for the concepts of sexual harassment and women’s rights to their own bodies in Taiwan.
In 1980, the term xingsaorao (sexual harassment) made its first appearance by way of a translated news report about the sexual harassment case at the U.S. Fort Meade military base. In 1982, Awakening magazine, the official channel for the pioneering women’s movement group, Awakening, began to tackle the issue of “sexual harassment,” which has continued throughout the decades. Since then, sexual harassment has appeared in various newspapers and magazines, enabling widespread discussion.
However, “sexual harassment” did not immediately replace “tiaoxi”; conceptually, the two coexisted. In 1983, Zhengan Huang, a legislator, divided sexual harassment into two categories—the “harmless” and the “harmful.” The former included “blatantly telling dirty jokes to women, verbal chitoufu, or using the power of one’s position to force others to accompany you to dinner, coffee, or dance.” The latter refers to the use of power to “achieve sexual purposes,” and such behaviour is technically classified as rape under the criminal law. In other words, while he saw rape as a crime, he saw chitoufu (tiaoxi) as “harmless sexual harassment.” Such a view is still common today; during the #MeToo movement, a common criticism was, “Why are you making such a big deal out of it? You have not lost a piece of flesh,” which also implied that only severe cases were justified to be brought up.
In the past, some victims of tiaoxi committed suicide to preserve their chastity, and #MeToo victims also felt polluted by unwanted touch and physical violation. The emphasis on women’s chastity in the broad Chinese culture has a long history. As Mark Elvin has pointed out, “It was essential for them [women] to avoid at all costs, including life itself, the contamination of sexual or quasi-sexual contact [with] any man other than a husband.” In late Qing China, more than 40 per cent of all rape victims committed suicide. In the era of #MeToo, in part due to a sense of being polluted and shamed, it often took victims a long time to make their experience known. Many also suffered varying degrees of psychological trauma.
The #MeToo movement, which rapidly brought numerous cases to light between May and July of 2023, has introduced a new form of justice-seeking. In the era of “tiaoxi,” a term now widely used to describe sexual harassment, it was traditionally common for fathers, brothers, and husbands to seek justice on behalf of the victim, focusing on the damage to her sexual purity. Women were often spoken for by others and left alone in their experiences. In contrast, a sense of shared experiences among many individual women of #MeToo was very strong; their rights and bodies had been violated, and they stood up for themselves. Many members of social media, mostly women, wanted to support the victims, and many, in turn, were encouraged to share their own experiences. However, the fact that many victims chose to use social media also points to the limitations of legal channels.
This short history of changing concepts about sexual harassment is also a history of changing regulation of sexuality in Taiwan—where tradition persists amid changes, particularly the introduction of the ideas of sexual harassment and women’s rights from the U.S. However, sexual violence against women has never disappeared. In the era of sexual harassment, when the term “sexual harassment” has replaced ambiguous concepts and brought a focus on women’s rights to their own bodies, many victims still feel tainted. Despite the conceptual transformation brought about by the language of rights, many victims often perceive themselves as dirty, which is similar to the ways women in the past felt, of being morally compromised, polluted and damaged.
Hsiu-Yun Wang is a Professor in the Department of Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at the School of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University.
For further reading on related topics, we invite you to explore our previous special issue, The #Metoo Movement One Year On.
Taiwan Insight 