Are Tibetan people sexually open or conservative?

Two days ago, I saw on Weibo that a Tibetan man who engages in performance art posted several large-scale artistic photos of himself with missing spots. Reading the comments, most Tibetans are relatively tolerant of him. At the same time, many people think that his style is vulgar and insulting to Tibetan culture. The Tibetans in their minds should not be so unrestrained. When they see a Tibetan who does not fit their imagination, they become confused.

The world has various reveries about Tibetans and sex, from singing love songs across the ravine, to going for a night run (in a tent) on a windy and dark night, from polyandry to polygamy, and then From the exciting encounters of young literary girls in Tibet to the foreign women who traveled across the ocean to borrow seeds, there are many legends that make people blush. So, how open are Tibetans, or how reserved are they? Take me for example, my childhood was like a blank slate. Under the care of a single mother, I couldn't even think about being "unhealthy". Moreover, Tibetan areas are divided into farming and pastoral areas, and their lifestyles and customs are different, and their sexual expressions are also somewhat different. To simply describe it as open or conservative would be too simplistic and crude.

So it is better to tell stories than to tell truths, so I will tell you some small things that happened in our small mountain village in Kangzang agricultural area.

There is such a number one figure in Tibetan folk stories. This person is healthy and upbeat in Tibetan primary school textbooks, and often fights with powerful people, just like the Tibetan Afanti. But in folklore, whenever a girl hears his name, she will lower her head shyly and blush. His popularity should be no less than that of King Gesar, but his image is not sacred. He does not have many deeds against powerful people. Most of the time, he can be called a thief and wretched. He has no magical powers, and many of his methods are unfair. He uses his thief's wisdom to punish evil and promote good, but at the same time he takes advantage of women. He even liked to prank monks. For a nation with deep-rooted religious beliefs, such a character should have been exterminated, but his story quietly spread among the people. His name is Agudunba.

Speaking of which, I have to share a folktale about Agudunba to portray its image in depth. As for where I heard it from, I have forgotten it. In addition to simply telling the folk tales passed down by our mouths, there is no intention to offend any religion, and we apologize for any offence.

During a sowing season, Agudunba passed by a large field and saw farmers working hard to sow. He asked the first sower: "What are you sowing?"

The man replied: "Sowing highland barley."

Agudunba blessed him with a good harvest. Keep going.

He asked again when he met the second person.

The second man replied: "I am planting peas."

Agudunba wished him a good harvest and continued to move forward.

The third person sowing seeds was a big man. Agu asked him: "What are you sowing?" Seeing that Agu Dunba was not doing his job all day long, the big man answered unhappily; "Sowing JB! (Actual) It’s a little more vulgar than this)”

Agudunba still wished him a good harvest.

At the harvest season, those who planted highland barley harvested a lot of highland barley. The pea grower got a lot of peas as he wished. As expected, the fields of the man who was rude to Agu Dunba were covered with penises of various shapes. At a glance, they looked vast and terrifying.

The farmer was stunned by the scene in his field. He was very angry and went to Agudunba to argue. I thought to myself, if it wasn't for his curse, how could something like this grow in the crop fields!

Agu gave him an idea. He asked the man to put all the harvest into cowhide bags, transport it to the nunnery, sell it at the gate, and taught him the tips for using it. A penis is exchanged for a barrel of highland barley. Soon, nuns came to buy in an endless stream, and the man harvested more grain than he could grow highland barley. The hostess of the nunnery also bought the largest one, put it into a small satin bag, and placed it under the pillow.

One day, a layman came to the nunnery and asked the abbot to chant sutras at his home. The host went to his house to stay overnight and chant sutras. Unexpectedly, she discovered that she had forgotten the penis and asked the family's daughter to go to the nunnery to get it for her.

The abbot repeatedly warned: "This is an important magical instrument. It is extremely precious. It must not be tainted with the tone of ordinary people. Do not open the bag..."

The girl climbed over two mountains and came to the nunnery. The abbot took the "magic weapon". But she was very curious, so she secretly opened the bag while resting on the mountainside. Seeing something inside that I had never seen before, it felt very strange, and I couldn't help but exclaimed. Unexpectedly, the little woman's exclamation coincided with the formula taught by Agu, and the guy in the bag came alive! Chasing girls. The girl was so frightened that she ran away. After running, I couldn't run anymore, so I stopped on the side of the road, panting, and let out a long sigh. What a coincidence, this long sigh is the second half of the formula Agu taught the farmer. The "magic weapon" instantly slipped back into the bag and returned to its original state.

The girl was angry and scared, so she put the "magic weapon" on the stone slab, smashed it to pieces, and put it back in her bag.

When the bag was handed over to the nun and abbot, she was very happy. That night, the abbot put the bag under his pillow and fell asleep. In the middle of the night, he softly recited the incantation, but there was no movement. He recited it again, but there was still no response. When I opened the bag and saw that it had become minced meat, I was very unhappy.

On the second day, a monk came to practice the ritual. The nun and abbot placed the minced meat on a plate in front of the monk's seat, hoping that the monk would cast a spell on it during the chanting to restore the "magical instrument". original shape. But before telling his request, when it was time for lunch, the monk mistakenly thought that it was the lunch offered to him by the owner of the family, so he ate it with the tsampa.

However, this was only the version I heard. Later I learned that there are versions of this story in different regions. Some Tibetans told me: This follow-up is very exciting. For example, the nun found out that the "dharma weapon" was eaten by the monk and asked him to compensate... Although this story is one of the countless stories in the Agu Dunba series, it is the first time I have heard it. to topics related to sex. At that time, I must have been less than ten years old.

Another incident that remains fresh in my memory is when boys in the village snatched girls’ “scarves.” "Scarf grabbing" is a very special custom. During festivals or Dharma ceremonies, people will dress up in costumes and come from villages all over to go to temples to participate in Dharma ceremonies. After the Dharma assembly, everyone has to go back to each village in an endless stream. At this time, young men from various villages will go out to a certain intersection to wait for the woman he likes to appear. They don't even care if anyone else passes by, they just go and grab the scarves the girls are wearing. If there are no scarves, hats, jewelry, rosary beads, etc. will do. In short, you have to take something away, and then tell this girl that if you want your things back, please go to such-and-such ditch in such-and-such mountain to get it.

For girls, it is embarrassing to be robbed by men. Of course, girls will try their best to resist and take back their belongings, and they may even fight and curse. I even saw a girl tearing apart a string of beads in her hand and scattering them all over the floor in order to take back her belongings. Even people passing by had to stop and help her pick up the beads one by one. Tearing is a reaction, more often than not it is begging, begging the man to let her go. She will even tell the boy to escape: "Don't you know? We are brothers and sisters! We are relatives. Brother, you are really Shameless, you dare to bully my sister!" This was a very clever rejection. But the situation is, it doesn't matter what the girl thinks, the reserved, cold and arrogant behavior is absolutely correct in that cultural background. If a Tibetan girl also has feelings for a man, when she is robbed, she hands him the scarf without saying a word and says: "Take it away, see you tonight!" The boys will also be shocked by her.

How should a girl reject a boy if she is robbed? Usually she would send someone to retrieve it for her. Send her best friend, sister, aunt, or other female. There are also girls who don’t even want to throw away the items that were taken away from them, but just don’t want them anymore. In this way, boys will really lose face. It can be seen that if you rob the wrong person, you will be embarrassed among those who know about it, which is definitely not a glorious thing.

Speaking of robbing the wrong person, I heard that a Tibetan came to Wuhou Temple in Chengdu. It was said that he fell in love with a woman on the street. Maybe he thought that if he missed it, he would never meet again. , the handsome Tibetan guy stepped forward and snatched the girl’s bag without saying a word. Apart from the bag, there is nothing else that is more convenient. You can't take off the other person's clothes. The final result was that the handsome guy was taken away by the police on suspicion of robbery. This is just a small episode. As for whether this is true, I am not sure, but I believe that such a thing is possible. This is the epitome of cultural differences.

There are even more ridiculous cases of robbing the wrong person. When I was a child, I was a good boy who deserved a lot of beatings. My brother would not take me with him when he did anything with the children in the village, because I would go home and make reports. One day he discussed with some older boys in the village that they would go to the entrance of the village to grab scarves from girls passing by. I knew they wouldn't take me, but I couldn't get angry. After they left, I found a women's robe and a woman's hat from my mother's closet. Hang the wig that my mother used to braid her hair behind her head, buckle it with a hat, and then wrap her face tightly with a long scarf. Like a ghost, I floated to the entrance of the village and saw them fishing by the river. I pretended to rest and stood on the conspicuous small slope and made poses. Unexpectedly, a few of them actually took the bait. I "got my wish" and was chased and teased by them. At that time, I thought that if I were really caught, I would be beaten up, so I ran away as fast as I could. But what I didn't expect was that they split into three groups, trapping me in the middle. Later, my brother's best friend found out it was me and collapsed on the grass by the roadside laughing. I just escaped.

In addition to robbing, men and women in rural areas have other methods. I remember something happened when I was 6 years old that puzzled me. I went to herd cattle in the mountains with an older sister from the village, and we met an older brother from the village on the way. He dragged his sister and pushed her down on the grass. The sister struggled hard and fought with the brother. I was shocked and frightened at the time. Out of instinct, I ran to hit him with two big stones. My brother let go of my sister, but my sister unexpectedly refused to let me hit him! He also said that he would go find the lost cow with his brother and asked me to stay where I was and not leave. They went away for a long time. Later, I felt scared when I was alone in the mountains. I cried for a long time before my sister came back. When she came back, she also told me that there was a cow that was very disobedient and had to climb several mountains to find it, whether I believed it or not.

Tibetans in rural areas snatch things from one another, but in the vast grasslands, herders have their own way. In pastoral areas, those who snatch things from deserted hillsides are usually bandits. I don’t know whether this is the case for herders in the entire Tibetan area, but in many areas of Kangzang and Amdo, it is indeed the custom to drill tents in pastoral areas.

Sleeping in a tent is also called running at night. In fact, it means taking advantage of the silence of the night to sneak into the home of the girl you like to have a private meeting with her. If you can't enter through the front door of the tent, you'll need to pull out one of the pestles used to nail the tent to the ground from the side, lift up a corner of the tent, and sneak in. You have to figure out where the girl sleeps, otherwise... tell me about a classmate from a pastoral area. When he was a teenager, he went to get into the tent, but when he opened the quilt, he found that it was the girl's mother. . The aunt grabbed him and said she wanted to cut off his penis. She also asked if he was so old that he hadn't been weaned yet! He was so frightened that he cried loudly in the tent. Later, another time, he was in the right position, but his butt was bitten by their dog. And according to him, it was very common for them to be bitten by dogs for trysts.

The following is a true record of an interview with a herdsman in the Kangzang Pastoral Area on a night run.

(Pseudonym: Gesang)

He did not remember how old he was when he started digging into tents, and how old he was when he succeeded. I just remember that when I was a child, I was often scolded by my father. My father hoped that his son would become a man soon. From time to time, he would complain about his incompetence in front of his stepmother. He would say: "These dolls now are really useless. If it were me, I would have been a long time ago by this time (evening)." She is holding a girl in her arms. She must be too ugly and no one wants her!" The stepmother would blame her father for being naughty. It is so irresponsible for such a young child to encourage him to go out for a night out. If he is killed by someone on the ranch, The Tibetan Mastiff took it in its mouth but it was fine.

My father would laugh and say in a sarcastic tone, "I've only heard of people eating dogs, but I've never heard of dogs eating people. What a joke!" It had already become a childhood ambition of his. I thought to myself that one day I will prove it to my father. In fact, he also slept in it and slept in it... It was really just a simple sleep! He didn't know the rest of the night running, and he didn't know what it was like to sleep in someone else's bed.

The first time he went to a nearby tent for a night out, the girls drove him out like an animal. Kelsang fled. Later I never dared to go. Sometimes, in order to prove his ability to his father, Kelsang would pretend to go for a night run, then play in the stream in the valley, pick flowers on the grassland, or play with his friends, and then go home very late. Later, his father discovered him and ridiculed him. Soon, he had the courage to go out again, but was kicked out by the girl. He felt ashamed to go home and be ridiculed by his father, so he simply curled up in his fur coat and slept outside the girl's tent.

The overnight fog condensed into ice on the outside of his leather jacket. In the morning he ran home and pretended he had succeeded. My father also joked, "You're a good young man, you've finally made some progress!" During breakfast, he and his family gathered around a warm fire. The heat dissipated and melted the ice on his leather jacket. The ice turned into water and was covered by the leather jacket. Absorbing it, the color of the soaked jacket quietly changed from light to dark without Gesang knowing it, and finally betrayed him. When his father saw that Gesang's fur coat had obviously been beaten by frost all night, he laughed and began to ridicule: "Did your fur coat get thrown out? Or did you drive him out together?" Gesang was ashamed after being exposed. .

Later, Gesang went on night runs with his brothers on the ranch, mainly accompanying them on their night walks. Gesang's cousin is in his 20s and likes to go out with a group, and he will go out to play with him. The first time he saw his cousin crawling into someone's tent with his butt stuck out like a groundhog. When he saw his cousin's cowardly appearance, he couldn't help but stand nearby and laughed, disturbing the owner's dog, and the two of them had to run away. For this reason, his cousin was no longer willing to take him out. He forgot about it until a long time later, and then took Gesang on a night out again. Many times, Kelsang's cousin would break into other people's tents. When Kelsang was left feeling bored, he would get into the pen where the calf was kept and sleep with the calf. In the middle of the night, he was so angry that a calf stepped on him that he opened the fence and let all the calves out. As you can imagine, the calves all ran to their mothers for milk. When the owner went to milk the cows the next day, all the milk was eaten by the calves. This incident angered the adults in their family, who went to complain to his father.

He still remembers one time when he went out for a night run with his cousin and other brothers. The cousin sneaked into his lover's tent, and several brothers ran to lie on the outside. The tent was not enough to lean on, so they simply climbed up. Eavesdropping, it turned out that there were too many people, and the tent collapsed due to the strain, and all the brothers rolled inside. A beautiful thing about my cousin was disturbed by them like this.

There are so many adventures of children in pastoral areas like Gesang during night running. I can write a special article "The Legendary Marriage and Love of Night Running" in the future.

However, although these sexual experiences are numerous, it does not mean that the knowledge is widely known. There are many people in Tibetan areas who lack sexual knowledge and education. For us, sex is more fun than educational. It's like a girl from Kangzang who was told by her mother that she would get pregnant if she held hands with a boy from now on. This girl actually believed it. Not only did she believe it, she accidentally touched the boy's hand while playing house with the boys in the village. She went to ask her mother what to do, but her mother threatened her that she was pregnant. The girl stayed awake for several nights. Her mother was a gentle and reserved woman. When she learned that her daughter had become a girl, she took her to buy a pack of sanitary napkins without telling her how to use them. The girl posted it backwards until her mother accidentally saw it one day two months later and corrected her.

The panic of menarche seems to cross national boundaries, but preparations for and treatment of it vary widely from place to place. It is said that a girl from our neighboring village lost her mother when she was young and grew up with her father. When she was 14 years old, she went to herd cattle one day and was frightened by the blood that flowed from her body. He ran all the way, crying and rushing home.

On the way, I met an aunt in the village. The aunt asked her why she was crying so sadly and if something happened at home. The girl told the reason. The aunt told her how she could tell her father such a thing. This is a normal thing for girls, but it would be embarrassing for men, such as father, if they knew about it.

I am equally ignorant, including myself. I remember that when I was 5 or 6 years old, I was playing games in the mountains. A little boy got a Dzi bead from somewhere and said it grew from his penis. I thought that every boy would grow a Dzi Bead at this age, so I waited quietly for a long time.

Tibetans are naturally fond of joking, but in some Tibetan areas, if there is a blood relationship between men and women, they must not be mentioned, and topics between men and women that many people think have nothing to do with sex cannot be mentioned. For example, a woman cannot ask her son if he has a girlfriend. The father still needs to ask. If the father is absent, then the uncle will ask. But this custom has been abandoned by many people. My aunts live in small towns and occasionally call me to ask about my relationship. I am really at a loss and shamefully tell my aunt immediately: "Aunt Aren't you ashamed? Don't you understand the things that Tibetans should be taboo about?" Then he quickly hung up the phone and took a deep breath.

When I was a freshman in college, the whole class had a physical exam. All the boys lined up at the door of the school infirmary. The boy in front went in and came out after a physical examination. I asked him what the teacher checked, and he said that the teacher looked at his little penis and told him that he had done it three times. The boy looked very worried and said, "It's over, I'm going to be fired!" I was so worried at the time, worried about whether masturbating would count and whether I would be noticed? What if the teacher confuses masturbating with having sex? How do I explain it to him? Will I be fired? Such worries reflect the staggering lack of knowledge about sex. So to say that Tibetans are conservative about sex does not mean that there is not such a group of people.