Qing Qingzi on Yang Li

 
Qing Qingzi, “Intel Pulls Yang Li’s Ad:  Who is Creating the “Male-Female Antagonism?’”[1]

Introduction and Translation by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
Introduction by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
Yang Li (b. 1992) is a female stand-up comedian in China, and her best known routines make fun of men, or, more broadly, “explore gender issues.”  I watched about half of one of Yang’s routines that is available on YouTube, and from my American perspective found her winningly charming and very funny, nowhere near “edgy” or “in-your-face” in terms of our comedy scene.  Of course, women’s stand-up is relatively new in the West, and brand-spanking new in China, and is a difficult profession in both places, largely for reasons of misogyny (which, sadly, appears to transcend cultural differences).  For Chinese speakers, this humorless retort by an enraged university professor to Yang’s question “How can men be so average, and yet so full of themselves?” suggests the intensity of the controversy that Yang’s comedy has stirred up.

In China, where the #MeToo movement is fledgling, this controversy goes beyond Internet comment sections.  As the text translated here notes, Yang’s detractors succeeded in getting Intel to drop an ad for which Yang was the spokesperson by organizing online protests and pressure. Intel caved overnight, presumably because men buy more computers than women, or because men simply make more noise on the Internet.  In any event, the male netizens’ reactions to Yang’s comedy are not “all in good fun.”  They are deadly serious, to some extent because Party authorities often allow this sort of noxious populism to flourish on the Internet.

As Freya Ge writes, these conflicts are deeply rooted in Chinese history and society:

“In Chinese history books, it is rare to find women depicted positively.  China’s only empress, Wu Zetian (624-705), chose to have nothing engraved on her tombstone, leaving the issue to posterity. Even today, sons are preferred to daughters, and successful men greatly outnumber successful women. My classmates and I are organizing a series of lectures to invite famous alumni from a variety of fields, all of whom turned out to be men. Finally we found a woman, a female alumnus who went to Stanford, but the Internet provided few details about her.  To a certain extent, Chinese women and their achievements do indeed appear to have been silenced. In urban schools, things are getting better.  Many of the students in my school that are admitted to the world's top universities are female students. Moreover, the idea that girls cannot earn high grades because they are not good at STEM has also been drastically challenged even in average high schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, etc. However, in more remote, rural places, women's education levels lag far behind men's.”

The text translated here, largely based on the writings of Western and Japanese feminists, asks men to look inward, question their motivations, and face their fears…Sounds like a good set-up for Yang Li’s next comedy routine.    
 
Translation by Freya Ge
 
Misplaced Accusations: Who Creates the "Male-Female Antagonism?"
 
As of now, the results of ad dust-up are: Yang Li’s posters have been removed from the Intel Taobao official flagship store, her promotional video on Weibo (@IntelCore) was deleted posthaste, Yang's earlier advertisements for Great Wall Motors disappeared overnight, and a group of male Internet users continue to flock to Proctor and Gamble’s live studio to continue the boycott of Yang Li…
 
Weibo, of course, also surrendered. After Intel deleted its Weibo account, topics such as # Intel Yang Li started trending, with a large number of male users posting "likes" and some holding up flags and shouting "Brothers, boxing [Internet slang for “owning” the feminists] really works!" and "Did Intel apologize? No, not yet. So, we have to keep boxing!"
 
An earlier screenshot on Taobao showed an unidentified buyer and an Intel customer service representative insulting Yang Li, calling her a "bitch" and a "pig." The screenshot has now become an indispensable image in Hupu Walking Street[2] discussions of Yang Li.
 
Incendiary, hateful, extreme rhetoric abounds, like a rancorous Internet witch hunt. But "witch hunt" rhetoric never stands up to scrutiny.
 
Highly praised comments like "men are the main consumers of electronic products" and "Yang Li endorsing Intel is like Jiang Jinfu [a well-known actor accused of domestic violence] endorsing Space7 [a brand of sanitary napkins for young women]" not only have no basis in fact, but also deliberately play with and distort the symbols in question (as if Jiang Jinfu's domestic violence in real life were the same as Yang Li’s jokes).  What the comments reveal is merely the means by which men deploy their power.
 
Let's take another look at the most important accusations lodged against Yang Li by male Internet users:  "creating antagonism between men and women," and " making dirty money out of sex." If Yang Li’s jokes, which make fun of men for being “average but full of themselves,” or say that “men are garbage,” or ask “do men really have a bottom line?" are enough to earn her a reputation for having “created the antagonism between men and women,” then perhaps it is time for women, who have long endured insults and misogyny, to simply call a halt to much of pop culture.
 
Of course, as Yang Li herself said "a happy life depends on what you do, not on how you argue," and the questions raised above are not to fight back, but instead to set the record straight.
 
In fact, a close look at the backlash that is spreading in the comments sections of social media shows that the accusation of creating gender antagonism is itself a patriarchal tactic:  “I don't like what they are saying, it's a woman that’s saying it, and I'm going to make it go away.”
 
Just as misogyny forms the deep psychological structure of patriarchal society, the attack on Yang Li by some male netizens reflects the misogyny that has always characterized the Internet. In her book Misogyny: The Loathing of Women in Japan, Ueno Chizuko argues incisively that misogyny is a historical and cultural epidemic. Misogyny means never treating women as sexual subjects equal to men, and engages instead in objectification, otherization and, more directly, discrimination and contempt.
 
In the eyes of many men, it doesn't matter who Yang Li is, what she says or what her purpose is. What matters is that Yang Li, as a symbol of women's rights, represents female subjectivity, and the fact of "female subjectivity" itself poses a threat to some men.
 
For men, who were (and still are) Subjects with a capital S and Agents with a capital A, there is no doubt that the sudden presence of female voices can cause a mixture of anger and fear. They are angry that women will no longer be submissive and silent, and they fear that they will be put in the same position as women and be judged as objects.
 
Male Anxiety: Demeaning Women, Becoming Men?
 
Looking back at the attacks on Yang Li, another point we cannot ignore is the existence of the male community. This is also systematically discussed in the book mentioned above, Misogyny: The Loathing of Women in Japan.
 
Ueno uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1950-2009) theoretical framework, and calls ties between men "male homosocial desires."
 
To put it simply, "male homosocial desire" means that the recognition of male identity is affirmed through the male community. In other words, for men, only recognition from the male community has value, while women live an objectified existence used by men to affirm the masculine subject and for the projection of their desires.
 
Thus, a man's biggest fear is "being feminized" (i.e., becoming a woman or becoming gay). To maintain their male identity, they relegate women to the "other" category that they can control. Whether they are worshipped as a "saint" or insulted as a "whore," it is two sides of the same coin. This is because, if they fail to do this, men run the risk of being "objectified" themselves, which means the loss of their subjectivity. It thus is not hard to explain why misogyny is so deeply embedded in heterosexual culture.
 
In the process of attacking Yang Li, men maintain their subjectivity in the same way. On the one hand, facing scrutiny and criticism from women, men maintain their fragile subjectivity by uniting to depreciate or suppress women. Common ways to belittle a woman's value are: "I don't think she's funny at all," or "She’s shit at what she does." They also insult her physical appearance, as when they referred to Yang Li as a "bitch" or a "pig."
 
On the other hand, they hold themselves forth as the authoritative judges of women by jointly promoting the image of a female spokesperson that is acceptable to men. That is why many men on Hupu, Weibo and other online communities compare Yang Li with Su Zifeng, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, and argue on the basis of their CVs and experiences that Yang Li is not qualified, while Su Zifeng is the deserving representative of "women's rights."
 
One might say that the bond of men's homosocial desire is based not only on mutual recognition between men, but also on misogyny and their contempt for and discrimination against women.
 
But just as gender is a highly cultural product, the establishment of so-called male identity/masculinity is itself a learned process. In his book The Descent of Man, published last year, Grayson Perry, who is a white male, questioned and reflected on the male gender culture from his own experience.
 
He points out that for many men, masculinity and masculine behavior—what look to be unquestionable physiological characteristics—are really just a collection of habits, traditions, and beliefs, which are historically associated with male identity. In his book, he calls for "masculinity to be whatever you want it to be." It is men who really need to change their thinking, especially in the face of the inequalities that are pervasive in society, and they should stop seeing women's voices and the changes they are calling for as a threat to their own power. After all, in a patriarchal society, many men are trapped in a prison of identity, disciplined and bullied by hegemonic masculinity.
 
Perry's argument certainly resonates with part of what men are facing today. The recent Proposal to Prevent the Feminization of Male Adolescents put forward by the Education Ministry is one example. The document pointed out that "our teenage boys are weak, self-abasing and timid, and seek to become pretty, effete men [追求’小鲜肉'式的奶油小生[3]]. Thus, we should pay more attention to the cultivation of students' masculinity."
 
The proposal sparked debate in part because it reinforces binary gender patterns that define what is "male" and what is "non-male" (girly/weak) behavior. This clearly makes an already unfair gender order worse. On the other hand, "masculinity" has historically been subtly associated with sports, competition, and strength, and tends to reinforce the angry and violent side of hegemonic masculinity. This is what Ueno called "the combination of masculinity and violence."
 
A more fundamental question is:  if men suffer the same unconscious discipline and pain, then how are they to make different choices? Do they take aim at women to avoid the fear of deviating from "orthodoxy," or can they fight the fear of "not becoming not a man" in the same way that women "overcome self-loathing?" The latter may be difficult, but choosing the former will have consequences, and ultimately this persistent, existential male anxiety will only backfire on men themselves.
 
Irrepressible: Who Determines the "Category of Women"? 
 
"Words really are the most important power a person can have," Yang Li said in an interview with Chinese GQ. Over the past year, her power has been repeatedly belittled.
 
Yang Li's story is not unfamiliar to women who are used to being silenced. There have been instances of women being disparaged for speaking out in public since the beginning of time, and patriarchal societies have traditionally silenced women on certain topics. As Yang Li said, language is indeed the most important power, and because of its importance, it is in danger of being taken away.
 
The British scholar Mary Beard has written brilliantly about this. In her slender volume, Women and Power:  A Manifesto, she dissects the history of female discourse from ancient Greece to the present day, pointing out that there is a long tradition in male culture of "shutting women up." One mark of male maturity is to seize the right to speak in public and to prevent women from doing so.
 
Beard recounts the myth of Medusa:  Medusa was punished by Athena for being raped by Poseidon, and transformed into a goblin-headed monster who turned anyone who looked at her to stone. She was eventually beheaded by Perseus, becoming a weapon on Athena's breast-plate. In this story, Medusa is demonized despite her innocence, while Perseus is held up as the hero despite his cruelty.
 
For a long time, Medusa has also served as a symbol of evil women. Even during the 2016 us election campaign, Hillary Clinton's face was made to look like Medusa by Trump supporters, and "Medusa" became the cultural symbol chosen by enemies of women's power.
 
Returning to the theme of artistic creation, Joanna Russ argues in How to Suppress Women's Writing that devaluing women’s creative work is a traditional ploy in male-dominated culture.  Yet even as they continued to be disparaged and ignored by the Canon, female creators never gave up on writing. "Like cells and sprouts," they grow on the margin, trying to break free from their shackles and establish their own female tradition of writing, writing the truth of women’s lives.
 
Yang Li too is still standing. In her March 24 post on Weibo, she did not treat the male netizens who attacked her harshly. Instead, she thanked other netizens for their kindness, saying, "The Internet is a virtual world, and it is the people around us that we should trust."
 
And it’s true.  This is the Yang Li that women see. She is living her life for herself; she can love men, and she can also make fun of men. In the face of harsh words, she never lost her agency.
 
May she always have that freedom.
 
Notes

[1]青青子, “杨笠代言英特尔被下架：到底是谁在制造’男女对立?’” 新京报书评周刊/Beijing News Book Review Weekly, March 25, 2021.

[2] Hupu is the rough equivalent of Reddit in China, focused on sports and daily life topics, and Walking Street one of its broader rubrics, in which any number of hot topics can be discussed.  Most of Hupu’s users are male.

[3]Translator’s note:  These translations are at best approximations, as they are deeply rooted in local culture.  Xiaoxianrou 小鲜肉 literally means “little pieces of fresh meat,” and is often used in describing the physical appearance of members of boy bands.  Naiyou xiaosheng 奶油小生, literally “creamy young men,” was first used in descriptions of male leads in 1980s Chinese movies.  Google images of the young Tang Guoqiang 唐国强 for an idea.  Leonardo DiCaprio in “Titanic” might be a rough American equivalent.