Today is Chinese Valentine's Day (七夕). Commercial campaigns targeting young lovers are everywhere. But the Awakening Foundation yesterday reminded the public the amorous day is also a day for middle-aged and elderly women and lovers.
Ancient Chinese folklore has it that a weaving damsel, an incarnation of a goddess, became infatuated with a cowherd, a human. They got married and neglected their duties of making cloth and tending cattle.
Infuriated by their negligence, the Celestial Ruler separated them. Since then, the lovesick couple were allowed to see each other only once a year -- on the seventh night of the seventh lunar month, which became Chinese Valentine's day.
PHOTO: SEAN CHAO, TAIPEI TIMES
The place for their annual rendezvous was in the sky. On this day, the couple met up on a heavenly bridge constructed by numerous magpies.
It is unfair, said Hsieh Yuan (謝園), chairwoman of the foundation, that the romantic day has been treated as if it were for young girls only.
Hsieh, heading the organization that fights for women's rights, pointed out that many middle-aged and elderly women have been left in limbo on the love-festival day.
"Have middle-aged and elderly women lost the ability and the right to enjoy love and sex because they are no longer young?" Hsieh asked.
Hsieh called for society to pay more respect to middle-aged and elderly women's rights to pursue love and sex.
Our society, Hsieh said, still widely discriminates against old women who get involved in love affairs.
"The media, when reporting on old women's love affairs, treat them as jokes," Hsieh said.
In one example, the foundation said, a newspaper teased an elderly pair of lovers when the police, acting on a tip-off by the male lover's wife, caught them making love in a hotel room.
The man was 90 and his mistress 80. The man's wife, 82, called her husband "a shameless old guy" when hearing him tell the police he "kissed" and "caressed" his girlfriend.
Hu Shu-wen (
The reporter, Hu said, also wrote that the police "could not believe that the old couple, with their ages totaling 170 years, could do anything serious in a hotel room."
"Shouldn't a woman in her 80s have wrinkles in her face?" Hu asked.
"The reporter treated the extramarital affair as a joke because the couple were old," Hu said.
Hsieh said it is very important for women to learn how to deal with love and sexual desire when they move into middle age.
Besides treating older women's love affairs as jokes, society also discriminates against widows and women who are single or divorced, Hsieh said.
The foundation interviewed dozens of women to provide the public with a picture of how middle-aged women think about love and sex.
"I have high expectations for my sex life ... Some of my friends told me they lost interest in sex when they reached a certain age," said a 50-year-old married woman in an interview.
"It is such a pity. Sex is a physical instinct ? they should not just give it up," the woman said, adding she often watched pornographic films with her husband.
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