Wedding bell blues
Feminists urge ban of Chinese bridal hazing customs featuring sexual farces
Viral videos capturing lewd, vulgar wedding hazing parties have sparked outrage among younger, modern Chinese.
Some rural villages continue to practice ancient hazing rituals as part of traditional patriarchal rights.
Committee for spirit civilization building will attempt to guide good morals at local wedding ceremonies.
Video footage capturing a bridegroom’s father, drunk off his mind, embracing his new daughter-in-law passionately and locking his lips on hers on stage in front of guests during their wedding ceremony has sparked national outrage and fierce discussions recently.
The nine-second clip captures part of a local wedding tradition – nao gong gong – in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, based on teasing and embarrassing the father of a bridegroom and pushing him to make sexual gestures to the bride.
Such a traditional custom is usually arranged by guests of the wedding with the aim of injecting a tone of revelry into the ceremony and appealing to the audience, even though it openly hints at incest between a bride and her father-inlaw.
But this tradition, though still popular in many rural areas across China, has begun to lose its appeal among younger couples. The recent footage has been sharply criticized and has led to an uproar for insulting women and insinuating the behavior of incest.
“Is it tease or treat?” netizens asked on social media over the “offensive act” of the elderly man, who appeared to have kissed his daughter-in-law. While some condemned it as a “typical corrupted custom,” a few defended the behavior as traditionally acceptable and a lighthearted wedding game.
Liu Ping, a Guangdong-based designer with more than 49,000 followers on Sina Weibo, defended the tradition, saying that netizens have overreacted to this deeply rooted custom.
“It’s like giving the bride’s virginity to the father first. It’s a symbol of filial piety to allow the father the first bite of tasty things,” Liu explained. He noted that the Yancheng region is largely influenced by Confucianism, which deeply values filial piety.
Liu’s comments were later regarded as an “insult” to Confucianism. Many modern citizens disdain such “filial piety” as misogynistic, claiming that it traumatizes brides and should not be tolerated as it is merely an excuse to humiliate women.
“Some traditional culture has been ruined by the vulgar tastes of these people, which have turned wedding hazing from a relatively innocent folk custom to crude, offensive revelry,” said He Linglong, an expert in folk culture in Yancheng.
Absurd wedding hazing
The father in the footage, surnamed Bian, is seen walking on stage with his new daughter-in-law dressed in a traditional wedding gown, then suddenly grabs her from behind and forcefully kisses her. Onlookers cheer and clap, but netizens later burst with anger.
The family later released a statement through their lawyer to clarify that the father did not really kiss her but only pretended to in order to satisfy the audience; the family also declared their legal rights to take legal measures against the rumormongers.
The bride in the video, who seems uncomfortable, was introduced by the host as “an elegant lady who liberally embraces local customs” to the crowd.
This “local custom” refers to a wedding hazing ritual in the historical “Pa Hui” tradition – a Chinese term used to allude to incest between the groom’s father and his daughterin-law.
Such age-old bridal hazing is quite common in Yancheng and surrounding regions.
Xiao Hong, a woman married in Yancheng in 2014, revealed to Chinese media outlet btime.com that she too was asked to participate in similar games.
“It’s shocking when you see a scenario of hanging two feeding-bottles over the bride’s chest then asking the groom to suck one side while his father sucks the other side,” she said.
Xiao recalls how she firmly refused the hazing. “It is so horrible to hear their bad ideas asking me and my father-inlaw to pose in such gestures for our wedding photos. I completely could not accept it and neither could my parents.”
“It is a departure from its original intention,” He explained. “Yancheng has a strong clan culture. The father usually has hegemony over everyone else. The wedding hazing is then regarded as a rare opportunity to crush his power and prestige, which is widely welcomed by brides’ family.”
“We traditionally believe that the more the father-in-law is hazed, the higher status the bride will be given in her husband’s family,” Tan, a 55-year-old man from Yancheng who was recently spoofed at his son’s wedding, told the Global Times.
“Not only the young couples, we