sex lives of the great helmsmen

Hitler, Stalin and Kim Il-sung famously didn’t much go in for that sort of thing. Mao Zedong and the younger Kim did and do like to put it about a bit.

Mao’s habits were first brought to general western attention in his doctor Li Zhisui’s expose, The Private Life of Chairman Mao. The book’s pre-publicity hinted with lip-smacking disapproval at sexual monstrosities on a Caligulan scale.

But that wasn’t how it turned out.

Instead of a Suetonious, Dr Li turned out to be a kind of grumpy amateur Tacitus, wittering on about decadence and citing as proof Mao’s liking for naked wrestling with a succession of young women from People’s Liberation Army song and dance troupes This is bad enough. It’s seigneurialism, and there’s a strong argument to be made that seigneurialism is a form of rape.

But it isn’t the kind of depravity that marked Ceasarian Rome, the kind which set rulers and ruled apart and confirmed the rulers in their belief that they could do absolutely anything. Mao’s preferences for enormous feather beds filled with giggling busty lasses was bucolic by comparison. You can imagine a man plodding behind a water buffalo way out in the Chinese sticks dwelling on exactly the same things. In this way, Mao’s sex life actually served to connect him with the population at large, at least the male half of it, and may go some way towards explaining his success as a tyrant. He was doing it for the lads.

Philip Short’s biography confirms Dr Li’s account, at least in the details. He reports the comment of a French diplomat that Mao bathed in women, filling his bed with up to eight at a time. One imagines naked pillow fights. Or rather, I imagine naked pillow fights.

Short also makes the case that Mao genuinely liked women and that freeing women from the Confucian order that subordinated them to their husbands and fathers was one of his higher political priorities. Prior to 1949, red occupied areas introduced laws on “democratic marriage” as a first order of business, before land reform and other classical socialist preoccupations. The Guomindang forbade footbinding, but it was the Communists who often made the prohibition stick. The Maoist solution to Shanghai’s prostitution problem also had an appealing simplicity: shoot the pimps and find the women jobs. Given his sex life, these measures just show Mao up as a rank hypocrite. But in my experience, it’s older Chinese women who are most likely to have a soft spot for the old bastard and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was confirmed by a more general survey.

Like Mao, Kim Jong-il grazes happily on the women of the Korean People’s Army’s cultural troupes. But, says Andrei Lankov, he also has a certain sensual savoir faire, despite looking like a sawed off oriental Bernard Manning:

A lot of troubles for the succession seem to be created by Kim Jong-il's own personal lifestyle, which is certain to inspire a number of soap operas in decades to come. He is different from his father, in whose life women never played a major role (with the probable exception of his first wife, Jong-il's mother Kim Jong-suk). Kim Jong-Il is a ladies' man. He has had a number of love affairs with stunning beauties, some of whom bore his children. To give him his due, Kim Jong-il was a good father who denied his children nothing (needless to say, the money came from state coffers). He was a good ex-partner, too. Even after the passion burned itself out, his former partners still could count on very special treatment and an occasional shopping trip to Switzerland. These are admirable qualities in a private man, but for a quasi-feudal absolute monarch they could spell disaster - as emperors, sultans and sheikhs have known for millennia.

…

In the 1960s Kim Jong-il was dashing, even attractive. He loved motorcycles (yes, the Dear Leader was probably the first North Korean biker) and beautiful girls. Certainly, the austere official mores of Pyongyang did not approve of such pastimes, but the prince was above the normal regulations. He enjoyed success with women - and not only because of his family background, even though few beauties would dare to reject approaches from the son of the Great Leader. In spite of some excessive weight (typical for the family), Kim Jong-il was a nice guy: smart, charming and witty.

I can see it now: fine wines, Belgian chocolates, forced labour in uranium mines. From this I get a strong impression that Kim would have been happier as one of our sons-of-bitches – killing his enemies, rewarding his friends, paying his dues at the US Embassy and generally making it up as he goes along in the style of Suharto or Marcos.

Unfortunately he’s been left a ruinous inheritance. This is the monumental complete load of absolute fucking nonsense known as the Juche ideal. Supposedly a theory of autarky, in practice it’s a kind of monstrous memetic feedback loop of the kind described here:

...the most dangerous internal state of an OODA loop occurs when the Orientation process becomes so powerful that it force fits the organism's observations into fitting a preconceived template, even when those observations threaten the relevance of that template. ... When this happens, the loop has turned inside itself. It loses its capacity to adapt to changing external circumstances, and in effect, the open far-from-equilibrium system becomes an incestuously amplifying closed system—and echo chamber amplifying its own echoes: Any tendency toward self-correction breaks down, because Observations of the results of its Actions are fed through the same non-adaptive template, over and over again. The organism becomes increasingly disconnected from reality.

There’s been lots of speculation about whether or not Kim the younger is insane. What his sex life demonstrates is that he’s above the law and therefore above the mindbending effects of the Juche ideology. Could he be, in fact, the only sane man in North Korea? Given the fact that Pyongyang has just declared itself the proud owner of functioning nuclear weapons this might be worth some consideration.

Comments

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