A Sexuality Worth Thinking About

After Sex (2007) feels less like a single film than a collection of short pieces. It’s made up of conversations between eight pairs of men and women after sex — lovers, a divorced couple, a gay man questioning his own identity… all of it aimed at exploring the relationship between sex and love. For Chinese audiences who tend to be obsessed and disoriented by sex, this is a film quite different from Lost in Beijing — and far better suited to thinking seriously about sex and love.

Some viewers online found the stories a bit strange, or not quite believable. Even I found myself doubting whether the gay couple’s discussion of who tops and who bottoms was a bit too far-fetched. But on second thought, we always try to judge how reasonable or credible a story is using logic — yet in reality, things that lie entirely outside the bounds of rational thought happen all the time. Nothing is off-limits, nothing is impossible — that, it seems to me, is closer to absolute truth, and it’s especially true when it comes to sex and love.

Sex and love — sex in particular — appear, on the surface, to be purely physiological. Some people think of it as no different from urinating or defecating, which crudely and brutally strips away the entire psychological dimension of sexuality. But I say this without any intention of moralizing, because everyone carries some bias about sex and love, and “prejudice is the everyday fare of those without ideas, and the Sunday entertainment of those who have them” (Qian Zhongshu) — no one really escapes it.