Why are there so many female ghost stories in China

Although no accurate statistics have been made, there are far more female ghosts in Chinese note novels than male ghosts. Moreover, female ghost stories have a common typical pattern:

　　A beautiful woman from an unknown source came to find an unaccompanied student at night and took the initiative to have intercourse, and the two became a good thing. However, Shusheng's body became weaker and weaker, and then he was told that the other party was a ghost, and Shusheng may die because of it.

　　Such stories are rare in other cultures, so why does China produce such female ghost stories? The traditional interpretation is that it is the ejection of men's erotic fantasies, and male authors and readers associate the thoughts of "my own sexual exuberance" and "I want" to the female ghost, becoming "the other party is sexually vigorous" and "she wants (give it to me)". If such a mind is mapped to Miss Qianjin in the real world, it will breed moral and legal problems, while female ghosts are not bound by human etiquette, so they become the ideal object of obscenity, but in the end they still have to add a moral tail to remind everyone that even female ghosts cannot mess around, otherwise you will still become weak and eventually die. There is some truth to this statement, of course, but a deeper dissection can lead us to something more interesting:

　　The relationship between the Dream Relic (Nocturnal Sperm) and the story of the female ghost

　　The philosopher Nietzsche said, "Dreams are the origin of all soul beliefs." The ancients believed that dreams are the outings of the soul, and the dead seen in the dream are the ghosts of the dead, which is very closely related to the production of ghost stories, and the female ghosts come to find men and are related to the phenomenon of men's unique dream relics:

　　Dreaming of a young man without a sexual partner is a common physiological phenomenon, and the person involved wakes up at night because of the wet pants due to sperm, and often remembers that he has just had an erotic dream. The psychoanalyst Hall has done a lot of research on the pornographic dreams of men before they die, such as a man who said, "I dreamed that I was chasing a girl on a spiral staircase, and finally I caught up with her, had sex with her, and then the dream happened." 」 The ancients obviously also had erotic dreams before the night sperm, but according to their concept, "strange women who appear in the dream" can easily be interpreted as "female ghosts from unknown sources", and in the note novels, after men and female ghosts have sex, the statement that "they are full of joy and their bodies are getting weaker" is likely to be a literary description and worry about the dream relics.

　　Chinese the concept of "making up"

　　In addition to the phenomenon of men's dreams, China's many female ghosts are also closely related to the long-standing concept of "nourishment" in China. In the "Biography of Lieyi", there is a "Talking About Life" that says: After three years of reconciling with Shusheng, a female ghost has grown flesh above the waist, and the bones below the waist are still dry. And in the "Night Talk", the "Zhou Yu Temple Dry Bones" said: After a female ghost and a man had a few spring breezes, flesh also began to grow in her dry bone eye sockets. The more you have sex with men, the "longer the meat will be", and such a plot is obviously reflecting the concept of "essence as a thing" mentioned in the "I Ching" - men's ** can be "flesh and bones" (of course, this is an overestimation of the value of men in the patriarchal society, which cannot be taken seriously).

　　Ji Xiaolan said in the "Notes on Reading Wei Caotang": "Female ghosts always want to be with people, and they are also good at taking their essence." Female ghosts look for men in order to "pick up the yang and supplement the yin", according to the traditional Chinese concept of tonic, the Yang world man is the "yang in the yang", the female ghost is the "yin in the yin", the yang world man's ** has a tonic effect on the female ghost, but the Yang world woman does not seem to have any "tonic effect" on the male ghost, this concept is obviously one of the reasons why there are more "female ghosts looking for men" but less "male ghosts looking for women" stories in the note novels.

　　The literaryization of the custom of "meditative marriage"

　　If you put together the female ghosts in the notebook novels who come to the Yang Room to lure shusheng, you will find that their biggest common feature is "unmarried and dying", and they are famous. For example, the female ghost in "Zhou Yu Temple Dry Bones" is "Qiu Xia, the Daughter of Gong Cao of Guqujiang County", and the female ghost in "Peony Lantern" is "Li Qing, the Judge of Fuzhou in The Ancient Fenghua", and even the most famous Nie Xiaoqian is unmarried and died. The story of so many unmarried female ghosts coming out to find men after death has to remind people of the special Chinese folk customs of meditative marriage.

　　Chinese believe that if people do not receive sacrifice after death, they are prone to become lonely ghosts, and this is the plight of unmarried and dead women. In order not to make them become lonely ghosts, there is a birth of a meditative marriage - the parents cannot bear the soul of their daughter wandering in the underworld, so they find a husband for her in the way of meditative marriage, so that she can enjoy the sacrifice of the Yang descendants of the husband's family forever. In the early stories of female ghosts, such as "Tansheng" in the "Biography of Lieyi", we can see its relationship with the secret marriage more clearly: the unmarried female ghost went to Yangshi and Tansheng to marry, and after the female ghost had to leave, the female ghost's father regarded Tansheng as a son-in-law and gave him gold and silver property, while Tansheng regarded the female ghost as a "dead wife".

　　Although the later stories have become more obscure, they can still be understood from this perspective, such as Fu Liqing in "Peony Lantern", Cao Qiuxia in "Zhou Yu Temple Dry Bones", all of whom died violently because of the migration of their father's transfer, and were abandoned in the temple by their parents, and have not been asked since then, such "unmarried and dead women" are particularly prone to become lonely ghosts, and they go to the Yang to find men after death, which can be said to be a projection of the cultural concept of "dark marriage", because their parents do not arrange a secret marriage for them, and the female ghosts have to "help themselves" , come out on your own to find a man.