So just who is the real sissy, then?

Gender roles are changing, but prejudice persists, even in the privacy of a household and among the highly educated

Lin Shaohua, a noted translator of Japanese literature, gave a lecture to a class of master of public administration students the other day. In the question-and-answer session, a student asked him how he managed his time well enough to be so prolific in translation and writing, on top of his job as a university teacher. Lin said the trick is in "not doing any household chores".

As he described it in his microblog, the male students all laughed while the women kept silent. So he turned to the latter and said the wear and tear on men of cleaning pots and pans would remove their manliness and ambitions, turning them into effeminate creatures, at the same time turning women into tomboys.

The remark was so tongue-in-cheek that, without the benefit of an audible voice, it is difficult to determine whether it was meant to be sarcastic. Since Lin deleted his post in the aftermath of swarms of critical responses, I figure that it was intended as a sincere explanation and, possibly, a piece of advice on the rigorous division of gender roles.

Now I don't believe China is an extremely male-chauvinistic society. Since the Enlightenment Movement, otherwise known as the May Fourth Movement of 1919, Chinese society has struggled to free itself from the shackles of feudalism, which includes institutional discrimination against women. While we cannot claim that women in China have achieved equality in every field, they have proved that they can hold their place next to men with no preferential treatment whatsoever. In fact there are so many fields and professions in which women are beating their male peers hands down that affirmative action, as it is known in North America, is often reserved for men who have turned out to be the weaker party in fair competition.

There has been discussion over the past decade about the sources of male weakness. Some point to the lack of military-style training in schools and others reckon male children are more pampered because they are supposed to carry on the family lineage. The fashion trend has clearly swerved to the epicene man. The fashion du jour is embodied by androgynous styling, an appearance firmly established as the paragon of metrosexual beauty.

Some see this as a threat to the traditional notion of masculinity, and some educators and parents want to turn the tide, or at least put a brake on it. They send boys to boot camps where the youngsters can presumably toughen their bodies and minds. I don't know whether they also lament the disappearance of after-class fistfights that were such a fixture in coming-of-age movies of yore.

The young male image in popular culture is largely shaped by entertainment imported from South Korea and Japan rather than from Hollywood. It is probably the racial affinity that has made male icons from China's eastern neighbors easier to identify with for Chinese youth. Action heroes from across the Pacific Ocean are welcomed as they are deemed to be in a different league, one that elicits more shock and awe than relatability.

Lament all you want, but I feel the sociological underpinnings for the current pendulum swing toward less masculinity are peace and prosperity, allowing young men to spend time on grooming and styling. In times of war and poverty, physical prowess would count more than delicate skin or facial features. The archetypal worker or peasant as depicted in propaganda is the buffed-up body shown in old-time posters and billboards. Nowadays an urban male frequents a gym to tone his body not so he can work like a hard laborer, but rather like a white-collar worker with an enviable physique. He wouldn't be able to plow a field with the help of an ox or strike an anvil with a hammer for a day. Therein lies the difference between pragmatism and aesthetics.

Of course there are many other reasons people cite for the decrease in masculinity. But Lin's mention of household travail is quite unprecedented as far as I know. It is obviously built on the assumption that cleaning dishes, doing the laundry and vacuuming the apartment are the exclusive realm of women. Well, they used to be for sure when women were denied education and could work only as nannies and maids. But things have changed in the past century and in most Chinese households there is no fixed rule about who should take care of the daily chores. Usually the arrangement depends on the specific skills and schedules of the husband and the wife, or the father and the mother. Honestly, with the ubiquitous use of home appliances, cleaning up no longer means scrubbing your laundry on a washboard for hours a day. Still, every member of the family should chip in even if one is wealthy enough to hire a maid or other form of help.

Had Lin's remarks been a totally isolated incident, they could simply have been brushed aside. Unfortunately, he may represent the vestiges of history, the part of Chinese tradition that had better be left in the archive of undesirable cultural legacy. When the government called for a revival of traditional culture a few years ago, public interest in Confucian classics was rekindled. Amid the renewed fascination with old customs are worrying signs of simmering ashes of feudalism and bigotry. There arose private schools devoted to the teaching of "female virtues", including the principle that women must obey their husbands unconditionally even when the latter are wrong. The local government shut down the class after the media reported on it.

China has come to the stage that, when a couple fights, one should not assume the woman is naturally the sympathetic party. The dynamics of each family is unique. But the suggestion that a man taking up housework is not manly is so ludicrous it can only be treated as a joke. And I say this with total acknowledgment of gender differences in professions. For example, as a general rule, women tend to excel in the positions of kindergarten teachers or hospital nurses. But that does not mean a man cannot be as good as his female peers if he is so disposed. Conversely, there are very few female truck drivers, but if a woman takes to it, there is no reason why she cannot be just as good.

There will no doubt be some who strongly oppose my argument. I'm not of the opinion that a country's truck drivers or kindergarten teachers have to reflect the gender ratio of the whole country so that men and women can be proven equal. But I believe there should be no barriers for either sex to enter into professions they are qualified for on the basis of merit. Sure, toiling away with home routine is not a profession - unless it is for someone else's household.

Lin can say he is free from the drudgery because he can afford outside help or he has a wife or other family members who do not treat it as drudgery. He can even argue from an economic point of view that his time can yield a better financial payoff than whoever is responsible for the grunt work. But to hint that he is above it because of his gender is simply condescending. To extrapolate from his logic, someone sweating in a truck or on a construction site can laugh at him, a man sitting at a desk all day long, for being a sissy.

The writer is editor-at-large of China Daily. Contact him at raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 12/12/2014 page30)