Why is it common in the villages around Lugu Lake to see young rather than old men strolling about at dawn, tired but content-looking? They're returning from a zou hun, or walking marriage, one of the most un-Chinese traditions you'll find in China.

The walking marriage is a Mosuo custom, not Naxi, the predominant ethnic minority in Yunnan Province's Lugu Lake area. And yes, there's a difference, unless Liverpool is pretty much the same as Manchester, and Canadian culture is a subset of American.

The Mosuo get most of their PR juice from the widely-held myth that it is a matriarchal society, where women make the rules, have all the rights, and peace reigns as a result. More accurate though to call the Mosuo matrilineal, and for typically historic reasons. Until they became a tourist industry, the Mosuo were a society of an elite few ruling the downtrodden many. The nobility were unrepentantly patriarchal, and long ago imposed a matrilineal tradition on the plebes, to eliminate threats to their power.

Creative repression does have long-term benefits for the repressed, apparently. Although far from the authoritative earth-mothers feminists would like them to be, Mosuo women have suffered far fewer social strictures than their woeful Han counterparts, and an amazingly progressive institution, the walking marriage.

 
As with mating moths and cats, it's the male Mosuo who does the traveling. After her right of passage initiation, a pubescent Mosuo girl gets a skirt and her own bedroom, although the rest of the household is typically communal, and privacy a rare commodity. Once she has passed puberty, she may begin to arrange walking marriages.

Remarkable as her sexual freedom is, intimacy is always a matter of discretion, and walking marriages are arranged secretly between just the prospective partners. Thus the Mosuo man's practice of walking to his date's home only after dark (Mosuo village streets are notoriously underlit), and scurrying home in the dawn hours when anyone cheeky enough to make remarks is still abed.

We can learn as much about ourselves in our reaction to the walking marriage as we do about the Mosuo. Inevitably, the myth has grown that Mosuo women are insatiably promiscuous, and that their boudoirs resemble open casting calls, with new talent auditioned nightly. Far from it. Although it would be uncommon for a Mosuo woman to have only one partner life-long, the majority of such couplings are usually long-term. Moreover, it is likewise unusual for a Mosuo woman to have more than one partner at a time, many of the pairings lasting a lifetime. And we're still reading angry editorials about the immoral new practice of "serial monogamy".

Yet even if the walking marriage becomes an extended arrangement, the man will never take up residence with his partner's family, nor the woman with his. He already has a family he's responsible to, as does she. No new nuclear family ambitions for the Mosuo, or sharing of property.

When children are begotten out of the walking marriage, the father carries no obligation, as startling to a born-and-bred Confucian as it is to a Presbyterian. If willing, he signals his choice to take an active role in the child's upbringing with gifts to the mother's family, and stated intention to do so. This brings him a certain status within the family, but by no means a claim of kinship. The child takes his mother's family name, daddy or no.

One can almost hear Pat Robertson's moral indignation sizzling, as he makes quick associations between the Mosuo system, the welfare state, and all that plagues degenerate modern society. Were he to take an in-depth tour of the Lijiang vicinity, however, he would find very few mature males loitering on street corners. A mature Mosuo man is honor-bound to stay with his mother's family, and provide for all the children born to the women in that family, none of whose bedrooms he's ever walked to.

Women choosing partners as they please, men caring not for their flesh and blood but that of their sisters - if it all sounds a little too communal and hippy dippy, consider the historically atypical consequences. Mosuo girls don't grow up to be sold off to another family, and therefore have enjoyed esteem as something more than another clan's mouth to feed.

Goodbye preference for males, hello gender equality. Not Andrea Dworkin equality, with boys wearing skirts and girls playing football, but gender balance. Too many males and there won't be enough children to grow the household. Too many females means not enough bacon brought home. This leads to the practice of adopting and even swapping male and female children between households. If the kids get confused, at least they never get lonely. The Mosuo culture is one of inclusivity, inclusive on a higher level than that of the otherwise inescapable blood bond. It's hard not to wonder what such a system might do in other parts of the world, where no blood relations means isolation, the plague of the 21^st century.