Sex in the Land of Genghis Khan is a title and subject guaranteed to elicit curiosity. Mongols have not had the kind of study lavished on medieval, premodern, and modern European sex lives. This is the first sustained look at Mongol and Mongolian sexuality through history: a short, accessible but serious book, with a strong throughline and a sense of historical movement—in directions people might not expect.
Of the great conqueror’s times, a common doubt has been whether there is sufficient evidence to say much about private lives. In fact the evidence can stand a much more complex treatment, and I hope Baasanjav Terbish’s book lays the groundwork for that. The first of five chapters covers the 13th and 14th centuries, the period of the Mongol empire. Mongol women, who lived publicly active lives—they drove and maintained the nomadic household’s wagons, were in charge of household barter and trade, and drank to drunkenness in public with no more dishonor than attached to men – were influential in the family, in politics, and in sex. Mongol sons’ deference towards their mothers is a point made through the well-known example of Temujin (Genghis Khan).
A few received truths are challenged. Historians who do not specialize in sexuality have repeated uncritically the claim that Genghis Khan’s Yasa (law code) banned sodomy. It was never so simple: a book like Louis Crompton’s Homosexuality & Civilization makes one aware how slippery that word “sodomy” is, particularly when passed through two or three language translations and cultural lenses. The claim originates in Islam-influenced writings in Mongol Iran that backdated and attributed such a law to Genghis to capitalize on his prestige. In Terbish’s rebuttal, absence of a native Mongol ban can be
extrapolated from the following reverse reconstruction using Mongol laws from later periods. If we look at the Mongol-Oirat Regulations of 1640, they do not ban sodomy. Nor did the fifteenth-century code of laws the Chajin Bichig, promulgated in Mongolia in the post-Yuan. If we go further back, the Yuan regulations do not mention sodomy either. The two most important pre-Yuan sources, Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, are also silent on this topic. Nor will the reader encounter mention of the ban on anal penetration in the Secret History of the Mongols, the earliest imperial annals. Had Genghis Khan banned sodomy, his immediate successors would have preserved this ban.
Terbish’s message on indigenous Mongol religion is that the gods and spirits of shamanism had no stake in people’s sex lives and were perfectly neutral on sexuality. Only human groups made rules, for secular reasons. One snippet might complicate this indifference on the part of spirits: Juvaini, a Muslim writing in early Mongol Iran, reports that Mongols put faith in practitioners who prophesy after a sex act with spirits in which the male practitioner is the bottom. Maybe this is more misinformation, but the queer sacred is certainly known in shamanism.
Sections on “Buddhism and sex”—with tales of Tantric mystic sexual practices in the palaces of Mongol China; “Islam and sex”—which contrasts the lively premodern scene in places where a dour Islam is prevalent today – explore how the mores of Mongols branched off under regional religious influence. Post-empire, the Mongol steppe converted to Buddhism. The second chapter covers almost 600 years, up to Mongolian independence from Qing China in 1911. From the gossipy to confronting accounts of institutional abuse of children, this section is eye-opening on the Buddhist establishment. Buddhist philosophy led to a crucial difference from Islam’s liwat, whereby a man’s reputation turned on whether he was active or passive in the matter of insertion.
What is peculiar about the monastic understanding of sexuality is that all forms of sex, whether sleeping with a man or a woman, fell equally into the same category of urin tachaalal [carnal desire]; therefore, no further categorization was made as to which form of sex was worse. This non-classificatory approach toward sex made it unimaginable to think that a man might need to have been of a certain nature to enjoy sex with a woman and of another to sleep with a man… It did not matter whether one had “insertive” intercourse or “receptive” sex with another man, for both types equally attached any man to the chain of samsara and worldly misery and delusions.
Adultery is a case study in historical change. Capital punishment for adultery in the conquest period of Genghis and his immediate successors was atypical, as seen against Mongol norms over time, and Terbish suggests, was in aid of feud prevention and discipline. Through premodernity, a woman’s sexual activity only became of social concern once she was a wife – single girls and widows were not policed (in a section on zoophilia, Terbish gives the consequent availability of sex as the reason for a low incidence of sex with animals). Mongol law codes responded to adultery with lenient fines, up until Mongols joined the Qing state, when harsh punishments from Chinese law were introduced:
Adultery between a Mongol commoner and the wife of a nobleman was punished most severely—the former was to be beheaded and the latter cut to pieces, while his family was to be given into slavery. Contrast this approach with the Mongol [law code] Chajin Bichig, which for the same offense (sleeping with the wife of a prince) postulates that the adulterer “must, in a sign of repentance, offer [the prince] a goat and its kid.”
It was back to lenience after independence from Qing China in 1911. Children of adultery were not stigmatized; Genghis Khan’s acceptance of his illegitimate first son Jochi was, and remained, customary.
Stigma did not attach to sex work, either—except in the writings of foreign visitors:
Selling sex—or “prostitution,” as it is known in the West and Russia—to the amazement of foreign travelers who visited Mongolia at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, was not a shameful profession… [R]eflecting lenient Mongol attitudes toward sex in a country where neither shamanic nor Buddhist gods prohibited single women from engaging in sex, the Mongolian term khüükhen does not have a pejorative meaning… Inflation of the prestige of sex sellers was so significant that even high nobles married them. For many foreigners, the Mongol kingdom looked not very different from whoredom.
In general,
Sex in all its forms—commercialized sex, casual sex, adultery—became so commonplace that by the nineteenth century, at the latest, nomads engaged in it with little inhibition… Many sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries indeed indicate that Mongols of all social backgrounds were casual about sex.
Then we turn to the Soviet-led socialist era, 1924-1990. Here the author’s personal reminiscences enter in, to attest to a new sex negativity. Sexual life was “de-romanticized, vulgarized, and impoverished”. The Stalinist state forced a violent severance with the past, an erasure of sexual culture and history. Post-socialist Mongolia suffers the effects of this loss. Into the void of memory comes the “invention of tradition”:
In contemporary Mongolia many so-called “traditions” that society claims to have revived are not authentic but modern interpretations of what people think or fantasize might have been the case in the past… Post-socialist Mongolia is a country that bulges with such invented traditions and myths.
Because people “internalized socialist-era sexual fears and prejudices”, these invented traditions tend to retain the “antisex indoctrination and historiographical distortions” taught through much of the 20th century.
A “cult of aggressive masculinity promoted by the state and nationalist-patriotic groups” shapes the idea of the masculine in modern ways, against homosexuality, whereas for premodern Mongols, Terbish finds, one’s identity as a man was unaffected by who one had sex with or how. Sinophobia and vigilante punishment of women who sleep with foreigners; ultra-nationalist far right groups and neo-Nazis “who worship Genghis Khan”; human trafficking; the debasement of sex work; off-the-scale levels of sexual harassment: this makes upsetting reading.
Sex in the Land of Genghis Khan does not shy from present-day ills, and ends in a grim place. But it is its own antidote: knowledge of history must be the way forward. Sexual harassment is no more innate to Mongols than the hyper-masculinity advocated by today’s nationalists—rather, like other aspects of sexuality and gender, these have been constructed through historical time. Baasanjav Terbish’s book traces cause and effect. It reminds us that people in the past lived more differently than we imagine when left to ourselves. History always complicates our narratives. History gives options.