They live in an agricultural lifestyle in southern China, which isn’t too unique. The most unique parts are that electricity has only been introduced recently, but many villages still don’t have it and the culture is very matriarchal.
The women to all of the cooking, cleaning, farming, and clothing making while the men don’t have many responsibilities. The oldest woman in the house has all of the authority and decides who lives in her house.
The Mosuo have something called a walking marriage. The married couple lives apart during the day, but by night the man visits the woman if she allows it. The men don’t raise their own children, but the mother’s brother helps in that instead.
The couple can be polyamorous is they chose and there is no divorce because no one was ever legally bound to one another. Historically the Mosuo lived in a feudal system where a larger peasant population was controlled by a small nobility. The nobility was afraid of the peasant class gaining power.
Since leadership was hereditary, the peasant class was given a matriarchal system. This prevented threats to nobility power by having the peasant class trace lineage through the female line. This system has led to numerous distinct traits among Mosuo society.
The Mosuo men practice tisese which translates as walking marriage in Chinese. However, the Mosuo term literally means ‘goes back and forth’. Women have the choice to invite men of interest to their private sleeping room. If the man does not reciprocate this desire, he may simply never visit the woman’s household. Men perform tisese in the true sense of the word.
They can seek entry into the sleeping chambers of any woman they desire who also desires them. When feelings are reciprocal, a man will be allowed into a woman’s private sleeping area.
There he will spend the night and walk back to his mother’s home in the early morning. Male suitors have been known to commonly descend into a woman’s bedding chamber from a designated opening in the ceiling, commonly using a grappling hook or modern rock climbing apparatus.
Anthropologist Cai Hua termed tisese as ‘furtive’ or ‘closed’ visiting, meaning no public acknowledgment or obligations are required between parties. At night Mosuo adults are free to experience sexuality with as many or as few partners as they wish.
Though a Mosuo woman is allowed to change partners whenever she likes, having only one sexual partner is not uncommon. Typically walking marriages are long term.
During these unions, a woman may become pregnant by the same man multiple times. But when children are born, they become the responsibility of the woman’s family.
Instead of marrying and sharing family life with spouses, adult Mosuo children remain in extended, multigenerational households with their mother and her blood relatives.
