Letters to the Editor
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The Mosuo
"Among the Mosuo people on the Tibetan plateau tradition dictates that women not only head their households and hold the purse strings but choose their sexual partners rather than marrying."
Yes, well I can speak from personal experience: I spent a week among the Mosuo some years ago.
The division of labor among the "matriarchal" Mosuo (who the author of this entry clearly admire) is roughly what you'd expect to find in a 1950s household, with women doing cooking and child-rearing and things inside the house with men doing hunting, construction and things outside the house. It is precisely this division of labor (according to my Women's Studies textbook) which forms the basis of how women are oppressed... yet it precisely what Mosuo women seem to prefer.
What's more, if you tried to convince them that American women are treated like second-class citizens, they'd laugh their heads off.