Good news for Yao

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-09-15-china-sex_x.htm

More over Mao, today's Chinese revolution is sexual

By David J. Lynch, USA TODAY

SHANGHAI — From the dance clubs that line leafy Fuxing Park to the crowded shopping boulevard of Nanjing Road, young people here are doing some extraordinary things in public.


"Young people today dare to wear anything," says a clerk at a Shanghai lingerie store called "Fantasy."
AFP

Like holding hands. Or hugging. Or even, occasionally, stealing a kiss.

Behind closed doors, they're not stopping there. "My parents' generation was pretty conservative. For instance, holding hands would be something they wouldn't do before getting married," says Jin Jiao, 25, a female pharmaceutical researcher. "I know some young people even younger than me who are very open to premarital sex. ... They think it's a good way to get to know each other."

A quarter-century after this country abandoned doctrinaire communism, it's not just China's economy that's changing. Western influences and increasing urbanization are transforming attitudes toward sex. Young Chinese tell researchers they are having sex earlier, experimenting with different positions for intercourse and even masturbating more often than their elders. About 40% of married men under age 30 say they had premarital sex, compared with just 17% of those in their 40s, according to sociologist William Parish of the University of Chicago, who led the most recent major study of Chinese sexuality. Likewise, 31% of younger married women report having had sex before taking their vows,up from just 12% of those who came of age in the 1980s.

"We call it the Chinese sexual revolution," says Pan Suiming, 53, of People's University. "It started in the 1980s, and it's still going."

Just two decades ago, this was a country where most marriages were arranged by an individual's parents. Western-style dating was virtually unknown, and men and women alike dressed in shapeless, blue cloth "Mao" jackets. What was worn underneath the sack-like outerwear hardly mattered.

Today, people increasingly choose their own spouses. Dating is commonplace, and at a lingerie store called Fandecie ("Fantasy"), sales clerk Li Xue says women in their 20s and 30s increasingly crave sex appeal. Those who have had children are reclaiming their figures with push-up bras, while younger women are snapping up strapless supports and thong underwear to complement skin-baring fashions. The store's most expensive product is a sleek, $326 bustier, available in pink and black. "Young people today dare to wear anything," Li says.

Of course, behavior that some see as refreshingly liberal, others view as shockingly libertine. On May 26, Hunan Satellite Television station began airing nightly weather forecasts hosted by a beauty queen named Wu Rong. Her five-minute reports were an immediate sensation, probably more because of her skimpy outfits and erotic poses than any meteorological acumen. But a month later, scandalized government officials ordered her off the air, says Liu Bin, the station's editorial director.

"The door of sex has been opened, but it's only half opened," says Liu Dalin, director of the China Museum for Sex Culture.

Liu, a sociology professor at Shanghai University, conducted the first major study of Chinese sexual practices in 1989. He surveyed more than 20,000 individuals in urban and rural areas, but the results couldn't always be taken at face value. For example, 97% of married women ages 30 to 40 told researchers that they were satisfied with their sex lives. Yet, 50% also said that their husbands typically spent less than 30 seconds on foreplay. Even a decade after China began opening itself to foreign influences, the women were loath to admit any sexual discontent.

Sexless in the City

The Chinese hadn't always been so reticent. Under the ancient Tang and Han dynasties, Chinese society was relatively open about sex, Liu says. Women had the right to divorce, were free to talk with and date men and, in some regions, even went naked above the waist, he says.

By the early 20th century, Shanghai was known as the "w**** of the Orient" for its licentiousness. Just as today's sexual opening is part of a larger transformation, easy sex for the European businessmen who ran Shanghai in that era was a metaphor for foreigners' dominance of a weak China.

The Communist takeover of 1949 put a stop to all that. Mao Zedong's commissars crusaded to stamp out prostitution and enforced a puritanical public morality that regarded individual desire as a bourgeois indulgence. As late as the 1980s, dating was almost unheard of on college campuses.

But as the country welcomed foreign investors to remake the economy, attitudes began changing. According to Parish, 95% of women in their 20s now say they have employed the "woman on top" position during intercourse, something almost unknown to their elders. And in Pan's research, nearly two-thirds of men ages 26 to 35 acknowledged masturbating — twice the percentage of 36- to 41-year-olds.

Contemporary China is trying to balance greater openness with an avoidance of the worst excesses of the West, Lui says. It's in accord with the ancient principle of zhong yong zhidao (roughly translated, it means "avoid extremes").

China remains far less overtly sexualized than the USA or Europe. State-run television is tame compared with Western fare. Magazines shy from publishing the sort of near-naked cover photos that dominate some newsstands in New York and London.

Even amid today's unmistakable air of openness, Shanghai hasn't quite returned to its anything-goes past. This spring, when a new television series revolving around the social lives of four twentysomething urban women began airing here, it was immediately likened in some foreign media reports to the American cable hit Sex in the City.

The Chinese program Pink Ladies is like Sex in the City — except without the sex. Government censors forbid televising anything even remotely explicit. "You can show kissing. You can show a man and woman going into the bedroom. But you can't show the part where the relationship happens," says Zhuang Liqi, 47, general manager of the Shanghai branch of China International TV Corp.

Still, Chinese television is slowly pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. In a production booth down the hall from his 17th-floor office, Zhuang previews his newest show: a stylish sitcom called Protein Girl.

As the series pilot flickers to life on a Sony monitor, a leggy brunette wearing a man's dress shirt is doing a handstand in her apartment. As the shirttail flops over her face, there's a momentary glimpse of her cherry-red brassiere. A later scene shows her startling a male visitor by emerging from the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel.

But it's a big towel, tightly wrapped, and that's about as racy as things get. "You don't really have to talk about sex to make a show popular," Zhuang says.

His target audience isn't waiting for the official media to catch up to society. In the city center, cell phone salesman Zhang Jun, 26, says he has seen plenty of sex in western DVDs. "The Chinese media is trying to be conservative with sex, but there's lots of ways to see things from other countries. They should be more like the Western media because the more conservative (our) media is, the more curious young people are," he says.

From dowry scroll to soft p*rn

Changes from within and without are making an official response, in the form of more sex education, essential, Liu says. As China develops economically, nutrition and living standards are improving. That's especially true in its coastal cities, which were the earliest to experience market-oriented reforms.

A better quality of life means adolescents are reaching puberty earlier. Women born before the 1949 Communist Revolution on average were past their 17th birthdays when they had their first menstrual period. By 1980, the average for Shanghai girls was down to 14 years and six months. Today, the average is 13 years and nine months, and it's still falling.

Thanks to the Internet, soft-p*rn images are available on the personal computers and cell phone screens of China's young. The government is cracking down on Internet portals that offer such photos and tries to bar access to pornographic Web sites, but it is often unsuccessful. Pan says 70% of men and one-third of women say they have watched p*rnography in the past year.

Since the 1980s, eighth-graders in Shanghai schools — among the country's most liberal — have received sex education. "Now, we realize that age 13 or 14 is too late," says Liu Yongliang, executive president of the Shanghai Family Planning Association. "Some kids start from the sixth grade, and they need to be educated earlier."

Today's sex education, of course, is an improvement over the 19th-century tradition of the dowry scroll. The silk painting, bearing explicit depictions of couples in a variety of sexual positions, was given to brides on their wedding night as a sort of 11th-hour "how-to" manual.

Young people aren't alone in demanding more information about sex. In March 2000, when Shanghai's Premarital Health Clinic inaugurated a 24-hour telephone hotline, it drew 300 calls a day, almost twice what organizers had expected. The volume has eased since then, but physician Tong Chuanliang, 40, routinely fields questions about premature ejaculation, impotence, duration of the sexual act, pregnancy and family planning.

"When we were in college, getting pregnant at that age was almost impossible. Boys didn't even date girls," he says. "Now, for senior high school students, college students, having a relationship is a very natural thing."

The cost of sexual openness

The greater openness toward sex has come at a cost. Mandatory premarital health exams here are uncovering a steady increase in cases of syphilis, Tong says. And prostitution, after being all but extinguished after the communist revolution, has roared back.

"Prostitution ... has taken off absolutely everywhere. The average county seat has a red light district. Commercial sex is an omnipresent feature of Chinese life," says James Farrer, author of Opening Up:Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai.

It certainly is in Shanghai. On a recent night, dozens of perfumed young women wearing incongruous evening gowns waited for customers in the third-floor lobby of a downtown karaoke club.

More than 100 women work here, typically in rooms 12 by 15 feet outfitted with a color television, karaoke machine and U-shaped brocade couch. Over the course of several hours, they will croon popular songs for their male clients, caress them and laugh at their jokes. The women earn about 300 renminbi ($36) a night in tips and perhaps 6,000 renminbi ($725) a month, good money for those lacking a college degree. But the nightly bouts of heavy drinking take a toll on their health.

Many of the karaoke hostesses are from farming villages where job prospects are poor. But the two hostesses talking to an American visitor say they are Shanghai natives, eager to save enough money to open a small shop and then, hopefully, find a man for a normal relationship. "Making this money isn't easy," says a 24-year-old who gives her surname as Zhang.

The two women insist they never go home with customers when the club closes around 2 a.m. But in a country that has enthusiastically embraced the market principle that everything has its price, many others do.

China's hard-charging economy can't produce enough legitimate jobs to absorb everyone who needs one, so the government's periodic crackdowns on clubs like this seem half-hearted.

As they celebrate society's greater personal freedoms, most experts are resigned to the persistence of a thriving sex industry. "It's like opening a window," Liu Dalin says. "The fresh air comes in, but there will definitely be bugs that come in, too."