The Changing Chinese Sexual Climate (Essay Sample)

Asian Popular Culture: The Changing Chinese Sexual Climate
by Student’s Name
Course Number
Tutor
College Affiliation
Department
June 2, 2014
The Changing Chinese Sexual Climate
Asia is a vast continent comprising of many countries with diverse cultures. Asians share similar traditions with many other cultures, for instance men are usually designated as bread-earners while the women are supposed to be caretakers; Asians have also viewed femininity and virility in terms of the complementary but also hierarchical pair of positive and negative. As such, Men were strong and women weak, men smart and women unintelligent, the long history of Confucian teaching and regal endorsement in China reinforced the notion that women were inferior as compared to the male counterparts (Wasserstrom and Brownell, 2008). In matters relating to sexuality women were supposed to be modest and demure; that has gradually changed as women dauntlessly flout their beauty and sexual prowess. This research study will probe into the modern day Chinese culture giving special attention the changing Chinese sexual climate. For a long time, Chinese people have been professed as being prudish about sex, but this judgment is incongruous with the culture’s rich textual history of erotica and pornography, which strictly remained at par with the administered sexual Puritanism of the Chinese Communist society.
In the early twentieth century there was social revolution which advocated for free love; this revolution spawned radical masses who sought to establish sexual liberty. The people were nonetheless misinformed about sex since they were tethered to conservative domestic arrangements which were brokered by parents and lineage heads (Ruan,2006).Since the 1980’s however, there has been a budding trend of self gratification and sexual exploration the post-revolutionary period has eliminated sexual repressiveness giving way to sexual license where young people freely express their affections publicly, engage in pre-marital sex going as far as experimenting on same-sex alliances(Evans, 2007). Unfortunately, sex education in China lags disturbingly behind sexual awareness and the enormity of these cultural effects is so great as to make up an uprising in national mind-set.
In the modern-day china, just like in the expansive stream of global media in which the country wades, sex has become a discrete and expanding currency. For instance, all of the county’s urban centers have a new crop of massage parlors, singles’ bars, hostess bars, karaoke lounges business ventures instituted to pave for sex to thrive. Notably, in the exotic sites of tourism and in the nation’s autonomous regions, commercial sex is accessible and its availability unrestricted and polymorphous (Farquhar, 2010). As far as sex trade is concerned, money is the king while sex is its servant; this attitude is ironically bound up with local politics. In 1999 the Shenyang, Mu Suixin mayor cultivated institution of prostitution as a job option in effort to combat the alarming unemployment trend, this trend was ironically embraced and contribute immensely towards the nation’s Gross Domestic Profit (O’Connell, 2009). Through the Shenyang’s sex trade, the mayor has been able to raise 30% tax through the innumerous places of entertainment; this mayor has inspired the other mayors in other regions to follow the suit.
In some other hyper-urbanized areas of China like Guangzhou, Hong Kong sex is both unavoidable and profitable. There is a blossoming cultural insurrection of sexual commodities visible everywhere: pornographic books, audaciously displayed tattoos, supermodel contests, pin-up calendars, clinics for treating sexually transmitted diseases, prostitution, condom promotion, sex slavery and women going for surgery to enhance their breasts(Zha,2005). On the streetscape there is proliferation of visual images of scantily clad women and images of the body throughout the commercial blandishments of the modern day. There is notable growing character in the China’s sexual climate: there are budding sex education programmes in schools, legal guarantees of reproductive freedom, to the scientific study of sexual relations, to the commercial pathology of sex work and, regrettably, the gruesome epidemiology of sexually transmitted disease. In the Haidian district of western Beijing, universities have access to sex education books while in the ,Jilin province in the provincial government enacted a law allowing that single women legal marriageable are at liberty to bear children.
Since 1980’s there was a pristine scientific quest for sexual knowledge and sexual practice that was concluded in the first national survey dabbed the ‘Sex Civilization Survey’ (Wasserstrom and Brownell, 2008). Since that time, many seminars and conferences relating to sexuality and present-day sexual problems have been organized with the aim to explore the subject of sex and reproductive health; sex education is no longer shunned but has gradually become professionalized. In that connection, there are numerous research centers relating to sex matters stationed at Beijing, Shanghai, Shaoguan and Shenzhen and china has a growing number of scientists pursuing degrees in sexology (Dutton, 2008). One of the renowned sexologists by the name Liu Dalin, shocked government officials in Shanghai in the year 2000 when he opened the first sex museum in China (Ruan,2006).
The most prevalent and the commonly discussed trend in the Chinese changing sexual climate is the astounding growth in prostitution. Report spawned by the World Health Organization (WHO) China has the largest commercial sex workforce in the world; over ten million Chinese women are prostitutes (Blum and Jensen, 2008). In China, the availability of commercial sex is not merely urban related problem since its swift expansion cannot be explained as a sudden intensification of public desire. The mushrooming market for commercial is also noticeable even in the perverse plurality of its offerings as evidenced by the numerous police records. There have been thousands of arrests related to children in sex trade, solicitations of underage sex unintentional sexual servitude, and kidnapping.
In the year 2001, in the Yunnan province the government discovered a prostitution ring involving young girls as young as thirteen who had been introduced to sex trade by the older teenagers. When questioned, the girls admitted that they indulged in prostitution due to the glamour associated with the practice and the extravagant compensation, wealth and power they obtained from their clients (Farquhar, 2010). Looking at the Chinese economic figures its apparent that commercial sex work generates up 6 and 12 per cent of China’s annual GDP (O’Connell, 2009). According to Ruan (2006), a woman working an average ‘barber shop’ solicitation post on daily basis is able to engage with one client every four days.
In the recent years, there has been budding modernized escort services which have gradually become manifestations of sex work. Enterprising women can now find jobs as ‘swim companions’ or ‘theatre companions’ of this new-fangled pornography lite. In the large cities private agencies offer employment for $40–70 a month for women willing to work as housekeepers, yet the women and girls who answer such advertisements are coerced into engaging in commercial sex trafficking(Zha,2005). In this light, the changing sex climate in china does not constitute individual empowerment. Rather, the Chinese sex industry can be recognized as a capitalist pathology resultant upon economic insufficiency and social jeopardy it can no longer be deemed as voluntary election (Ruan, 2006).
For more than ten years, prostitution and sexual transhumance has been widespread in the sites of illegal transit of drugs and people, such as Ruili where women in their early teens from Burma and Nepal offer themselves for an entire day’s pleasure for just little remuneration. As such the HIV/AIDS pandemic has been rampant amongst the transit point traffickers; as these flesh conduits and truck stops there is a growing number of migrant sex workers. In modern China, sex and sexuality are boldly venerated, displayed in billboards, magazines and television. Sex stands at the edge of the Chinese social life since it cannot be easily spoken about, scholars in high schools and colleges have developed liberal sex attitude because the society in general seems to have embraced the changing times and the unimpeded sex desire amongst the Chinese populace. When UNESCO conducted a survey in the year 2000 in both Beijing and Shanghai it was discovered that 50 to 85 per cent of women interviewed had experienced premarital sexual intercourse (O’Connell, 2009).
In the rural China the sexual atmosphere is not as intensified as the urban set-up, this is ...