Spiritual Pollution and the Sexual Revolution
Feb 21, 2004
WHETHER YOU are a weasel-faced God-botherer or an unrepentant dyed-in-the-wool smut merchant, sex still sells. And so, the titillating misdemeanours of prostitutes and transvestites, the complications of extra-marital affairs and the problems of sexual harrassment are now the staple diet of even the most sober of news services, including the police rag known as Inspection Daily.
Inspection Daily recently drew attention to the ongoing case of a website disseminating pornographic items. The prosecution began in the picturesque tourist city of Hangzhou this week, and as is usual in the Chinese legal system, sub judice simply does not apply. The case involves a certain Mr. Xu Yansheng, who set up a dodgy dotcom venture with two associates some time last year. Their film website – already, in the strictest sense of international intellectual property law, illegal - contained a section entitled "Adult Movies", and eventually included over 40 downloadable gems with names like "Love Chapter 12" and "Plum in a Gold Vase". They earned 180,000 RMB from the downloads before being arrested by the Internet Supervision Team of the Hangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau.
The crux of the case seems to be that young people can gain access the internet, and so, ipso facto, any adult material discovered thereon is a dagger to the heart of juvenile morality. Of course, most examples of public hypocrisy in China and the rest of the world involve protecting the innocence of children. However, most kids would not waste hours downloading questionable films from a Chinese-registered website when they could purchase a high-quality triple-X rated flesh pic from the neighborhood pirate DVD stand.
Meanwhile, the evils of the internet are again on display at the China News Service. A Shanghai woman is reported to have leapt out of a fifth floor window after a man she met online had wrestled her to the bed and tried to fondle her, all this while ogling a pornographic website.
Things, of course, have changed, and throughout the world, ancient lusts have been transmogrified and multiplied by new technologies. The estimable Sina.com today compiles a list of various abuses of digital photography in China recently. "The moral baseline is extremely fragile," says the report, before describing the edifying case of two middle-aged men who entered a photography shop in Shenyang last year with a picture of a naked woman and a marriage certificate. One of the men offered to pay the Photoshop expert 1000 RMB to transplant the face of his wife onto the body of the naked woman. The technology is being used to cheat and insult people, and to satisfy "indecent lusts", says the report.
Many westerners, weened on decades of Cold War propaganda, are often surprised to find that people in China actually have sex drives. Novice reporters tend to begin their stints in Shanghai or Beijing hanging around in the dirtier corners of the local entertainment industry, interviewing masseuses and hairdressers and KTV hostesses before telling the world, in breathless tones, that China is the new Babylon.
Some observers have explained that the streak of puritanism that usually prevailed in Communist societies is attributable to the fact that the state – in its efforts to create Homo Sovieticus – sought to wipe out all of the frivolous bourgeois allegiances and cravings. Of course, such arguments assume that Communist societies had more power to change the way people thought than was actually the case. Crucially, most Communist revolutions took place in repressed backwaters, and the normal sexual hypocrisies of the village became national policy.
Equally clearly, as a society gets richer and leisure becomes something more than slobbing out on the sofa after sixteen hours of back-breaking work at the quarry, a whole range of new possibilities then come into view. Partying and philandering require considerable time and energy, and China's urbanites certainly seem to have more and more of that. Meanwhile, you can bet that the likes of Inspection Daily will keep their slightly disgusted fingers on China's racing pulse.
