SEXUAL mores are changing as the Chinese take control of the world’s sex toys.
Seventy per cent of female graduate students in Shanghai say that one-night stands are not immoral, and that living together before marriage is all right.
And China is now the dominant manufacturer globally of sex toys, its industry worth more than $2 billion a year.
China’s political structures may remain unyielding, but it is continuing to liberalise socially at a surprising pace.
The educational high ground remains, however, in the hands of conservatives. There is little sex education in schools and many parents are reluctant to endorse such information to extend beyond basic reproduction.
Hu Zhen, a sex education expert at Chengdu University, said that since such courses – when they are provided – are usually electives rather than required classes, many students skip them.
“For many, sex education mainly arrives in the form of the internet, magazines and friends,” he said. “Parents in China received little such education themselves. Therefore they don’t know what or how to tell their kids.”
A recent posting on an online forum from a student in Changsha, Hunan province, calling herself “Xiaoyou”, about her sexual misadventures, attracted 20,000 hits in two days. She says she has undergone three abortions from three different partners, and gives advice including how to choose a hospital for an abortion.
The Journalism Department at Fudan, Shanghai’s most prestigious university, asked about 1000 female students at the city’s 17 universities, about their attitudes to sex and marriage. The report was published this week.
Surprisingly, 56 per cent said they could understand a young woman becoming the lover of a rich man, while saying they would not do so themselves. Twenty per cent said they despised such behaviour, 20 per cent said they could not comprehend it, while 2 per cent said they were open to such an arrangement themselves.
Similarly, 55 per cent said they could understand young women working in nightclubs – where sexual liaisons may be considered an extension of the job. Three per cent said they might take up such work themselves.
Traditionally, marriages were arranged by families. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, the danwei, or workplace, played a prominent role in formalising marriages.
But now, as the role of the danwei has weakened with the modernisation of the economy, people – at least in urban China – are free to form their own relationships.
While 70 per cent understood living together before marriage, 7 per cent strongly endorsed it as “romantic”, while just 10 per cent viewed it as immoral. Just 5 per cent said they had already lived with a lover while at university.
But while most of the respondents expressed tolerant views about others’ sexual choices, most were more conservative in their own lifestyles, with 74 per cent saying they had not had sex.
The market for sex toys is developing fast within China, but most of the 1000 specialist manufacturers there – based in Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces – rely heavily on exports.
Manufacturer Romeo Jiang – he chose his own first name – says that China produces about 70 per cent of the world’s sex toys. His factory focuses on vibrators, dildos and fetish clothes.
But, he lamented to China Daily, “Our profit margin is only about 7 per cent. Most of the profit goes to the dealers and importers.” His factory in Shenzhen, bordering Hong Kong, has an annual turnover of about $3 million. About half its sales go to the US and 30 per cent to Europe. He originally ran a trading house, but when he began to receive requests from an American customer to source vibrators, “we decided to enter the market ourselves”.
Ma Xiaonian, deputy director of the China Sexology Association, said the new best-selling product for the industry was stimulus condoms, now accounting for 21.5 per cent of the market.
He said: “It is very different from the past, when adult products, including condoms, were not even allowed to be imported into China. Now China produces most of the global adult toys, and the industry has been booming in recent years.”
Within China, he said, demand had been growing rapidly since the first sex shop was opened, in Beijing in 1993. “Using sex toys can help couples maintain their marriage and perhaps make it even more satisfactory.”
Sexual anxieties and stresses have increased in recent years in China, especially because of the large number of couples who are split because of work or education, as demands for professional success and building wealth intensify.
According to a China Youth Daily survey, published last week, 33 per cent of 2149 respondents, in their early 20s, said they had friends in long-distance relationships. The government continues meanwhile to clamp down on pornography online, via the tens of thousands of “net police” who defend the Great Firewall of China.
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