Chinese Sex Theme Park Demolished

On Saturday I blogged about a sex theme park (Love Land) that was set to open in China in October. Although all the pictures I had seen of the park were of dismembered female lower-halves (objectification?), I was supportive of the general idea of opening up and talking about sex.

Well, apparently Chinese officials decided to demolish the park before it was even open to the public.

Developers billed the attraction in Chongqing as tasteful and socially beneficial. But senior officials conducted an emergency tour of Love Land last weekend after it attracted worldwide publicity, state media reported today.

"The investigation determined the park's content was vulgar and that it was neither healthy nor educational. It had had an evil influence on society and had to be torn down immediately," a municipal publicity official told the Global Times newspaper.

I never really got to see exactly what Love Land was supposed to look like, but the builders' ideas about making China more open to talking about sex (and safe sex) seemed helpful to me.

Is talking about sex through a theme park really "evil"?

Thanks to Faith for the heads up!

Love Land to open in October in China

China will be opening its first sex theme park in October. Love Land will be offering workshops on sex techniques and information about safe-sex methods, along with displays of naked bodies, genitalia, and "an exhibition on the history of sex".

"Sex is a taboo subject in China but people really need to have more access to information about it," the park's manager, Lu Xiaoqing told the China Daily state newspaper.

I have blogged before about the issues China faces with not being able to discuss sex. Seems like that is still a problem, but I am not sure how I feel about the idea of a sex theme park, especially if the idea for it came from visiting this LoveLand in South Korea.

I have not been to China, and I cannot claim to know what kind of tactics would be effective at getting people to talk about sex in a way that would not only promote pleasurable, but safe sex, but the theme park thing gets to me.

I believe that the intentions behind it are good, especially considering the obstacles that seem to be in the way of talking openly about sex in China. But I wonder if this sort of set up would possibly serve to trivialize sex. The first image I saw of China's Love Land was a dismembered figure of the lower half of a nearly naked woman in the BBC article linked to (top of this post). Coupling things like that with the idea of a theme park, which is supposed to be fun, may make it difficult to have serious discussions on matters like sex. I can see some problems with this design, but it definitely looks like a step in the right direction.

Not "Cute" Enough

I've been watching the Olympics as often as possible the past few days. There have been so many things to be excited about, both as an American, and as a feminist. But last night when I heard that the little girl who "sang" at the opening ceremonies last Friday was not the same girl whose voice was heard over the speakers, I was confused.

Turns out that Lin Miaoke, aged 9, actually stood in front of the massive audience and sang while the voice of Yang Peiyi, aged 7, "who had won a gruelling competition to perform the anthem, a patriotic song called 'Hymn to the Motherland'" was being broadcast.

The reason behind this? Yang Peiyi was found unsuitable for the role because of her teeth, although her voice was deemed perfect.

Worse than that:

Mr Chen said the initial hopefuls to sing the anthem had been reduced to ten,
and one, a ten-year-old, had originally been chosen for the quality of her
voice. But she, too, had fallen by the wayside because she was not "cute"
enough.

So Yang Peiyi got her chance to sing, although she was not allowed to appear in the opening ceremonies.

"The main consideration was the national interest," [the ceremony's musical
designer, Chen Qigang] said. "The child on the screen should be flawless in
image, in her internal feelings, and in her expression. In the matter of her
voice, Yang Peiyi was flawless, in the unanimous opinion of all the members of
the team."

Yeah, Yang Peiyi. You sang with a flawless voice. But even that kind of perfection isn't enough to represent China. I think it's awful that girls as young as 7 are being taught that they just aren't good enough because of a physical imperfection. Nevermind your talents! You don't have the looks to match. And looks, really, are all that matter.

"Post-Feminist Society" laughs at Marital Rape, Slavery

Cross-posted at XXBlaze

Here in our "post-feminism society", where genders are finally equal in every sense of the word (yes, that is sarcasm), we can comfortably laugh at female bondage and the antiquated notion that your wife is your property at MarryOurDaughter.com. Maybe I am just being a kill-joy, but I thought for something to be satire it required that the targeted audience, men who objectify women, could not view or say it without a shred of irony. I just think it is probably in bad taste to mock something that is not at all historical. Considering that Washington University just handed out an honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who supports marital rape, the view that marriage renders a woman the sexual property of her husband is alive and well even in the ever-praised bastion of gender equality, the Western world.

Eerily, the website reads more like a pedophile's shopping list than the lame attempt at satire it really is. From the profiles:

Katelyn F.
Age: 14
Location: Caribbean

Bride Price: $24,995

Our own Little Mermaid Katie Lynn swims like a fish and isn’t happy unless she’s getting wet! She got her SCUBA ticket at 12 and she can pull more than her weight as crew on any kind of boat or ship. She tells us she’s tired of dry land and that’s she’s looking for a husband who works on, by or in the water.

I suppose I have no sense of humor, being that I do not think that selling young girls into slavery to men is at all funny.

The testimonials, of course, sound familiar:

"Thank God for your site! Our daughter was really nervous walking down the aisle, but she seems okay now and the money we got let us keep our farm and even add on a few acres."

Because selling your daughters to keep afloat is nothing new to real people, in real places, right now:

"We were not so desperate before. Now I have to marry them younger. And all five of them will have to get married if the drought becomes worse. The bride price is 200,000 afghanis. His father came to our house to arrange it. The boy pays in installments. First he paid us 5,000 afghanis, which I used to buy food."

Accusations of shrill feminist aside, my definition of satire lies more along educational lines. Meaning, of course, that the purpose of satire is to educate people how utterly ridiculous the universal phenomenon of objectifying women really is. Piss poor attempts at being clever like the Marry Our Daughter website are, at best, getting a sick laugh out of female objectification without providing any relevant context. At worst, the site operates on the same wavelength as the ubiquitous rape joke, the headlining punch-line of every half-wit comic's cliche repertoire.

New rule: poking fun at stereotypes, especially anything resembling female objectification, is only funny if and only if sexist pigs cannot chuckle along without a shred of irony and self-reflection.

China: Children in Crisis

Young Chinese girls are suffering unimaginable horrors due to China's one-child policy. Female fetuses constitute 70% of those aborted in China and those who live are often given up for adoption to live in orphanages in horrific conditions. These young girls are malnourished, beaten, and often starved to death.

So why is China making it more difficult for foreign couples to adopt?

New restrictions are being mandated:

• The couple must be under the age of fifty.
• The couple may have no more than two divorces between them.
• The couple must have been married for at least five years.


• They must have a net worth of over $80,000.


• The parents must have a BMI below 40.
  

These children have the potential to contribute so much to the world. If they are not valued in their own countries, why are they not allowed to flourish under parents who will truly care for them?

China's sexual revolution

So here is some non-Charlotte-Allen-outrage news because I am so sick of her.

There was an article on CNN yesterday about how urban Chinese citizens have been becoming more open about their sexuality.

“China is in the midst of a sexual revolution, a byproduct of rising prosperity and looser government restrictions on private life. The relaxed attitudes about sex mark a historic turnaround from the days when love and sex were denounced as bourgeois decadence, and unisex Mao suits and drab austerity were the norm.”

Although the word sex (or “xing” as the article explains) is still rarely said in public, it was good to hear that people have been gaining more freedom. The only problem is that while sexual experience has been on the rise, Chinese sex education is still severely lacking.

“High school girls make up 80 percent of the patients at Shanghai abortion clinics during one-week school holidays, state media reported last year.”

Seems like abortions are easy to come by in China, but only because being an unwed teenage mother is an unthinkable shame.