by cornelia hediger
by cornelia hediger

All in all, our understanding of sex is far, far too limited, especially among certain people. But exactly which “certain people” I mean, I can’t quite pin down for now – maybe it’s the less educated, who only know about sex as a means of producing children; or maybe it’s the highly educated, who treat sex as a kind of sin to be painstakingly avoided… But I can say one thing for certain: confusion about sex is a problem for the entire nation.

On March 24th, a man in Nanxi County, Sichuan, was fined 3,000 yuan for downloading and viewing obscene material at home. According to the relevant provisions of the Measures for Security Protection Administration of International Networking of Computer Information Networks, issued by the Ministry of Public Security in 1997: no unit or individual may use the international network to produce, copy, browse, or transmit obscene or pornographic information. Merely browsing it is already against the law. (original article)

Similar incidents have happened before. As far back as 2002, a couple in Yan’an, Shaanxi, had their door broken down by police and were arrested for watching pornographic videos at home. On September 12 and 18 of 2008, Ren Chaoqi and Tang Shanghai were respectively convicted and fined for distributing and copying obscene videos. Netizens were all watching closely for the outcome, expecting – the way we’ve all been taught to expect since childhood – that “evil cannot prevail over good.” But in these cases, who exactly is good, and who is evil?

There are plenty of people who download or distribute pornographic videos – there are quite a few even among the people around me (oops), so by sheer numbers we make up the majority. And yet the law has forcibly intervened in our private lives – there’s simply no privacy left! Of course, the police have a strong and powerful backer – the law. Anyone who dares go up against the law is asking for trouble; refusing to comply is basically a form of self-destruction.

Many people have tried arguing with “the law” on its own legal terms. Article 68 of the Law on Penalties for Administration of Public Security stipulates that penalties apply to those who use computer networks, telephones, or other communication tools to distribute obscene information – it says nothing about keeping such material at home purely for one’s own viewing, which doesn’t violate the relevant provisions. Going further, the constitution guarantees the right to freely read all sorts of books and browse all sorts of websites – this is a citizen’s right to personal freedom, a citizen’s sexual rights. (Li Yinhe, “In Defense of the Underclass”).

But in my view, in a China where both politics and the rule of law are this chaotic right now, saying any of this to “the police” is like playing a lute to a cow. Of course, the entire nation’s sexual consciousness is confused, so it’s understandable that such pointless things keep happening – and perhaps someone will ask again, the way people used to: “who will be the next ‘man from Nanxi County’?” Really, everyone should just wave it off, laugh at the increasingly absurd state of things, go home, and – like in the picture – make love to a mannequin instead. Wouldn’t that feel a lot more satisfying?