China Debates Its Sexual Liberalization
BEIJING — In a photograph on his lawyer’s Web site, Ma Yaohai stares straight at the camera, cheekbones prominent above sunken cheeks, his expression intense, almost haunted. The 53-year-old computer scientist, dressed soberly in a dark jacket and polo-neck pullover, holds a sign saying: “Swinging is no crime.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Ma, it is. Article 301 of China’s criminal law bans “crowd promiscuity,” with offenders liable to five years in jail.
On April 7, Mr. Ma and 21 other members of his swingers’ circle were tried in the central city of Nanjing on group sex charges, in a case that is roiling society and provoking heated debates in academic circles, among friends and in the blogosphere. Prosecutors accuse the twice-divorced Mr. Ma, who has since been fired from his job as a professor at Nanjing University of Technology, of organizing and taking part in at least 18 group sex parties between 2007 and 2009. Fourteen were in his own home, four in hotels and the rest in unspecified locations, according to his lawyer, Xue Huogen.
No verdict has yet emerged from the two-day trial, during which Mr. Ma was the only defendant to plead not guilty.
“This case is having an enormous impact on society, so they are deliberating very carefully right now what to do about it,” Mr. Xue said.
Yet what Mr. Ma did isn’t all that unusual, sexologists here say. In 1978, when China began its bold, capitalist-style economic and social experiment known as Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, attitudes toward sex began changing fast, along with almost everything else.
In a sign of just how fast, Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, noted how members of a rare swingers’ group in the early 1980s were treated: one person was executed, another was sentenced to life in prison and a third was given 15 years. Today, by comparison, Ms. Li estimates that the biggest online group sex site, Happy Village, has 360,000 users alone.
Ms. Li, arguably China’s most famous sexual rights campaigner, is leading a campaign to decriminalize group sex.
“‘Crowd promiscuity’ is an out-dated law, a wrong law,” she wrote on her blog, calling on the Chinese people to defend what she said were their sexual rights. Group sex is fine as long as it meets three criteria, she said: adults, joining in voluntarily, in a private place.
Countering critics who say decriminalization would lead to a decline in public morals, Ms. Li points to the 1997 abolition of the laws against “hooliganism,” long a punishable, catch-all term for sex outside marriage, and “counterrevolution.”
“That didn’t lead to an upsurge of hooliganism or counterrevolution, did it?” she asked.
In March, Ms. Li persuaded delegate friends at the National People’s Congress to submit a proposal she drafted to abolish the “crowd promiscuity” charge at the congress’s annual meeting.
Swinging is just one of a slew of controversial habits arising from China’s sexual liberalization. Sadomasochism clubs, many organized online, are flourishing. Many are new, such as one in the city of Baoding in Hebei Province. “Come along and fulfill your long-suppressed happiness and excitement,” the post says. “Only Baoding residents need apply.”
Many sex shops have sprung up in China’s cities in the last decade. At Purple Passion Adult Health Store, one of four on just two streets in my neighborhood in Beijing near the embassy district, a 43-year-old saleswoman who gave her name as Ms. Wang stood in a tiny, 2-square-meter, or 22-square-foot, space with floor-to-ceiling shelves festooned with sex toys, bondage gear and Chinese-made Viagra.
“We get all sorts of people,” she said. “Older men who are divorced, or whose wives have gone to another city to put their child in school there. Single women, too.”
“They say to me, ‘Don’t tell anyone what I bought.’ I put their purchase in two black plastic bags to hide it.”
Business had been slow that day, a rainy Sunday afternoon, but Ms. Wang said normally she did “several hundred” renminbi in sales a day. Not a lot, but steady, she said. “There’s no harm in it.”
Yet Ms. Wang has her limits.
“Oh, no!” she exclaimed, when I asked about the Nanjing case. “That is too chaotic. It’s unhygienic. They could catch diseases from each other.”
Anecdotal evidence suggests the pro and con camps in Mr. Ma’s case are about evenly split. Supporting that, a survey published in 2007 by Renmin University in Beijing, on sexual attitudes in China between 2000 and 2006, found that three in five people considered the “crowd promiscuity” law too severe. Two in five believed group sex was no crime.
In early April, another survey by Phoenix TV found that 69 percent of respondents believed he should not be tried; 47 percent said swinging was not a crime.
Meanwhile, Mr. Ma is protesting his innocence, while packing his bags and getting his things ready to go to jail.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he told the television station. “And there was no force involved or organizing. Why is the whole country picking on me?”
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