China Hope Live » Sex & Sexuality

Colonialism’s new frontier: Western beauty ideals plague China and the world

Joel 大江 — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:30:26 +0000

I’m riding in a 4×4 with Sweetbert, my Tanzanian language tutor out in the sticks of rural Tanzania — no electricity, TV, internet, nothing, except the odd battery-powered handheld radio. Local entertainment, from what I can see, mostly involves the occasional regional drumming-and-dance competition and getting drunk on village brew banana beer. We get to talking about women, and when I mention that North American men like skinny women, he busts a gut laughing, literally can’t stop. “A beautiful woman must be FAT!” he exclaims between uncontrollable giggles, incredulous, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, as if finding thin women attractive was the most counter-intuitive thing he’s ever heard and can barely even imagine. A few years later he gets married and sends a photo of him and his ‘fat’ wife, of whom he is very proud.

Meanwhile, Western beauty ideals have metastasized throughout every media-saturated corner of the planet. We’re all well accustomed to a large daily dose of visual B.S., but that doesn’t mean it smells good, or that it’s healthy. Criticism is piling up in the West, from “Health Warning” label legislation to movie-style rating systems for manipulated photos. According to the speaker quoted below, our malignant Western beauty ideals are also compounding body issues in the already patriarchal beauty cultures of China and the rest of the world.

It’s no secret that Western beauty ideals rule in first- and second-tier Chinese cities. Of course, traditional and modern Chinese culture has plenty of its own ideas about which faces and bodies and postures, etc. are attractive. But walk through any mall and count the number of ads that use Caucasian models. The highest beauty ideals in China are Western. And the highest beauty ideals in the West require surgically and digitally altering the bodies of underfed, underweight, unhealthy women.

I’m thinking about this because of a recent speech at the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which opened fire not at oppressive patriarchal traditions of 2nd and 3rd World cultures, but at us, calling out our societies for our hypocrisy in criticizing foot binding and female genital mutilation, and for the cancerous effect on women that aggressive Western corporate marketing has in societies around the world, specifically including China. I’ve excerpted much of it below, but the whole thing (not long) is worth a read. Regardless of how much you disagree, it’s a fantastic conversation starter. Emphasis from the original.

Susie Orbach Speaks at the UN Commission on the Status of Women

. . .what has been overlooked have been the vicious body practices that girls and women have come to take on themselves in the west in the mistaken belief that they are doing good for themselves. . .

The west congratulates itself on its distance from Eastern practices of foot binding which constrained and limited women. It fails to see the links between toe operations carried out now to enable women to fit into the latest 4 inch high heels.

The west smugly criticises FGM while sanctioning labiaplasty and the remaking of the genital lips which has become a growth area for cosmetic surgeons.

The west makes appeals about famine victims in the southern hemisphere but has failed to notice the voluntarily insane food practices that exist in their own countries.

The west hasn’t noticed that these are forms of violence and constraint for women. . .

. . .the engine which feeds the tyrannical hold that beauty exercises on girls and women’s energies, dollars and sense of self. . .relates to those industries which grow rich on creating body distress and body hatred in girls and women. . .

The beauty companies, the fashion houses, the diet companies, the food conglomerates who also of course own the diet companies, the exercise and fitness industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the cosmetic surgery industry combine together, perhaps not purposefully or conspiratorially, to create a climate in which girls and women come to feel that their bodies are not ok. They do this through the promotion of celebrity culture, through advertising on every possible outlet from billboards to magazines to our electronic screens, through the funding of media outlets which can only exist because of their economic support. . .

As immoral and unethical as the activities of these companies are in and of themselves, the economics of growth as we currently conceive it depends upon their extending their markets. L’Oreal’s growth rate in China is 26%. They achieve this not by marketing their lipsticks and hair products to Chinese women per se but by marketing the western body as the body to have to Chinese women. They and the other beauty, fashion, media companies promote the western body to the new economies as a way of finding a place to belong in the maelstrom and confusion of modernity.

Alongside the disseminating of western ideals of beauty to Asia, Africa and South America, is the export of the consequences of these ideals: body hatred and body anxiety. This is the emotional fallout from the endeavours of these industries and the basis on which they make their extraordinary and obscene profits.

. . .They are mining bodies as though they were a commodity like coal or gold. Women’s bodies all over the world are being designated as profit centres.

As the western ideal becomes plastered over the globe we bear witness to the loss of indigenous bodies. This is a new frontier of colonialism. Mad eating is normalised. Western style bodies are revered and local bodies are swallowed up as fast as demise of local languages. [Link]

I wonder what my Tanzanian language tutor would think. Then again, they were selling skin-whitening creams in East Africa, too.

Related China & Beauty stuff from the blog:

Beauty & Young Love… with Chinese characteristics
White is beautiful… (by Jessica!)
Beauty is all in the eye…lid? (by Jessica!)
瓜子脸 (“melon seed face”)
小鸟依人 (“birdie leaning on a man”)
Woman, man, or East Asian pop star?
The Men and the Boys
On love and being “smart enough” (by Jessica!)
“Beauty”
Beauty (topic)

Related stuff from the web:

A Photoshop reality check
A Perceptual Metric for Photo Retouching
Does the media require a Photoshop score?
Legislating Beauty
Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? No (WSJ)
The Paris Paradox: how sexualization replaces opportunity with obligation
Any-Body.org – …”challeng[ing] the limited physical representation of females in contemporary society.”
CollectiveShout.org – “a grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture.”
MelindaTankardReist.com – “…is well known for her work on the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls and working to address violence against women”
PS Disaster’s Greatest Hits
The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesn’t want you to see (BoingBoing)
Vandalism is a crime, but… (creative, but illegal)
U of Chicago research: conservative Christian women have the best sex. [Research, Slate article].
“Fotoshop by Adobé“:

Young Chinese non-residents skewing New Zealand abortion statistics

Joel 大江 — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 23:02:50 +0000

According to a study published in the New Zealand Medical Journal, young, Chinese non-residents and new immigrants are the predominant ethnic group having abortions and impacting New Zealand’s abortion statistics. Many factors are mentioned, including, “ethnic Chinese women lack adequate contraceptive education, demonstrate distrust of non-barrier methods, believe men should provide the condom, and mistakenly believe contraception unnecessary for the first week following menstruation. . .Abortion may be used for family planning, rather than as back up for contraceptive failure.” See Non-Resident Birth Care and Abortion.

For more on abortion and China:

China’s sexual education, taboos and consequences

Joel 大江 — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 03:58:24 +0000

China’s a very interesting place right now in terms of sex education, sexual behaviour, and tenacious, strong taboos surrounding discussion of sex.

When we first landed in Tianjin (2007) we walked to Chinese class, and noticed that the walls lining the sidewalk outside of residential and school compounds had condom boxes affixed to them. The anonymous (though still public) nature of the transaction made sense to me, given that sex talk was still very much taboo and buying condoms at a convenience or grocery store risked a scowl or scolding from the cashier if the customer looked young.

Here’s a picture of one kind (they didn’t all come with cute posters and fancy framing):

关注生殖健康，共建和谐家园
Pay Attention to Reproductive Health, Together Build a Harmonious Home
关注生殖健康，构建和谐社会
Pay Attention to Reproductive Health, Construct a Harmonious Society
安全套售货机
Condom Vending Machine (They chose “safety cover” 安全套 rather than “contraception cover” 避孕套。)
Contraceptive Social Marketing

I was reminded of these things by a recent e-mail from the author of this article: “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Didn’t Learn Because You Grew Up in China): Despite the one-child policy, millions of Chinese citizens don’t know how to have sex without getting pregnant”, and much of it rings true to what we’ve seen volunteering with a sex ed. project in Tianjin — for example, the practical difficulty of implementing sex ed. directives:

his teacher forced an assistant—who until then had not taught a single lesson—to lead the class. The younger instructor stood in front of the students red with embarrassment, unable to broach the subject. Eventually, the students were told to read the chapter themselves.

The article makes for a decent introduction to the current sex ed. situation in China, tying together the state of Chinese sex ed., cultural taboos surrounding sex talk, traditional Chinese patriarchal gender roles, the rampant, uninformed sexual activity among students, the lack of birth control use and China’s abortion epidemic.

Here’s more on sex ed., cultural taboos, and current sexual behaviour in China, including stuff about the university sex ed. project we’ve volunteered with:

Prostitution in Tianjin, China — anecdotes, STD vocab, and how one group of local women is fighting back

Joel 大江 — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 18:58:09 +0000

Even an untrained, inattentive eye will notice evidence of the pervasive prostitution industry in Tianjin. If you’re clued in to the typical indicators, you’ll see that it’s a flourishing open secret, hiding in plain sight. Study some Chinese and read up on Chinese society, and it will ooze all the more out of your increasingly legible and intelligible surroundings. In the especially attuned gaze of a group of local women who are actively reaching out to the girls and trying to provide them with alternatives, prostitution in Tianjin is like an advanced form of malignant cancer, metastasized deep into the cultural and economic fabric of the city. And Tianjin is certainly not special in this regard.

Prostitution is so ubiquitous that the clueless can accidentally find themselves in very, shall we say, unintended circumstances. It needs no red light district. Walking along the nicely treed side street to our former apartment complex, with the WèiJīn canal (卫津河) and ZǐJīnShān Rd. (紫金山路) on your right and buildings on your left, you’ll find, in order: a first-floor window converted into a sex toy shop, a bar with prostitutes, a restaurant, a bath house with prostitutes, a karaoke club with prostitutes, a preschool, our apartment buildings, and a foot-massage parlour with prostitutes.

I’m reminded of all this because I’m reading Factory Girls and came across this bit describing the garbage-strewn side streets of a factory city in the south [p.111]:

the walls of the buildings were plastered with ads for gonorrhea and syphilis clinics; in China these flyers broke out like rashes wherever prostitution thrived.

But this actually describes our second Tianjin apartment complex, which is full of retired university professors and their families, with an elementary school across the street, and is, I want to emphasize, a normal Tianjin neighbourhood; we weren’t living in a migrant worker ghetto. And it’s saturated with these kinds of ads. There are six of them just on one side of the main gate, and we accidentally ended up broadcasting three more all over North America when we announced our second pregnancy via a photo taken outside the entrance to our stairwell, which was also plastered with them. Basically no matter where you look in our neighbourhood, if you can read Chinese you see “VENEREAL DISEASE, GONORRHEA, SYPHILIS” in big bold black font. Here’s a closer look at one ad, with a partial translation (mouseover the Chinese for pronunciation):

Venereal Disease One-shot Effectiveness
性病一针灵
Imported Western medicine, one shot gives the desired effect, will never recur
进口西药一针见效永不复发
Gonorrhea (specialized outpatient service) syphilis
淋病[专科门诊]梅毒
Inflamed glans, prostatitis, spermiduct pus, painful and difficult urination,
龟头红肿、前列腺炎、精管流脓、尿痛尿难、
syphilis buds, pubic lice and itching, acute viral genital warts, vaginal odor
梅毒花蕾、阴虱阴痒、尖锐湿疣、白带恶臭
Acute viral genital warts (cauliflower-shaped granulation/anal warts) removed then
尖锐湿疣[菜花状肉芽/肛门湿疣]当时脱落
Chlamydia, mycoplasma, non-gonococcal urethritis
衣原体支原体非淋菌性尿道炎

So you can imagine how becoming partially literate in Chinese can change the feel of a place.

In the months before we temporarily left Tianjin for the second time, Jessica was volunteering with a group of women who reach out to local women in prostitution. Originally, part of the idea was to help these girls find other jobs, but it was difficult finding people willing to hire them. So the group created jobs by starting a jewelry workshop as a viable first big step out of prostitution.

Related stuff on sex and Chinese society:

One Chinese woman’s fight against gendercide

Joel 大江 — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 05:16:36 +0000

A Chinese woman in exile with a colourful past leads the fight to end sex-selective abortion in China and India: “She launched the group All Girls Allowed, which aims to end what she described as “gendercide,” the elimination of millions of girls in China and elsewhere through sex-selective abortion.” Read more here and here.

A related recent story is also here.

For more on this topic:

Teaching school girls how not to become mistresses

Joel 大江 — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 04:23:13 +0000

I’d say mistressing is an open secret in China that’s hiding in plain sight, except it’s not a secret, nor is it hiding. Anyway, it’s so bad that anti-mistressing content is being added to the curriculum in some Chinese public elementary and high schools: China: Can Education Curb a Mistress Epidemic?

This isn’t an entirely new thing in China. We have an American friend who, along with her Chinese husband, has been teaching Chinese girls how not to become mistresses for years through her Bright Future project, an “HIV/AIDS, Sexual Health and Values Training” initiative at Tianjin University. For more on Bright Future, which aims “to meet the physical, emotional and relational needs of university students in China,” see the links below:

“Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China

Joel 大江 — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 03:37:38 +0000

We’re in a Chinese hospital for an ultrasound to confirm our first pregnancy. The examining room is a bit of gong show — there’s no privacy, and forget lining up; a group of women are elbowing each other for position, crowding the examining area, each trying to shove her paperwork in the doctor’s face ahead of the others while the doctor’s busy seeing Jessica. But we don’t care, it’s a spiritual moment for us: we’re going to hear our child’s heartbeat for the first time, see his or her first picture, get real live confirmation that there definitely is a baby growing inside Jessica and that we are indeed parents. Awestruck doesn’t even begin to capture our feelings. “I want to abort it,” a woman says bluntly in Chinese, in front of everyone, as she thrusts her paperwork at the doctor. That was our first personal encounter with abortion in China.

China’s Abortion Epidemic

That was two years ago. As our language ability develops and abortion becomes increasingly ubiquitous and brash in China, we’re running into it more often. If I take a taxi and the radio’s on, chances are I’ll hear a commercial about once every 30 minutes that always starts with the same unflinching dialogue:

“Oh no! I’m pregnant! What about my career? What will I do?”
“Don’t worry! It’s no problem. You can just go to blah-blah hospital and get a 3-MINUTE, PAINLESS abortion!”

Only once have I heard them use the euphemism of “woman’s surgery” for abortion; usually they’re just unapologetically explicit. Students have told me how they were “supposed to have a baby brother” but didn’t, and most of them assume we’re planning to have more than one child because we didn’t get a boy the first time. In a country with an on-going legacy of post-birth infanticide, killing babies before they’re born doesn’t carry near if any the stigma that it does in North America, as our taxi driver last week demonstrated by bringing it up in casual conversation:

Driver: “How many kids do you have?”
Me: “Just one, but we hope to have more later.”
Driver: “Yeah, then you can have a boy!”
Me: “We don’t really care if it’s a boy or a girl.”
Jessica: “Besides, you can’t really choose that anyway.”
Driver: “Sure you can! You just wait until the belly’s big enough” [he gestures] “and then you can see. If it’s a girl you can get rid of it, but if it’s a boy, ‘Oh! We want it!’” [thumbs up sign].

Sex-selective abortion may be small talk fodder for some in China, but pre-marital pregnancy is another story:

“The moral outrage over having a child before marriage in our society is much stronger than the shame associated with abortion,” said Zhou Anqin, the manager at the clinic in Xi’an, which performs about 60 abortions each month, mostly on students aged 24 or younger.
[...]
“Luckily, in Chinese culture people generally feel that before the actual birth, you don’t yet have an actual person, so we have cases of induced abortion at seven and eight months along,” Li said. “I think this is to China’s advantage from a population control point of view … China has absolutely no need for the so-called ‘right to life’ argument, no need to introduce ideas about abortion as murder and so on.” [Full article]

The Chinese abortion epidemic is even skewing gender ratios in North America. In my hometown of Surrey, B.C., Canada where our daughter was born, there were signs taped to the walls in the ultrasound clinics telling us that the techs and doctors would absolutely not tell us the gender of our baby. I later confirmed what the nurses in the NICU had told us: too many baby girls were being killed. Turns out that a school board administrator in the 1990′s noticed that the gender ratios in greater Vancouver elementary schools were skewed in areas with large East Asian and Indian communities (see Canada’s Missing Daughters and Ultrasound ads promote female abortion). (In Canada you can abort your child for any and no reason because a person’s legal status depends on her physical location relative to a few inches of birth canal (or, it used to); if she’s on the inside, then she has not yet magically transformed from a not-a-person into a baby. Arbitrarily disallowing minority women who have a gender preference to know the gender of their not-a-baby seems just a TAD hypocritical to me.)

I try not to share the nastiest parts of our China experience on the internet. It’s rude and misleading to show up in someone else’s country and make a big deal out of the absolute worst or exceptional and freakish experiences. All our societies have brutal, inhuman aspects to them, but China takes it to a whole nother more explicit level by foregoing the faux-moral fig leaves to which Western societies still hypocritically cling. In blunt, unapologetic ‘honesty’ China carries some things further toward their logical conclusions than North Americans are currently willing to go or admit to (in the West we’re still in denial about being unable to grow Judeo-Christian moral absolute apples — like the inherent value and dignity of people — from secular, relativistic trees).

I could share some things, with photos, that people do and accept/tolerate in China that are so mind-blowingly brutal and animalistic that they make ubiquitous abortion look minor by comparison, even to the hardest-core pro-lifers — but I wont. I will, however, translate something below, because abortion in China is invading everyone’s consciousness here with increasing regularity. And since it actually invaded our home this week, I’m blogging it as a significant aspect of our China experience that we can’t ignore.

Magical Abortions… at a discount!

If you buy a pregnancy test today in Tianjin, China (we’re not pregnant), it comes with one of these (below), because if you’re potentially pregnant in China the first thing you’re apparently supposed to do is consider killing your baby. And judging from the amount of advertising, pre-birth infanticide is not only much more convenient than traditional infanticide, it’s a cash cow:

This is an abortion discount card for a local hospital. Mouseover the Chinese text below to see the pronunciation. The front says:

“PAINLESS ABORTION Assistance Card” 无痛人流援助卡
“Assistance amount: $50 援助金额：326元
Tianjin City Family Planning [Government-]Appointed Hospital 天津市计划生育定点医院
Painless Abortion Assistance Hotline 无痛人流援助热线

And then it has the address, bus routes, and website. The back is worse:

The back compares three kinds of abortion: abortion via drugs 药物流产, ordinary abortion 普通人工流产, and (in the pink column) “Blah-blah Hospital’s Hysteroscopy Obtain Embryo Surgery” XX医院宫腔镜取胚术 (a Tianjin City Women’s Federation Designated Medical Treatment Aid Hospital 天津市妇联指定医疗救助医院). Here’s what the pink column says:

Surgery eligibility 适应症 (“medical indication”):
- “up to and including the 11th week.”
Surgery time 手术时间:
- “three minutes” 3分钟。
Anesthetic 麻醉:
- “short-term effect I.V. anesthetic” 短效静脉麻醉。
Patient’s surgery experience 手术者感受:
- “sweet dreams during the surgery, wake up promptly, cozy and cheerful after the surgery” 术中甜梦、术后即醒、舒适愉悦。
Harmful side-effects 不良反应:
- “very few complications, won’t affect subsequent pregnancies, can go to work the next day” 并发症极少、不影响再次怀孕、转天即可上班。

Under the chart it says you can get:

“a free ‘early avoidance early pregnancy detection’/ultrasound exam (valued at $20 USD)”
免早早孕检测/免费B超检查（价值126元）。
“$30 USD off an abortion (Please present this card when visiting)”
凭此卡可抵扣人流手术费200元（就诊时请出示此卡）。

Related blog posts:

Related news links:

Canada’s “fourth trimester abortion”:

On the Kermit Gosnell scandal:

色

Joel 大江 — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 15:04:41 +0000

Pronounced: sè
Means: colour; appearance; sex.
Click here for a long list of words containing this character. This cartoon from a grassroots Chinese anti-porn/immoral sexual behaviour website says:

“Advise you not to have voracious appetite for lust. Careful: the character “色” has a sharp knife on top!”*

劝君莫贪色欲小心色字顶上那把利刀呀！
*(Knife = 刀)

When the news is real life

Joel 大江 — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 14:50:25 +0000

For some Chinese people, that stuff we hear about in the news or read about in history textbooks is real life.

I’m sitting in the office with a student. Students often come in to chat during office hours — this one’s in her early 20′s. She asked about us planning to eventually have another child, and then started casually telling me how she “was supposed to have a little brother” but the government wouldn’t allow them to “so they just killed it” in the second or third month of pregnancy. She says she doesn’t know the details, but “at that time it was very strict” and they couldn’t just choose to pay the fine for breaking the One Child Policy and have their second child (like some of my other, richer and better-connected students have). Then she went on wondering what it would have been like to have a brother.

It makes sense that she’s talking about it so casually. I’ve read enough about China (and heard enough of those horrible radio ads for “3-minute” “painless” abortions: “Oh no! I’m pregnant! But I just started a new job — what about my career?” “Don’t worry about it! You can just…”) to understand how these kinds of situations are so common that regular people like my student naturally talk about it like it’s no big deal. Of course, the fact that a person could discuss this kind of situation so nonchalantly only demonstrates just how extra horrible it is; the brutality is not just barbaric, it’s also commonplace.

It’s always interesting when the things you read about in the news and in history books suddenly appear before you in the life of someone you know. Like a sudden reminder that no matter how well we get along, the world my students come from is very, very different from my own.

A similar reminder happened in class two days ago — that’s two days before June sixth, a major but unmarked anniversary (I promise you know what happened in China on that day, even if you don’t recognize the date). I was facilitating a free talk session with about fifteen students. One of them was 32 years old and living in Tianjin in nineteen eighty-nine, another was 19 and living in Shanghai. Others were only children at the time, while some weren’t born yet. All they wanted to do was talk about the event, about what they remembered, what happened in their cities and what they saw — none of them were sympathetic to the gov. I wanted so bad to ask so many questions, but if it came out that I instigated or encouraged discussion of that particular topic I’d be risking trouble with my employer. I tried to steer the discussion elsewhere several times, and the students kept bringing it back. Anyway, it was interesting to see history come alive in memories and stories of my students. It’s easy to talk with them everyday and forget that they’ve experienced some crazy stuff and have all kinds of stories to tell.

Related stuff:

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publishes the latest and most negative data on sex-selective abortion in China

Joel 大江 — Fri, 21 May 2010 02:52:09 +0000

From: A Study of Sex Selective Abortion in China
“Today, almost 20% of the pregnancies that happen in China are manipulated using the simple method of ultrasound scan to determine gender, followed by abortion in case it is a female.
[...]
“This shows that sex selective abortion is not a minority problem practiced by a few rogue parents. It is a very common occurrence, with large parts of the population and the health sector taking part in it. In spite of the illegalization of ultrasound scans for sex detection in the 90s, it is obvious that a large part of the doctors are colluding with the public to ignore the law. In short, in most parts of China practicing sex selective abortion is extremely easy and extremely common. Practically anyone can do it.”

Related: