China: People's Republic of Desire

It's a common scene in many western countries: Half naked women dancing on tables, bleary-eyed men watching intently. A scene like this in China would have been unthinkable a decade ago. No more. Bao Huai is the author of "In and Out" on the explosion of sex in traditionally modest China. "People no longer use sex as a yardstick of personal ethics. "We have humanized sex" says Bao. "When yobu walk on the street, you see billboards advertising Ca lvin Klein underwear. When you watch a DVD movie, the first scene may be lovemaking. People are stimulated by these images and start to think more about sex," Bao says.

The sexual revolution is afoot for some time in China, where men and women no longer hesitate to touch each other in pu blic. Talking about sex is also more common and shops in Beijing now offer an array of marital aids and specialty condoms.

Pan Suiming, a sexologist at People's University (professor of sociology at Renmin University in Beijing) conducted a nationwide survey on Chinese sexual behavior. His most notable finding: half of the urban males in their thirties say they have had more than one sexual partner. "It's not a shocking revelation compared to the West, but compared to China's own history, compared to the time when I was young, it's something amazing. If half of Chinese urban men in their thirties are unfaithful, what about their wives?" Pan says.

During the Cultural Revolution forty years ago, love and sex were denounced as bourgeois decadence. Pan explains "After the Cultural Revolution, as soon as politics changes, sex rebounded. That's why we say the Cultural Revolution is the father of the current sexual revolution."

If politics is the father - what's the mother of sexual revolution? "That's the one-child policy adopted in 1980, which shattered the Confucian belief that reproduction is the only purpose of sex" says Pan.