The Chinese government’s problem of controlling the Internet and thus the information that it allows its citizens to have access to goes beyond just political content. Authorities in Shanghai have arrested a woman named Huang for uploading a sex video.
The twelve-minute video, which is still on the Internet despite the Chinese government’s best efforts to remove it, depicts the woman named Huang doing unspecified sex acts, according to an official source. It was one of the most popular Internet videos in China, being downloaded for view by thousands every month. The woman named Huang had also set up a blog and attempted to sell interviews of herself in order to profit from her notoriety.
Pornography is illegal in China, but also regularly available on pirated DVDs. This kind of dichotomy between what is officially forbidden and what is privately indulged in is not unusual under a tyrannical regime. Sex is the ultimate private act that any regime that views privacy with suspicion will want to control and restrict.
George Orwell, in his classic novel on tyranny 1984, offered an extreme example of how this works in his fictional regime Oceana.
“Winston makes his next entry in his diary. He writes about a horrible encounter he had three years ago with a prostitute. Remembering the incident leads him to reflect that the sex instinct was another area of human life, which the Party sought to kill or at least distort. Only the “proles” the so-called lower class people who did not actually qualify to belong to the Party were acknowledged to have sexual instincts. Among Party members all love and eroticism was removed from the sex act. Marriages were permitted, but they had to be officially approved and were to be undertaken for the sole purpose of begetting children who would grow up to be responsible Party members. Permission would be denied if the couple showed any signs of being physically attracted to each other. Ideally the Party would prefer complete celibacy, which would mean that men and women would forge fewer bonds of individual loyalties and children could be produced artificially. Failing this, it tried to present the sex act as a rather disgusting preliminary necessity.”
Very few regimes, even China, have even approached that level of control exerted over the sexuality of its citizens. Modern Iran is officially puritanical and Afghanistan under the Taliban mistreated women savagely, largely because of their sexuality and thus their potential to divert men from their true Islamic duty. The Zulu Kingdom under Shaka Zulu actually forbade sex to men until they had “washed their spears”, i.e. killed an enemy in battle, which became a problem after the Zulu Kingdom conquered almost everyone in sight.
It is no wonder indulgence in sexuality has, from time to time, been seen as an act of liberation as much as it is of pleasure, love, and procreation. It was thus in America and elsewhere in the West, starting in the 1960s and tempered, at least, by the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. If people are willing to defy official regulations on sex, what else will they be willing to defy? Official crackdowns, like arrested Internet porn stars, usually just have the effect to drive that sort of thing underground. There is nothing quite as erotic, after all, that the forbidden fruit.
Source: Chinese Internet porn sensation detained by police, Ben Blanchard, Reuters, December 21st, 2008
