Protecting "our" females

Recently there has been a miniflap about a professor in China and his vituperative reaction to the Shanghai Sex blog, chroncled at ESWN (original post, further info) and Peking Duck and several other major China blogs. ESWN has a list of related links:

• The Chinese Waiter Hongkie Town Redux
• Sex, Pride and a Bit about Israel fiLi's world
• Shanghai Sex Blogger Scandal The Peking Duck
• Sex in the city gets a Chinese turn China Herald
• Immorality and Word of Mouth Confused Analects
• A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing Sex and Shanghai

What's interesting is not that some Chinese bigot feels compelled to express his contempt for a western slut, but that there is so much interest in this story. The oversexed foreigner on the prowl for local pussy is a common sterotype here in Taiwan constantly exploited by the media, especially by the tabloid Apple Daily, which often simply makes up stuff about foreigners and sex. Violence charged with sexual jealousies is not uncommon outside certain bars -- Feli here chronicles another inventive story by Apple Daily about her own personal experience with one case, remarking:

So the five of us ended up going to a local dance club, located behind the Sogo and Mitusoki Department Stores in downtown Kaohsiung. I haven't been there in about six months because I'd heard about a number of incidents involving Caucasian foreigners being beat up or hit over the head with a beer bottle for simply talking to, or dancing with a local Taiwanese woman.

Taiwanese often snidely remark that foreigners only date the ugly girls -- the ones with bronze skin, freckles, and secondary sex characteristics, leaving the pretty girls -- the ones who look like they're about to expire after being locked for a month in a trunk underground -- for the local men. I have gotten several thank you letters from local women for pointing this out -- they didn't believe it when their Big Nose husbands told them their freckles gave them an energetic and appealing attractiveness to foreigners until they read it on my website. I have also been the victim of harassment from Chinese men who don't like it that I mention that *GASP* Taiwanese women date foreign men and that there is a whole population of local women here who will not get married. The kind of scapegoating nonsense manifested by Professor Zhang against the Shanghai Sex Blog is an all too common visceral reaction. And the responses to it have remained largely at the visceral level.

I wish the Zhangs of the world would wake up. If women are sexually mistreated in Asia; it is predominately by Asian men. In Japan there are guides published about Taiwan for Japanese sex tourists; in China there are villages for the mistresses of Taiwanese businessmen. All over Asia women flow out of rural areas and into urban whorehouses at a rate even the insensate reproductive powers of H. sapiens can barely keep up with, yet this vast river of women cannot slake the thirst of brothels that have carpeted half a planet in prostitution and slavery. In Bangkok children are chained to beds and serve 50 men a day; in Taipei aborigine girls are forced into prostitution; Nepal is stripped of females for the brothels of Bombay; across Asia the remaining comfort women cry out to Japan for justice.

And none of this happens to satisfy the demands of western English teachers who live in Asia.

The problem isn't that Zhang is an idiot or that the foreigner is a slut. Every sensible person already knows that. It is that the cultural habit of scapegoating foreigners -- one found in every culture -- prevents focus on the real issues of male-female relations in Asia: the lack of legal equality, the prevalence of female infanticide, slavery and sex trafficking, and social expectations that place women in impossible and inferior positions. What the Zhangs of the world need is education, not a scornful dismissal.

[Taiwan] [China] [Shanghai Sex Blog]