Obsessive female fandom is having a moment. First it was the “Twilight” books and tie-in vampire-chastity-fantasy films that still have women all over the world daydreaming about being brutalized by bloodsucking aristocrats. Now, just as the first film installment of “The Hunger Games” hits cinemas, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the X-rated fan-fiction novel based around the “Twilight” films, will soon be arriving in bookstores. They’re popular not only because they flip the classic narrative on women, but because they take on three issues key to young women’s lives — sex, class and power.

Although these bestselling series share a great many readers, devotees of one particular series or another will invariably contest that they have nothing in common. True, if you had to objectively measure the fortunes of Katniss Everdeen and Bella Swan, “Twilight’s” milquetoast heroine, there is little overlap.

These are dark, violent, emotionally exhausting books. Packed with more violent body horror and buckets of blood than parents who buy them for their 14-year-olds probably quite appreciate –  certainly grislier than any equivalent series I’ve encountered aimed at young men. “Twilight” contains a scene where Bella literally has to have a cannibalistic vampire baby bitten out of her womb, and by about halfway through “The Hunger Games,” I was getting a little weary of the horrific torture sequences, the visceral fights to the death, the scaldings, stabbings and brutal police beatings, the enemies being gnawed to human jelly by genetically engineered nightmare-hounds, and just wanted to go away and read Cosmo Girl for a while. Actually, that’s a lie — I loved every second.

Both series have male fans, but they’re not specifically catered to, in the way that James Bond films, Bruce Willis films or, indeed, 95 percent of the rest of the output of the film and fiction industries don’t particularly concern themselves with the female gaze. In these series, it is women and girls who have desires, passions and problems, women and girls who act on those desires or are consumed by them, and men who are the objects of desire, even if they show up in the story addicted to the whiff of the heroine’s funky-smelling blood.

Like the Bronte novels, “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” are fairly oozing with repressed eroticism. One can no more write about extramarital sex in a book aimed at modern teenage girls than one could in a Victorian novel, but the implication drips from every page, which possibly explains the enormous volume of smutty fan-fiction on the Internet making the implicit explicit. “Fifty Shades of Grey,” meanwhile, was originally written as “Twilight” fan-fiction, and part of the reason that it is less interesting as a social phenomenon is that its apparatus of censorship does not work in the same way that it does in the teen novels, where the frantic tension of suggestion and repression drives the plot, and readers are encouraged to fill in the gaps with their own feverish imaginings — which they do, in graphic detail, on the Internet.

These stories are also fairly obviously about class. Vampire novels are straightforward tales of class treachery, all about wanting to offer yourself to wealthy social leeches who will, in return, grant you power, beauty, eternal life and pots of money; one somehow never reads about vampires who have to work for a living. “The Hunger Games,” meanwhile, is an occasionally eye-watering narrative arc about economic inequality and social unrest, in which the hero finds herself fighting to survive between the cruel, cartoonish extravagance of an overbearing ultra-capitalist state and the murky machinations of the neo-Stalinist rebels. Sex, class and power: Three things that are on most little girls’ minds far more than polite society likes to contemplate. No wonder these films have them screaming in the streets.

While VAWA has not yet faced a full Senate vote, all Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voted in February against reauthorization. Democrats are clearly trying to use this to capitalize on the recent interest in Republican misogyny, which, legislatively speaking, has become mainstreamed in the party. Sen. Dianne Feinstein asserted on the Senate floor last week that “This is one more step in the removal of rights for women.” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell shot back Thursday, citing a Politico article to suggest Sen. Chuck Schumer “is sitting up at night trying to figure out a way to create an issue where there isn’t one … to help Democrats get reelected.”

The Democrats’ latest land mine, according to McConnell and his caucus, is to have quietly made VAWA a vehicle for radical causes. Sen. Jeff Sessions complained, “You think they might have put things in there we couldn’t support that maybe then they could accuse you of not being supportive of fighting violence against women?” Sen. Chuck Grassley has accused Democrats of adding specialized provisions about same-sex partner violence, immigration and Native American jurisdictional issues that are “not consensus items,” to make Republicans look pro-domestic violence.

See if you can make sense of the following Grassley condemnation: “The substitute creates so many new programs for underserved populations that it risks losing focus on helping victims, period … If every group is a priority, no group is a priority.” Apparently, victims can’t come from underserved populations – or be particularly vulnerable because of it.

Then there is the faction of the Republican base that has always opposed VAWA, well before the recent measures. It made its opinions known in a Feb. 2 letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee signed by groups including the Family Research Council, claiming VAWA “destroys the family by obscuring real violence in order to promote the feminist agenda.” One of the signatories to the letter, Janice Shaw Crouse, senior fellow of Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, recently elaborated, saying VAWA “offers women both a ‘tactical advantage’ and a ‘powerful weapon’ when they want to ‘get back’ at a man, have regrets the next morning, or want out of a marriage for any reason at all.” (It’s not clear where any of these scare quotes come from.)

Notably, they didn’t mention the LGBT, immigration or Native American-specific provisions, though the letter did warn darkly that the reauthorization would “add expensive new programs, such as one that would serve to ‘re-educate’ school children into domestic violence ideology.”

It helps then, amid the uproar, to remember what it is, exactly, that VAWA does, and understand how its supporters have proposed to modify it. Before its passage in 1994, not all states had stalking laws, and many had weaker laws on sex crimes, both of which got an indirect push from the federal law. So did funding to help training and collaboration between law enforcement, shelters, and medical professionals. “Before, it felt like each person, each department was [dealing with victims] in a vacuum and not talking to one another,” says Sue Else, president of the U.S. National Network to End Domestic Violence.

Since its passage, the Network reports a 51 percent increase in reporting by women and 37 percent increase in reporting by men, who, despite the act’s title, are also covered under it. At the same time, the number of individuals killed by intimate partners has decreased, by 34 percent for women and by 57 percent for men. (The more dramatic figure for men may be due to a smaller overall figure being more sensitive to percentage shifts; Else also suggested in an interview that women now have more recourse before reaching a desperate situation.) An increase in protection orders, says Else, has lowered the number of instances of domestic violence, in the process reducing law enforcement and hospital costs.

The new VAWA is not as radically different from earlier versions as Republicans suggest. Longtime advocates of the law argue that the expansions for these groups are incremental. “It’s not so much novel as it is an evolution,” says Lisalyn R. Jacobs, the vice president for government relations at Legal Momentum, who has worked on VAWA since just after President Clinton signed it in 1994. “Over the course of 18 years, obviously we’ve learned a lot.” Previous versions of VAWA already included some separate provisions for Native women. Groups that work with LGBT populations already get VAWA funds in many cases. And the U.S. already issues 10,000 U visas annually for the abused immigrant spouses of citizens. The new version of VAWA would add 5,000 visas a year, “a smaller increase than has been requested by the Secretary of Homeland Security,” according to a memo from sponsor Sen. Patrick Leahy’s office.

Advocates sound exasperated that their years of effort have been ensnared in political maneuvering. Take the provisions about Native American women, who suffer domestic violence at a far higher rate than the general population, and who have been separately addressed in VAWA since its first version. “[Republicans] would leave you with the impression that this VAWA is unique in its focus on the particular needs of Native women,” says Jacobs. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” The new bill simply eliminates the hurdle for Native women married to non-Native men, as 51 percent of Native women are, and living on reservations that requires them to report abuse to non-Native law enforcement. Instead, it gives some authority to tribal authorities in responding to a domestic violence report.

“With particular respect to the Native issues,” says Jacobs, “we did not have a clue that [Grassley] had any issue about that until we got to the markup last month. Any number of people had met with his staff on numerous occasions” without hearing about any objections.

As for the immigration issue, Grassley said recently that “the questions had to do with the additions that have been made to this bill related to illegal immigrant visas.” Under the assumption that women pretend to be abused rather than be deported, Grassley tried unsuccessfully to force an amendment that would have required that the crime be reported within 60 days and that it be under active investigation, making it significantly more difficult to qualify.

But the visas already long made possible by VAWA are fairly narrow in scope: The abused immigrant spouse, child or parent has to have lost status due to domestic violence in a marriage to a U.S. citizen, and therefore be eligible to petition directly to the Department of Homeland Security to qualify for a new visa. The additional 5,000 visas will help clear the backlog that has built up due to bureaucratic red tape.

These U visas, initially created by the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, also aid in law enforcement purposes. As Jacobs puts it, “The green card can become a weapon of abuse; for example, ‘Go sell drugs for me or I’ll withdraw your petition.’”

Finally, there’s the assumption that there is some sort of vast expansion of resources or recognition to LGBT communities. In fact, VAWA grants administered by the states have gone to groups that have served LGBT communities for years; separately, in 2010, the Justice Department issued a memo clarifying that criminal provisions in VAWA apply regardless of gender or sexuality. What’s new in the most recent VAWA is the anti-discrimination language, saying that grantees can’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Like the new measures for immigrant and Native American women, the new language doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Says Jacobs, “While we knew that same-sex relationships were not the favorite things of lots of people on Capitol Hill, we didn’t think we were breaking a lot of new ground.”

While Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee were recalcitrant, the current bill still has Republican co-sponsors and supporters, including Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who publicly recanted her party-line vote on contraception and who joined the Senate women on the floor in support of VAWA. According to the New York Times, she warned her party in a closed-door meeting that if it picked this battle, it would cede the Democrats’ war on women line. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee seems to hope it can pull an “I know you are but what am I” on the Democrats with women. It recently released a video claiming it was Obama who was attacking women, mostly because he took money from Bill Maher. Best of luck with that one.

You would have to be profoundly tone deaf to not recognize the satire in recent bills proposed by female lawmakers that proclaim “every sperm is sacred” and restrict access to the blue pill. Last month, Oklahoma state Sen. Constance Johnson offered a bill in response to Senate Bill 1433 — which seriously and nonsatirically holds that a fetus at “every stage of development” has “all the rights, privileges and immunities available to other persons, citizens and residents of this state.” Her proposal states, “[A]ny action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

A handful of similar bills call for men to jump through hoops to obtain Viagra — a mandated cardiac stress test, a rectal exam, even being forced to watch a “horrific” video on the drug’s side effects. Some have managed to make a big statement without a bill: During a protest of Oklahoma’s Personhood measure, state Sen. Judy Eason McIntyre stood in front of the state Capitol with a grin on her face and holding a sign reading, “If I wanted the government in my womb I’d fuck a senator.”

It isn’t just these daring female lawmakers who are turning to humor to combat the anti-choice onslaught. Consider the scores of everyday women who have hijacked the Facebook page of Virginia state Sen. Ryan McDougle — a supporter of the state’s transvaginal ultra-sound mandate — with exquisitely detailed descriptions of their vaginas. For example: “Hey senator! just a quick hello to let you know that I’m currently ovulating! my vaginal discharge is thick and sticky and smells acidic (probably all the garlic i’ve been eating!).” In February, my Facebook news feed was filled up with repostings of a screenshot from “Morning Joe” showing an all-male panel criticizing an all-male Congressional panel on birth control. (The show certainly didn’t intend it as satire, but it read like a piece from the Onion, and women circulated it as such.) That’s not to mention recent biting commentary on the topic from comedians like Amy Poehler.

This isn’t entirely new, of course. Women have long used satire to make political points. Just look at suffragette Alice Duer Miller’s bulletpoint list of reasons why men should not be given the right to vote (a highlight: “Because men are too emotional to vote. Their conduct at baseball games and political conventions shows this, while their innate tendency to appeal to force renders them unfit for government”).

“There were a lot of women humorists in the 19th century who were going at the political system in a very similar way, and it had a very big effect on women getting the vote and being able to be admitted to colleges,” says humorist and feminist theory professor Gina Barreca. “Every generation of women sadly thinks they’re the first ones ever to do this because the tradition isn’t usually encoded.”

That said, it’s reached a fever pitch as of late. The recent comedy-infused pushback against the assault on reproductive rights builds on what Amber Day, author of “Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate,” calls a “satirical renaissance” of the last decade. It’s a result, in part of the fact that “political debate has become so heavily stage managed that there is rarely any discussion of substance happening,” she says, and talking points are “repeated ad infinitum on the debate programs, with scarcely anyone bothering to fact check or to push through to the real substance of the matter.” Contemporary satire — from “The Daily Show” to “Saturday Night Live’s” Weekend Update — offer “us a way to satisfyingly break through the existing script.”

Women are turning to satire now “for many of the same reasons others have in the past,” Day says — it’s just that the current war on reproductive rights is more motivating for vagina-havers. “What much of the recent satire has demonstrated is that there is still a lot of sanctimonious language that gets used in discussions of women’s health and sexuality,” she says. “That language is revealed as ridiculous when applied to men’s sexuality.”

That was the aim of Missouri state Rep. Stacey Newman, a Democrat, who proposed a measure earlier this month that read in part, “A vasectomy shall only be performed to avert the death of the man or avert serious risk of substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the man.” She tells me that attempts to restrict women’s reproductive rights are constant. “We deal with this all the time,” she says. “You feel like all you can do is sit there and bury your head and go, ‘Is anybody paying attention?’”

Maxberry-Carrara, of the faux sex strikers, was similarly aiming to get people’s attention, and her tongue-in-cheek protest did the trick — and the strike hasn’t even officially started yet. “What we wanted was to bring attention to the assault on women’s rights,” she says. Her hope is that by poking fun at these legislators, “the less seriously we can take them as candidates.”

Barreca, author of “It’s Not That I’m Bitter … : Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World,” says women are turning to humor right now “because it’s so much more effective than weeping or banging your shoe on that table!” She says, “The point of satire is not only to illustrate the absurdity of things but to show what the world looks like when it’s turned upside down.”

Amanda Marcotte, a feminist commentator and author, says, “Things have just gotten to the point of absurdity that you can’t react without being absurd yourself.” Thanks to recent attacks on even contraception, “ordinary women who often don’t pay attention to politics are finally beginning to pay attention,” she says. “And I think that means more opportunities to communicate through humor instead of the typical outrage thing. Humor can be very clarifying.”

Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Uncoupling,” a fictionalized account of a sex strike, points out, there’s a long tradition, “starting with Aristophanes and continuing up through a strange episode of “Gilligan’s Island” that I remember from my childhood,” of sex strikes being used for comedy. “Desperate times do call for creative and vigorous responses, and the assault on reproductive rights today certainly qualifies as desperate times. I think women need to find lots of ways to speak out and act, and this is just one,” she says.

You might ask how effective it is in bringing about actual change. Day says, “Historically, satire has often been dismissed as never actually accomplishing anything, because it is extremely rare to be able to draw a straight line from a piece of satire to a substantive political response, like a bill being passed.” (Although she gives the example of Jon Stewart and the Zadroga Act; Stewart helped shame Republicans who filibustered against extending benefits to Sept. 11 responders who died of cancer or respiratory diseases.) But this is “an overly narrow way to think about political efficacy,” she says. “When satire is successful, it functions to shift the terms of the wider public discussion. And that, in itself, is a big deal.”

On the other hand, he seemed to be really trying, whoever he was, and the panel was far from the only example of SXSW broadening from its typical-tech-dude roots. Such is the uneven distribution of progress.

As the saying goes, you can’t be what you can’t see. But this year at South by Southwest, when it came to the usually invisible, there was more to see than ever — and in prominent, big-ballroom setups. “How to Be Black” author Baratunde Thurston keynoted, as did cyborg anthropologist Amber Case and Code for America’s Jennifer Pahlka (oh, and two white dudes).

Some of that prominence was a reflection of objective achievements out in the world and the expansion of the conference’s oeuvre: Thurston was a social media superstar before he published his book; Jill Abramson is the first female executive editor of the New York Times; Lena Dunham has a hot new HBO show; Mona Eltahawy has been central to discussions of recent upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa. But some of it was just a concerted effort by some cheerful agitators who have juggled calling out problems and proposing solutions.

Why should anyone care about the demographic breakdown of a bunch of semi-professional badge-wearers? South by Southwest isn’t just an excuse to Instagram breakfast tacos or jockey for party spots on the corporate dime; it’s also one of the few places for technology, film, music and activism to converge in one place. “This is where people come to see the emerging talents. The A-listers at SouthBy will be the real A-Listers in a couple of years,” said festival regular Rachel Sklar. And though there’s always going to be some sorting, it’s still a place where it’s slightly more possible to break in and access those resources.

That’s why Peterson has continued to come back and encourages other women and people of color to come too. “We have to make sure that we’re not ceding the technological future,” she said. Of women and people of color in those spaces, she added, “If people don’t see us, they assume we don’t exist.”

The reverse is also true: The future is increasingly made up of people who aren’t white, and in the United States, at least, the educated class is increasingly female, so technology itself cedes something by leaving them out.

South by Southwest offers a particularly good opportunity for changing the usual formula. There’s the semi-democratic panel voting system, in which organizers, of which I was one, had to explicitly lay out how panelists were diverse in their opinions, ethnicities, gender and geographical location. But it’s an imperfect system, as seen in panels like this one, with a homogeneity and scale to beat any Darrell Issa House panel. (Still. Maybe some of those guys live in different states!)

Videoblogger and radio host Jay Smooth, who took that panel photo (and who, full disclosure, was on the panel I organized), points out that even such proactive systems can only go so far in a still-segregated world. “I do think it’s worth raising the conversation of why are there so many all-white dude panels within these big events,” he said, “but I think the conversation that has to be had, and the work that needs to be done goes deeper than the panel selection process and into the culture of these industries and scenes.”

At my first experience of the conference last year, it became clear to me how even nerd culture’s recent mainstream dominance — and these guys’ privileged place within it, in attending or presenting at the conference — hadn’t rid them of their feeling of social marginalization. How could they be oppressors, the thinking seemed to be, if they felt like such outsiders?

For people who feel like they’ve had to restart this conversation annually, explaining why that isn’t the whole story can get exhausting. But they still do it.

Aminatou Sow, a social media strategist, made it a habit throughout the conference to show up at homogeneous panels and blithely confront them about their lack of diversity during the Q&A session. When I’d posed a similar question on Twitter about a panel that was disappointingly all-male, the organizer, Todd Pruzan, replied, “I tried very hard not to make this panel a bunch of guys. Forgive me!” One panelist, OKCupid’s Eli Gwynn, was a black man, but I have no idea why it would be difficult to find a single woman to talk about “surprise in the social media age,” but this isn’t about my forgiveness, or anyone else’s – it’s about thinking about this stuff before anyone has to be called out after the fact.

“I think some of them are getting it,” said Sow, saying there’d been some “good, frank conversations.”

Sometimes the only solution is starting your own parallel operation. Last year, Sklar realized that her panel about women in comedy (in which I participated) was contrasting with the fact that only a single female comedian was to be featured by the official conference, a source of some online controversy. So Sklar, who also founded Change the Ratio to advocate for women in tech, corralled the sponsors and the talent for an all-female comedyshow, which played to a full house and returned this year.

Sklar says who is participating is less of an issue than who is plucked out to be visible. “I’m so tired of what is next in the community being white dudes,” she said. “Sorry. Love white dudes – made out with a whole bunch of them – but it’s not the only thing that’s going on.”

At Abramson’s “Future of the New York Times” talk, interviewer Evan Smith asked her whether she was a woman editor or an editor who was a woman. She told him that she detected a note of sheepishness in the question that she found unnecessary: “I’m proud to be the first female executive editor of the New York Times.”

Most likely the reason Smith sounded sheepish was because the first or only often feels reduced to a token and gets defensive about that being the overarching message about her. But Abramson was clearly there on the merits of her career and had no problem both substantively discussing technology and journalism while acknowledging that it means something to be the first woman.

That, too, was the message Peterson wanted to get across in her panel, getting beyond being solely an “ambassador for your race,” as one panelist put it, while still recognizing that it shapes who you are. In that vein, Sklar opted to leave gender out of the title of this year’s comedy show, unlike last year. She called it “This Is a Comedy Show” and only in the subhead mentioned the fact that it would double the number of female comedians featured at SXSW. “I’m not going to point it out anymore, I’m just going to show you the awesome,” she said.

As Peterson puts it, “It’s when we get flattened that the problem arises. You just become that black guy or that girl who talks about gender. But if it’s one of many things about you that you talk about, it’s a whole different ballgame.”

As these women age, their marriageability plummets, and they acquire a snazzy new name: “shengnu.” Used to describe an unmarried woman ever so precariously teetering near the age of 30, this word literally means “leftover woman.” The prefix “sheng” is the same as in the word “shengcai” or “leftover food.” Loosely translated, it implies that single women of a certain age in China are the stuff of doggy bags, Tupperware and garbage disposals.

Lynette (her English name) is turning 30 in two months, and all her parents wanted this Chinese New Year was for her to announce that she was getting married. A successful television producer in Beijing, she returned home for the holidays with plenty of gifts — but with no romantic prospects on the horizon, she was subject to endless needling from family and neighbors.

“One of my neighbors heard that I worked in television, and offered to set me up on a blind date with someone compatible,” she said. “I learned that he was a network administrator, and that he made 3,000 RMB ($476) a month. My neighbor considered this to be a good salary, because she thought I worked in a TV factory. Little did she know, as a producer, I pay my entry-level directors more than that. But I still went on the date. The man was very uncomfortable. It was supposed to be for dinner, but we just ended up having soybean milk, because I think he knew nothing could come of it.”

That well-educated, well-employed American women are finding themselves with fewer “marriageable” (men who are better educated and earn more money than they do) options around them is a well-documented phenomenon. It’s the “All the Single Ladies” crisis, as described by Kate Bolick in the Atlantic. “All the Leftover Ladies” of China are facing a similar fate, but with slightly different characteristics.

That’s not been the case. In 2007, the Chinese Ministry of Education listed “shengnu” as one of the 171 new words of the year. The Communist Party sponsored All China Women’s Federation, China’s most influential women’s organization, published the results of a survey that breaks women down into different categories of “leftover.” Beginning at 25, it details how women must “fight” and “hunt” for a partner, so as not to wind up alone. By 28, it implies the heat is really on, telling women “they must triumph.” Between 31 and 35, these women are called “advanced leftovers,” and by 35, a single woman is the “ultimate” leftover. This woman has met great professional success, but like the Monkey King — to whom she is compared — she is flawed in thinking that she is higher than the mandate of heaven, which we can only assume is marriage.

The survey appears to stress the urgency to marry, which, this being a Party-propagated document, is best viewed with a critical eye. Here we have a government that is feeling the aftershocks of one of its most onerous policies. Since statistically, men will already be hard-pressed to find a wife, might the Chinese government have a vested interest in ensuring that a maximum of its female citizens are married off? And, as Leta Hong Fincher suggests in Ms. Magazine, might the government, in a gentle swipe at eugenics, be particularly keen to pressure the country’s best and brightest females to get married and produce babies that could be especially enriching to the nation’s gene pool?

The holiday blitzkrieg around Lynette, the TV producer, also included another neighbor who offered to set her up with a man who had “excellent conditions,” meaning he earned a good salary and owned a home in the astronomically priced real estate market of Beijing, what most Chinese — parents, especially — see as a very coveted asset to marriage.

Nobody, though? Where are the 30 million surplus men?

In the countryside, tending to their parents and their farms. Because in Chinese society, it’s expected women will marry up, that’s exactly what most women in rural areas do. They migrate to bigger cities, find better jobs, marry men in higher classes, and in some cases, even end up providing more money for their parents than the males who remain on the farms taking care of them. In a fascinating piece for the Pulitzer Center, journalists Sushma Subramanian and Deborah Jian Lee report that these women are known as “golden turtles” for the wealth they are able to provide for their families by migrating and marrying up. Their “success” has given pause to China’s traditional preference for sons, all while leaving thousands of men behind in perpetual bachelorhood. These men, also known as “guan gun” or “bare branches,” are at the rock bottom of the marriage chain, and although equally strapped for an available pool of partners to choose from, are not very compatible with the average shengnu, socially, intellectually or geographically.

Making matters worse, according to a survey conducted by the All-China Women’s Federation — again, the organization founded to further women’s rights — out of 30,000 men, more than 90 percent said women should marry before 27 to avoid becoming unwanted. This stems partly from beliefs about the prime years for bearing children, but mainly, from the value that Chinese men place on youth and looks. While they’re hardly the only men in the world to do this, they are rather unforgiving. A 35-year-old Chinese male CFO is much more likely to go for a 19-year-old head-turner than a fellow female executive. Because he can. He is successful, and therefore has his pick of the lot. But by the same logic that makes a divorced man in China “broken in,” but a divorced woman in China, “sloppy seconds,” his female professional equivalent is likely to remain single.

And so emerges the modern shengnu: the imperishable leftover who braves the tide of political, cultural, social and parental waves pushing her towards marriage. For better. Or for worse. But at least, on her own terms.