China’s schizophrenic sexual revolution

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000

The brothel downstairs from my Shanghai apartment, like so many similar establishments across China, masqueraded as a foot massage parlor. But only the densest or most desperate massage seeker would have mistaken it for a purveyor of the painful rubdowns prescribed in traditional Chinese medicine. Most nights young women in short shorts and exaggerated makeup lounged in the massage chairs in varying degrees of boredom, and the space was lit in pink. The imprint of a foot on the placard outside was about all that kept up the ruse.

As far as neighbors went, the sex workers were fine — quiet, courteous, not prone to cooking stinky tofu. The few times my clothes fell from the bamboo poles used to dry laundry in China, they saved the garments for me until I could make the trek downstairs to retrieve them. We didn’t share an entrance, though a window in the back of the parlor opened onto my stairwell, and on my way home on hot nights I would see the women brushing their teeth. (Even the room that doubled as a kitchen and bathroom glowed fuchsia.) As the years passed I rarely had reason to think about the brothel. But it remained a difficult thing to explain to overseas guests, invariably evoking one of those questions about China that evade any quick, pat answer.

Blaming abortion for disappearing girls

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 01:01:00 +0000

In a 1994 article for the journal First Things, Amherst College political scientist Hadley P. Arkes outlined a calculated plan for the antiabortion movement. "We seek simply to preserve the life of the child who survives the abortion," Arkes wrote. "From that modest beginning, we might go on to restrict abortions after the point of 'viability,' or we could ban those abortions ordered up simply because the child happens to be a female." Such limitations were useful steppingstones toward achieving what Arkes called the "ultimate end": banning all abortions.

Arkes saw opposing sex-selective abortion as a tactical maneuver, not a remotely feminist act, and 17 years later his strategy has taken hold. Antiabortion legislators are using the prevalence of sex selection in Asia to justify restrictions on abortion in the United States. Bans on sex-selective abortion have passed in four states -- Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Arizona -- and been proposed in five others this year -- Massachusetts, Rhode Island, West Virginia, New York and New Jersey. These bills are filled with language intended to set a precedent for declaring a fetus equivalent to a life.

Salon.com > Mara Hvistendahl

China’s schizophrenic sexual revolution

Blaming abortion for disappearing girls