The Pleasure Periscope and the Salsa Shaker in Shanghai

HONG KONG: Mumbai’s testosterone-driven men who wish to be better lovers may well have to douse their aroused expectations if the cops pull the plug on the Better Lover Seminar, but in other parts of the civilised world, sex toys of the sort that seminar participants would have handled — and fondled — are so commonplace they don’t merit any officious attention.

More particularly, even in China — with which we like to benchmark ourselves for everything from GDP growth to population growth — realistic plastic vaginas that throb to an electronic pulse and life-size inflatable dolls — of the kind that have inflamed Mumbai’s moral policemen — can be bought off the pavements for the equivalent of less than Rs 500. And Shanghai, which Mumbai aspires to be, last year hosted the first officially sanctioned exhibition of sex toys, complete with leather body suits, vibrating rubber tongues and vibrators with names like ‘Pleasure Periscope’ and ‘The Salsa Shaker’.

Some estimates put the sex toy industry in China, which serves about 70 per cent of the world market, at over $10 billion. And in Beijing alone, there are believed to be in excess of 2,000 stores retailing adult toys. The only policemen who swing by are off-duty cops who wish to buy something long and hard for their wives or mistresses — or whoever.

Even so, sexual ironies abound in China. For instance, there may be 1.3 billion Chinese people on this planet, but evidently Chinese men still need realistic imitations of intimate female body parts to map women’s erogenous zones. A 2004 study cited in the official People’s Daily notes that only about a fifth of Chinese men surveyed knew where the clitoris was. The survey doesn’t mention it, of course, but presumably most others believed it was a little-known tourist hotspot in Forbidden City.

This inadequacy in sexual matters is somewhat curious when you consider that, like in India, there is a body of medieval Chinese literature that points to a civilisation that was once sexually far more liberated than it is today. Just as modern-day cultural rigidity in sexual matters in India is almost inevitably compared unfavourably with the far freer sexual mores as reflected in Vatsyayan’s Kama Sutra, the Chinese too have had their fair share of erotic literature down the ages.

One such, The Carnal Prayer Mat by Li Yu, a 17th century author, is a graphic, witty novel that narrates the life and amorous times of Vesperus, a lusty young scholar who aspires to be a poet and a skilled lover. Although it is in the end a moral tale that denounces promiscuity, the novel is a virtual sex manual, with actionable advice on, among other things, the use of pillows in positioning a woman’s body to enhance sexual pleasure, the superior sexual skills of plumper women, and the importance of women taking a pro-active role during intercourse - “by lowering the Yin to join the Yang.”

Wonder what Mumbai’s moral policemen would have made of all this!