This story originally appeared on October 16, , on Danwei. As millions returned to work after one of the most stressful holidays in years on Monday, October 8, the 10th annual Guangzhou National Sex Culture Festival is just finishing. This year, it is sperm β or rather, lack of it. In , for example, year-old Huazhong University of Science and Technology medical student Zheng Gang walked into a university-affiliated sperm bank and opened an account. Zheng passed a medical checkup and made four donations; the legal limit is five.
But after making his last deposit in October, Zheng Gang collapsed and died. Further murky details can be found in this report. Bizarre as it is, the case sheds some rare light on one of the more persistent superstitions in China, the idea that masturbation can be a life-threatening habit for the unwary male. The theory is a very old one β some Daoist beliefs dictate that all sex should be geared toward gathering energy from strictly heterosexual congress; solo sex is therefore a waste of good qi β muddled in with some good old-fashioned, down-on-sex Communist moralizing of which more later.
As background for this story, I spent some time on the campus chatting to students about their attitudes to sperm donations, which can offer a needy undergraduate about three to five thousand yuan β enough to pay half their annual tuition fees. Not even if they pay me loads of money.
Will sperm banks see an appreciable increase in donations as a result? Wandering the Jinhan Exhibition Hall, which once housed the famous biannual Canton Fair, the first thing you notice about this sexpo is the complete absence of any eroticism. Men β often seen craning their necks, standing on seats, and fighting for a good view β far outweighed women. If you were to handpick a crowd of candidates least likely to get laid in Guangzhou, it would look much the one assembled at the sexpo.
Which probably explains the need for so many products for what is supposed to be a natural act. If it can make you pregnant, potent, or popular, you can find it and flog it here. Visitors can view a traditional array of Ming- and Qing-era jade and stone carnal objects housed under Perspex cases that looked pretty antique themselves, or see a human body-art photography show with 50 pictures. I Happy? In Beijing alone, there are around 2, sex shops, with around , nationwide. The commercial opportunities are unquestionable, the demand apparently unquenchable.
