People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet Paperback – 12 Jul 2013

There are unfortunately and rather inexplicably all too few books on contemporary sexuality in mainland China. Richard Burger's recent Behind the Red Door: Sex in China comes to mind; I scratch my head to think of any others. And I can't think of any other topic so vital and pressing: the flashpoint of a huge burgeoning population freer than it has ever been in its entire history, at the precise moment it is simultaneously thrusting up against the outside world both virtually via the internet and in the flesh. Katrien Jacobs can be commended for confronting the topic head-on with sex-positive openmindedness; too bad the book was rushed to print with lousy, hasty editing.

The present era has converged with a number of technological breakthroughs resulting in an explosion of DIY ("do it yourself") pornography and personal sexual expression: affordable home video cameras, a proliferation of internet pornography, blogs and sexblogs, and social networking sites of all types from dating to countless x-rated pages for the kinky. The Chinese Government has tried to hold off this deluge by haphazardly effective online censorship but is facing a losing battle and has effectively resigned itself to accepting the lesser evil of sexual freedom of speech in favor of a more open and productive society. It could even be described as evolving its own brand of friendly fascism or "repressive desublimation" (Herbert Marcuse), where sexual freedom is exploited by the powers that be and channeled into useful forms of monetization and control proving far more effective in quieting a restless population than the obsessive sexual oppression of the traditional communist regime.

Any study of contemporary sexuality that fails to latch onto the exciting intersection of sex and technology as its starting point is quickly irrelevant, and thankfully Jacobs is right on the mark. She covers everything potentially germane to sex discourse in China since the turn of the millennium when internet caught fire on the mainland: the return of the made-in-China (post-Liberation) underground porn film industry, the explosion Chinese porn sites and their equally aggressive dismantling by the authorities, iconic sex propagandists and internet protest personalities including Mu Zimei, Li Yinhe, Han Han, and Ai Weiwei, internet sex scandals (e.g. Edison Chen) that occur with such regularity they seem factory-produced, and the ever-present influence of Japanese porn and idol stars and the pro-gay manga and Cosplay cultures. Jacobs even gets ethnographically creative by posting her nude body on an adult sex networking site to meet and interview subjects and delve into the mindsets of some of Hong Kong's more daring youth subcultures.

I wish I could say it was a gripping read, but I found myself slogging through much of the book, which is written in the relentlessly turgid academic style of a novice scholar, reading much like a dissertation. In fact I'd wager it was a dissertation, one that prematurely got a leg in a mainstream publisher and filled a gap and need for this kind of study. In Jacobs' better moments the PC-academicspeak attains a certain stodgy felicity, as when we are reminded of the appropriate definition of "Queer": "originally an umbrella term for non-heteronormative expressions of gender and desires, including LGBT people (lesbian, gay, bisexuals and transgender) and non-normative heterosexual people." Elsewhere, her prose is riddled with stylistic awkwardnesses and typos which would never have gotten past your typical dissertation committee (mine at least), along with certain nonnative-seeming turns of phrase, as her name hints. The lack of a good, astute editor is to blame for these lapses in what is otherwise a welcome publication.