China discovers the sexually permissive society

Families and schools remain shy when talking about sex, and teenage sex has flourished in the gap between awkward discussions and silence.

Psychologist Deng Jun fields 15 to 20 calls a day, mostly about sex, on a hot line for teens she runs out of her office, tucked in a corner of the fifth floor of the dingy Beijing No. 2 Hospital. Most of her callers are high school or college age, though sometimes they are as young as 10.

"With society opening up, our attitudes about sex are changing," the 52-year-old said. "(Adults) don't approve of premarital sex ... because when you have sex, it brings a series of unavoidable problems. These problems, as they increase, become society's problems."

A vocational high school in Xinjiang, a region about 1,500 miles west of Beijing, briefly enacted a rule last year requiring female students to take pregnancy tests as part of their annual school physical. An outcry about privacy forced the school to retreat.

Skipping anesthesia for abortion
Abortion is readily available and viewed as a much better alternative to the searing shame of being an unwed teenage mother in China.

A walk-in abortion costs $140 at the Haidian Maternal and Child Health Hospital, a large public hospital in northwest Beijing. Too pricey? Skip the anesthesia and the price falls to $55.

Still, the rising number of abortions among younger Chinese alarms educators, who blame outdated sex education. Students learn about sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS, but the discussions about sex itself are vague and condom use is rarely addressed.

"They don't talk directly about sexual relations," said Li, the sex expert. "If you don't talk directly about sex, it's an incomplete sex education."

Frisky blogger "Bamboo Shadows" embodies the contradictions of a changing China, with one foot entrenched in traditional values and the other swinging forward toward a modern kind of free love.

On her site, the Beijing resident openly discusses her breasts, orgasms and struggles to control arousal during yoga classes. But the husky-voiced tech worker, who refused to give her real name in an interview, illustrated in one posting that even in an increasingly permissive China, standards still exist.

She had wrapped her arm around her boyfriend's waist while riding on the back of his bicycle, caressing him as he pedaled the streets of the Chinese capital. But later, she wrote, "He wanted to be very affectionate in public. I refused. I said we had just eaten and hadn't brushed our teeth."

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