you will surely blush

Roland Soong translates a Southern Weekend article about the proliferation of sex-related adverts in Chinese media.

In September this year, a certain Guangzhou metro newspapers published a news story on . Ironically, right underneath that news story was an advertisement about "the unique Chinese method to increase penis length and thickness." It is the "hidden rule" for the companies to "work with" the media to forge 'low price' contracts in order to pay for the fines imposed by the State General Administration for Industry and Commerce.

Fines are imposed related to the cost of the advertisement, so contracting parties agree to keep formal costs down, splitting the difference. A circle jerk, then. But onwards:

Guangzhou: When you go to work, a salesman hands you a finely printed magazine. You open the magazine and you read the big-lettered words: "Nerve-stimulation method makes a man hard and strong."

Taiyuan: When you are leisurely reading a local news digest, you get annoyed: a certain "power pill" to cure premature ejaculation has just drawn attention from the featured text.

Qingdao: On a public bus, the television screen is showing an advertisement: an eight- or nine-year-old boy jumps out and says: "Whey I grow up, I want to go to the XX men's hospital!" Of course, even if you are driving in your own car, the various traffic radio stations are probably filling your ears with advertisements about cures for sexual frigidity.

At night, you are visiting the women's channel at the web portal and you read "penis lengthened by XX millimeters"; late at night, the various local television stations are showing explicit advertisements about "giving you a brand new manhood in twenty days." You will surely blush ...

The odd thing is that adverts for cures for penile dysfunction are proliferating at the same time when selective abortion is producing a preponderance of young men, whose chances of using their new and improved equipment are therefore all the slighter. Apparently, many of these adverts are targeted at male migrant labourers too; the sort of men liable to be at the bottom of, so to speak, the erective hierarchy of the sexual economics of shortage. Perhaps it’s about competition. A wealthy man can buy what he cannot get by natural means...

There were other markings of new money on Mr. Zhang and one stood out more loudly than his outfit: his entourage of young dames.

There were four: two in flower-printed summer dresses, with whom he cavorted incessantly; one college-aged with glasses, whom he largely ignored; and one in a low-cut halter top and tight jeans, to whom he deferred.

...but a poor man has to look to self-improvement.