Artifacts: Sex dolls, strippers and… golf

Vanessa Moore

Morals are a funny thing in China these days. Take the corrupt ‘naked’ official’s standard weekend. Saturday night was never so good as when it was spent splashing out thousands of RMB on drinking liquor and hiring a few prostitutes. After a good Sunday lie-in, to finish off, a nice relaxing afternoon out in the open teeing off with a round of golf should do the trick. But thanks to party stalwart Xi Jinping’s latest decree, such classy weekends might be a thing of the past. And it’s not Friday evening’s activity that’s under threat.
Xi’s crackdown seems to be getting even more crackers these days. The latest in the line of fire: golf. This month authorities closed 66 golf courses in a renewed clampdown on the sport, once considered a bourgeois excess by Mao. The motivation? The environment, obviously.
First picked up by a Reuters report at the start of April, the ban was imposed “to protect China’s shrinking land and water resources”. Apparently the authorities are now implementing a long-­unheeded 2004 veto on golf-related construction making it illegal to build new golf courses. Three of those named on the list of the 66 shuttered were in Beijing, with the others spread out across the country. But according to the New York Times, at the 12-course Mission Hills Golf Club in Guangdong, the world’s largest, party officials have been forbidden to golf during work hours “to prevent unclean behaviour and disciplinary or illegal conduct.” Ah. Environment my foot. Seems to me that’s the real reason then.
So how about another alternative for those strippers? Fear not, an enterprising Beijing company has it covered. A new spate of lifelike sex dolls is being marketed as a reasonable alternative to not cheating on your wife. An April AFP report has revealed that “high-quality sex dolls made of thermoplastic elastomer, a rubbery material softer than silicone, with adjustable hands, a removable head and genitals”, are now available from Micdolls specialist shops for around USD2,500. A salesman interviewed by the news agency in Beijing had this to say about it: “If a married man refuses to see prostitutes and uses a doll instead, isn’t it admirable?” Clients are usually professionals or business owners in their 30s and 40s, and, according to his non-cheating logic, he praises them as morally upright. Upright? Perhaps not. Maybe “playful” is a better choice of word…
And continuing on the topic of strippers, just as the devil would say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And on this corker, China’s higgledy-piggeldy logic never ceases to amaze me. According to a CNN story from last week, the latest trend hitting the mainland is hiring exotic dancers to perform at wakes. “In some rural areas the hiring of professional mourners known as ‘kusangren’ is customary. These can include performances, although in recent times the dance acts have increasingly tended towards the erotic”. As a result, it’s now the latest focus of the clampdown on vice.
And here’s the logic: Strippers are paid large sums to perform at funerals to attract more mourners, thereby giving the deceased more “face”. The mainland’s official Xinhua news agency released a statement last Thursday from the Ministry of Culture cracking down on these funerary stripteases admonishing that they undermined “the cultural value of the entertainment business,” and that “such acts were uncivilized.”
Well it’s no secret that Macau’s trying to diversify its economy and become more of a cultural hub. It seems to me that expanding the local exotic dance industry would be the perfect addition to the policy. We’ve got the resources already in place – second only to gambling, the city’s favourite post-casino outing is to a strip club. With so many “professionals” to choose from, starting funeral package weekends would be a sure-fire hit. Just like the logic for mourner numbers, it bet it’d definitely get those lacklustre tourist arrivals up.