CHINA: Lingerie, aphrodisiacs, adult toys and sundry erotica went on display at China's biggest sex fair in Shanghai at the weekend, a sign that traditional conservative attitudes to sexuality are changing.
While the wares on display at the three-day fair, innocuously titled the "China International Adult Toys and Reproductive Health Exhibition", would barely raise an eyebrow in permissive northern Europe, in China they still have the power to shock.
China may be the most populous nation on earth, but sex has long been a taboo subject here. The revolution in 1949 which brought the Communists to power wrought massive social upheaval, but this did not translate into a wave of permissiveness, but rather a retrenching of traditional values about sex.
Rapid economic growth has seen the development of a burgeoning sex industry and both prostitution and pornography are widespread, though illegal. However, for most people family values remain sacrosanct and things are changing only slowly.
"Two years ago, everyone was very shy to see what would happen, because having a show like this was unheard of," exhibitor Jimmy Cai, head of condom manufacturer DKT, told the China Daily newspaper. "Then the second year the skirts got a bit shorter, and now look at it, it's almost like Las Vegas."
One local policeman was taking pictures of leather masks and other toys. "I don't see why these things are such a taboo, I hope this exhibition can help people become more enlightened in their attitudes."
At a summit meeting of experts in the run-up to the show, there were calls for more sex education.
A survey two years ago found that 80 per cent of women did not know what an orgasm was. One middle-aged Shanghai woman said she was amazed when someone blew up a condom "really big and it didn't explode or leak at all!"
At the show was Liu Dalin (74), a Shanghai sociology professor famous for opening China's first sex museum, which has about 4,000 erotic artefacts, some of them 9,000 years old.
"I want people to be able to have a good, healthy attitude towards sex and realise that it is the most natural thing in the world," said Mr Liu, a veteran pioneer of a more open approach to sexuality in China. "The majority of the products at the show help promote exactly that."