China's Sexual Blogolution

The nude black-and-white photograph of the young Chinese woman is gritty and amateurish. She sits in front of her computer with her face turned away from the camera. A large potted plant obscures her waist.

"Women on the Internet are always lonely," says the caption.

The photograph and caption are from the blog of Liu Mang Yan, or "Lost Sparrow," China's latest controversial woman blogger. Liu's outspoken posts about sex include a "bedside encyclopedia" of love-making noises, broken down by the type of response it can elicit from your lover, and by geographical regions in China -- that is, how pillow-talk may sound in regional dialect or slang. She talks openly about masturbation ("I have no worldly possession, except for two vibrators") and muses about why men are afraid to say "I love you."

Liu is the latest of a string of Chinese women bloggers who have become famous, some even worldwide. They talk about sex and relationships openly, changing the dialogue between the sexes. In a culture where sexual attitudes are still oppressive, the racy details shared by the women bloggers are thrusting them into the spotlight, despite China's most recent crackdown on the Internet news media.

The China Internet Network Information Centre estimated 94 million Internet users in China in 2004, now the second-largest Internet population in the world following the United States. China has some 4 million bloggers.

"The Internet is advancing the fortunes of many other people the Communist Party cadres aren't so interested in promoting," says Rebecca MacKinnon, a veteran journalist who writes extensively on the Internet in China. She is the co-founder of Global Voice Online, a media project at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

"It used to be that you couldn't be a famous cultural icon in China unless some cultural officials had signed off on the lyrics for your album," MacKinnon said at a talk for the Pop! Tech conference in Camden, Maine, on Oct. 21. "Now you can get famous if you publicize the titillating details of your sex life on your blog."

Because of frank women bloggers, the conversation about sex is no longer limited to close women friends.

"Women like Liu Mang Yan want to satisfy their need for attention, but because of them, women are talking about sex with men for the first time," says Naizhu, an entertainment writer from Guangdong who started her own blog three years ago. Naizhu's blog is popular for its terse sarcasm about the entertainment business.

"Nowadays, if you're on a date with a Chinese man, the first thing that comes out of his mouth would be, 'You're not going to blog about me, are you?'" she says.

Liu Mang Yan isn't the first woman to become famous for publicly discussing her sex life. In 2003, Internet sex columnist Mu Zi Mei gained national fame for talking about aphrodisiacs and her sexual conquests. Mu became China's Carrie Bradshaw, the protagonist of the hit television show "Sex And The City." The New York Times even featured Mu in a story in November 2003.

"You can say that, for the first time, sex bloggers like Mu Zi Mei gave Chinese women equality in the conversation about sex," says Naizhu. In 2004, Fu Rong Jie Jie, or "Sister Lotus," became the icon of China's bustling Bulletin Board System (BBS), a type of online forum popular in Asia. A young woman of average looks, Sister Lotus regularly boasted about her beauty and posted pictures of herself coyly arching her back and thrusting out her chest.

China's restricted media landscape is partly responsible for the fame of these women, says Lyn Jeffery, a research director at the Institute For The Future in Palo Alto, Calif., where she is studying Asian women bloggers.

"Bloggers have so much more influence because there are a lot fewer voices in China," says Jeffery. "When bloggers get famous in China, they are covered by the Chinese mainstream media, so they become hugely popular."