Battle of the Sexes: Shanghai Baby vs. Foreign Babes in Beijing

It recently came to my attention that Wei Hui's novel Shanghai Baby has been made into a film, starring Bai Ling as "Coco", the novel's protagonist.  Meanwhile, Rachel Dewoskin has turned her own non-fictional account of her stint as an actress in a 1990s popular Chinese TV series, Foreign Babes in Beijing into a film as well.  Interesting that both stories are being produced as films around the same time and that they both deal with female sexuality in China during the same era.  In one, Chinese women appear seductive, Western men are virile while Chinese men are weak.  In the other, Western women are attracted to virile, artsy Chinese men.  What a telling juxtaposition!  I'll get back to this theme at the end of this blog, but first, for those of you unfamiliar, here's a rundown of both stories.

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More Thoughts on Sex and Shanghai

There's something macabre about this online character, China Bounder.  While I appreciate his blog as a kind of "Kinsey report" of the sexualized environment of today's Shanghai, something is eerily disturbing about his particular line of thinking.  Certainly I'm not a trained psychoanalyst, but in mulling over his case last night while tossing and turning in the wee hours, I came up with the following observations.

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Sex and Shanghai

He's back.  The man who inspired a witchhunt last August for his controversial blogsite about shagging in Shanghai.  We know him as China Bounder.  If you believe his story, he is a British Caucasian in his 30s and a former (if not current) English teacher in Shanghai.  If you're somewhat more susceptible to rumors and innuendo, he is in fact a team of clever, mischievous blogsters making it up as they go along (or maybe even a team of monkeys relentlessly pounding on the keyboard?).  I for one don't believe that tripe for a minute.  In my humble, unenlightened opinion, this guy is real, and so are his stories. 

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