Cover the kids' eyes

Okay, here's the deal. Because this is a family-friendly blog, I've been putting off this post for some time, but I'm going to go for it. Parents, you are at your discretion.

I'm throwing a bunch of little stories into this one, so I'm going to be rambling. Here we go...

One of the things one eventually starts to notice about China is how chaste everything is. You don't really realize it right away, because it isn't about what you see, but rather what you do not. Then finally, one day, you see a woman dressed like a typical American out on the town, and you are suddenly shocked to realize that she looks half naked! Chinese women are, by comparison, very modest dressers.

This goes for advertisements as well. For those of us like myself who have spent extensive time in Europe, the difference is especially jarring. Ah, France, the land of topless women on family television, postcards of sex acts on souvenir stands, and condom ads towering above you on billboards... By contrast, in downtown Suzhou I have noticed exactly one store with a display of a naked woman. It is very incongruous.

Traditional moral values are still very strong in China, and but I'm under no illusion that a good part of this is also enforced from above by the government. In fact, there has been a recent well-publicized crackdown on online pornography. I don't have enough cultural experience to give a real opinion as to how much if this is reflects a real difference in what actually goes on in the Chinese mind, or whether this just reflects reserve as to what gets displayed in public. However, I have done some reading that suggests a certain level of naivite about the "birds and the bees" (particularly in rural areas).

I do have one funny little anecdote I can tell relative to that. A co-worker was telling me that last year he suddenly began to get a lot of, shall we say, inappropriate e-mail spam. He went to talk to our tech person to see if she could do something about it. She is a very sweet and friendly, very competent young Chinese woman. My friend tried to explain what the problem was, but he just could not get her to understand. He kept offering variations of "bad pictures" and "dirty pictures", but she just didn't get it. Perhaps it was just a language barrier, but in the end, he decided that he didn't want to risk being the one to shatter her illusions about the world, and he just let the matter drop (eventually, the spam tapered off on its own).

So, with that as an only marginally relevant introduction, I have some pictures. I return to a theme on which I have posted before: the fact that so many Chinese produces are anthropomorphized in some way. This includes even household products that are not intended for children. Here is another example:

These are two humidifiers (which the Chinese love) for sale in a local shop. Aren't they just adorable? They look like they should have their own Saturday morning kids show, and maybe they do. The one on the left had me quite confused with the horns and all, until I finally made the connection that we are in the "Year of the Bull". That disappointed me, because up until that moment I had a better name for him, to which I was quite attached, which was "Satan's Humidifier".

So now I come to the two pictures that got me thinking about this post in the first place. They bring together the two threads of thoughts that I have been rambling about so far, the apparent gentle naivete, and the "cuteness" of consumer products.

Now.... I want to know, in all honesty, is there anyone out there that looks at these two products and does not think the same thing I do? Do the Chinese not notice, not care, or do they think it is funny?

Finally, now that I've brought up the whole topic, take a look at these packages of prophylactics.

Copulating while parachuting? That should come with a warning label of some kind.