Abstinence for the sake of modest success: a Chinese anti-masturbation group’s path to individualisation

ABSTRACT

Based on three-month online participant observation in “Jie Se Ba,” a male-dominated pornography abstinence forum with 6 million users, this article explores how low-status men in China recode the requirements of Chinese individualisation by using China’s traditional ethics in order to make individualisation accessible to themselves. I examine their aspirations as desiring selves, their means of self-mastery and the community culture they have established. Due to a lack of financial power, educational background, and cultural resources, members of this group disengage from mainstream desires for financial success and middle-class-style self-fashioning practices. Instead, by appropriating traditional Chinese sexual ethics, they set more modest family-centred aspirations and adopt jiese, or masturbation abstinence, as a means of practicing self-mastery to build their striving selves. In their efforts to integrate themselves into Chinese individualisation, they accept and express a set of conservative gender-sex and familial ethics. This article argues that such a situation is caused, at root, by a social mechanism within Chinese individualisation that restricts, excludes and stigmatises low-status groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Individualisation
• striving self
• self-mastery
• masculinity
• China
• pornography
• masturbation
• Jiese

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Fran Martin for her invaluable suggestions throughout the development of this article. The idea for this article originated from a writing group at Shanghai University. I am also thankful to Luo Xiaoming and Wu Zewei for their discussions with me and the insightful ideas they shared during the early writing phase.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Special terms

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Notes

1 During my observation and writing phase, I searched for the keyword “Jie Se (Ba)” on several Chinese online platforms, including “Zhihu,” the largest Q&A website in China, some sub-forums on Baidu Tieba, and “Pincong,” a forum mainly accessed by China’s firewall bypassers and overseas users. The majority of comments took unkindly to jiese theory and blamed it on insufficient sex education. Some hostile comments even portrayed “Jie Se Ba” as a cult.

2 Additionally, three key points relating to human research ethics should be noted. First, “Jie Se Ba,” as a subforum of “Baidu Tieba,” is an open-access public forum and does not require individuals to register an account in order to access to user-generated content. Content may thus be considered as in the public domain. All posts are uploaded under pseudonyms and there is no way for the reader to ascertain the real identities of the posters. Therefore, I have translated some posts from Chinese to English and quote them directly, without risk of posters’ identities being discoverable. Second, the data collection was completed when the author was studying at a Chinese university. As most Chinese academic institutions do not have a research ethics committee, no formal ethics approval was required for this research. However, since citing the translated open-access data may raises ethical concerns, I have further anonymised the data by deleting reference to post authors’ original pseudonyms. Third, posts on “Jie Se Ba” usually disappear quickly from the homepage and are subsequently unsearchable. This is largely due to regular refreshes of the forum by operators to handle high volume of posts. Most of the posts archived by the author and analysed in this article have since been completely deleted from “Baidu Tieba” servers. This situation strongly protects the authors of quoted posts from possible re-identification.

3 Unlike the low-status men in “Jie Se Ba,” this group of users may believe more in the dominant aspirations for financial success, as they have relatively greater chances of moving up into the urban cultural middle class, even in the face of serious unemployment problems in China. They temporarily practice jiese partly due to the panic caused by their lack of income sources and increasingly bleak future in the context of the Chinese recession. Nevertheless, they are not the majority of the core users of “Jie Se Ba,” nor are they the main research subjects of this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chenglin Liang

Chenglin Liang is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on Chinese youth culture, cyber-nationalism, masculinities of low-status and lower-middle-class Chinese men, and the broader cultural production of Chinese online communities. His PhD project seeks to outline the pessimism and disenfranchised masculinities of lower-middle-class Chinese men over the past decade, and to explore their cultural and political influences.