Men in China Are Becoming Online Lingerie Models After Female Models Got Banned
That's one heck of a loophole.By Dale John Wong March 3, 2023
If you place a ban on a certain thing, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone will find a way to get to it, or at least find a compromise.
In China, a ban on females modeling lingerie online has led to a trend that's more than a little dumbfounding: Guys are doing it instead.
With the aim of preventing the spread of obscene content online, China's government has been clamping down on anything that might be considered raunchy, including live broadcasts by businesses trying peddle female underwear on social media platforms like Douyin (China's name for TikTok).
With no other options available, some of these online shops have turned to the confounding alternative of using male models to sell these undergarments, with the first of such broadcasts occurring in December 2022.
"Personally, we don't really have a choice. The designs can't be modeled by our female colleagues, so we will use male colleagues to model it," said an owner of one such business in an interview.
Many other similar stores have since followed suit, and obviously, the trend has managed to grab the attention of more than a few confused netizens, with sentiments ranging from supportive, to critical, to not knowing what to make of it all.
Some have lauded the male models for rocking the skimpy lingerie pieces better than some female models, while others have lamented the fact that this trend just wasn't great news for female models in need of income opportunities.
"If it's a female model, the livestream would be banned every other minute. It's not like this hasn't happened before, this is depriving a group of women their job opportunities," said one comment on a male-modeled lingerie video.
For China, the livestream shopping fad is something that has exploded into a market that is set to be worth more than US$700 billion in 2023, with this figure to account for about 10 percent of the country's total e-commerce value.
As such, it's pretty hard to tell how the Chinese government will look to tackle this new trend of dudes posing in skimpy female lingerie on popular social media channels. Surely, if officials have an issue with women modeling underwear for live audiences, then the idea of scantily-clad crossdressing guys doing the very same must be also cause for consternation.
Of course, some netizens have suggested the use of mannequins instead (which sounds like the most obvious compromise), but we already know that going that route won't rack up nearly as many views and conversions as a living and breathing human model will, regardless of gender.
What to do, what to do?
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