Unintentional Porn

Last night my friend X said:"Lei, I hate you!" I was surprised:"Why?" He explained:"I was proctoring tonight. I knew it was going to be boring so I took the magazine you gave me to the classroom to kill time. A student flipped through it and found many porn images in it! I was so embarrassed! Why did you give me a porn magazine?"

The magazine in question is Panorama Monthly (Wan Xiang), a Chinese magazine about literature, history, people, and culture. It's like New Yorker, with a much lighter tone; or Vanity Fair without the ads. In short, it's anything but a porn magazine.

So what made X's students think it was a porn magazine? I searched my memory for all the articles on that issue. Finally, I got it. There was an article about how baths played an important role in the sex life throughout the Chinese history. Not unlike today, women could be quite active to seduce the men they liked. To be successful, they had to play some "games" or "tricks". One of them is taking baths in "fragrant water" in a not-so-well guarded room, and deliberately let men peek. Men, as we still do, took great pleasure in peeking a beautiful woman's naked body through the half-rolled bamboo curtains, half-open windows, or see-through screens. Of course, the scented steam enhanced the mystery. The article described some most powerful fragrance and some most efficient "techiques" women used, and some interesting "bath incidents" between some famous couples in the Chinese history. The author also provided some traditional paintings showing women taking bath, men peeking outside the house. These paintings must be the ones X's student saw. The article itself was funny, witty, purely educational and absolutely clean, but the American students didn't read Chinese. The only things made sense to them were these universally understandable obscene paintings. Looked through their eyes, they did look like porn!

The take-home lessons: 1) People are so different that they don't see the same things you see, and so 2)always be prepared to be embarrassed.

Two paintings from the article:



The King Peeking The Queen Bathing



Ladies Taking Bath