Introduction

By using the sexual life of young women in Shanghai, China, this study endeavours to understand the rapid changing sexual and social culture of the city. It will focus on young women's sexual encounters in cyberspace and with offline dating, and provide us with useful information about their sex lives and how, as women, they deal with a fast-changing, modern city in the digital age of the 21st century. We will see how women create new virtual networks for themselves and more importantly, how they transform these virtual networks into so-called ‘real’ social networks, and how they use these networks to achieve their personal goals. By exploring how women improve their lives through the Internet, we also examine how they use ‘underground activities’ to create new social spaces and opportunities for themselves. Also explored is how young women justify these activities as morally correct while practicing multiple sexual relationships via the Internet and in their offline lives.

Internet Sexual Behaviour

Researchers have studied various aspects of cybersexual activity. These scholars (Cooper 2004; Cooper, Mansson, Daneback, Tikkanen, & Ross 2003; Cooper, Mcloughlin, & Campbell 2000; Cooper, Morahan-martin, Mathy, & Maheu 2002; Cooper, Putnam, Planchon, & Boies 1999; Cooper, Scherer, & Mathy 2001) were concerned about Internet sexuality and attempted to generalize about the character of Internet users. Cooper collected evidence of the sexual addiction of certain internet users to describe and discuss online sexual compulsivity (Cooper et al. 2000) and other therapists have described the treatment of people obsessed with online sexual activity (Cooper et al. 1999; Schneider 2003). Cyber sex is also viewed as ‘high-risk sex’ because of the high probability of ‘sexual adventurers’ tracking their sexual contacts in ‘real life’ (Toomey & Rothenberg 2000). Other researchers are interested in gender differences in cybersex behaviour. Women have been reported to engage in more ‘social’ forms of cybersex behaviour, such as using chat rooms and emailing, while men were reported to engage in more visual, isolating activities, such as viewing or exchanging pornography online (Cooper et al. 2000; Ferree 2003). In addition, women's online sexual behaviour was found to mirror their offline behaviour, in that they preferred relationally-oriented activities (Ferree 2003). Social support formed on the basis of a group of people who engage in regular computer-mediated communication with one another for an extended period of time served as a key psychological reinforcement for computer- based interaction (Young 1997).