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10 - Sex & Life Politics Formed Through the Internet: Online & Offline Dating Experiences of Young Women in Shanghai
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- By PEI Yuxin, HO Sik Ying
- Edited by Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce
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- Book:
- Chinese Women and the Cyberspace
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 26 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 21 May 2008, pp 203-222
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- Chapter
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Summary
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).
6 - Cyber Self-centres?: Young Hong Kong Women and their Personal Websites
- Edited by Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce
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- Book:
- Chinese Women and the Cyberspace
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 26 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 21 May 2008, pp 117-134
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
Every once in a while we are reminded of the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet and the addiction of the young to it. The Asian Internet growth rate is found to be very high (Mitra & Schwartz 2001). The rapid growth of the Internet is increasingly international, with young people being the early adopters in most countries (Skinner, Biscope & Poland 2003). Witnessed in our own lives, for many of us, the first thing to do in the morning is to check our mailboxes – the virtual ones. In addition to the use of e-mail and instant messengers, constructing and maintaining personal websites has become one of the most popular online activities.
In an online survey conducted by a non-government youth service organization, Breakthrough (2005) suggests that 75.5 per cent of respondents from the age of 10 to 29 have been writing online diaries. According to Miller and Arnold (2001), the real space of cyberspace is (perhaps) on the bodily, non-virtual side of the screen, and the webpage presence can be a means by which people can increasingly find ways (in their own voices) to tell their stories. We observe that, by regularly updating their websites, young webmasters establish and maintain a virtual connection with other webmasters, thereby expanding their personal networks and social spaces.
One of the popular assumptions about cyberspace is that it allows individual users to express and actualize themselves. The survey conducted by Breakthrough also supports this idea and suggests that most young people writing online diaries aim at expressing their own emotions and points of view. But when we take a close look at the survey, it is quite surprising to find that the research method painstakingly generalizes the respondents without paying much attention to their gender difference. In the following sections, we will show that gender implication is often overlooked by researchers who analyze the socio-cultural influences of emerging digital media (e.g. online diary and personal website).
Our investigation must not only involve issues of self, but also gender. As Youngs (2002) notes, ‘Technology is not a neutral realm […] in broad terms, there are historically entrenched differences between men's and women's socially constructed relationships to the broad realm of technology and the innovation associated with it’ (http://www.bci.org/abw/papers/pap/int.htm, retrieved 12 October 2004).