On the Hunt for Feminine Beauty in China

My fear arose on a date night, when I was called “sexy” in a miniskirt and stockings. Delighted by the compliment, I caught myself sitting straight all night, so that a ring of belly would not swell beneath my bra like beer foam oozing out of a full glass. Just as my back muscles stiffened, my legs suffocated in black nylon, and my mind lingered on a small tear. Then he quoted from White Noise: ”What fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing stockings as she crosses her legs.” I smiled and nodded and twisted into a curvaceous pose, my legs crossing thanks to the sorry length of my pencil skirt. And my stockings, like corsets, like thongs, like many more supposedly attractive pieces of fabric, are fetters on women’s bodies, but as pleasure in men’s eyes. In the dim light, I felt a shapeless, vehement force reducing me to an unflatteringly-shaped, inescapably-eroticized Barbie doll.

I feared that I was becoming, what Ariel Levy called, a “ Female Chauvinist Pig:” a woman who makes sex objects of other women and of herself.[1] A victim, a beneficiary, and an imposer of the male gaze, she plays within the rules of patriarchy in order to excel in a male-dominated society.

When the chauvinist pigs treat women as pieces of meat, naturally, their objectification backfires. In Chinese social media, men consumed with toxic masculinity morph into “long-horn grasshoppers (蝈蝻).” Poor insects—their only misfortune is to be named and pronounced enough like “Chinese men” to make a pun. In the context of denouncing extramarital affairs, domestic violence, sexual harassment, or any harm largely inflicted on women, an unsurprised sneer frequently emerges: “classic grasshopper behavior, that’s all.” An archetypal “grasshopper” is a misogynist, a philanderer, a homophobe. He dreams of being macho by day, yet shrouds himself with insecurity by night. Women who commit themselves in wedlock with these men, consequently, turn into “marriage donkeys (婚驴).” She lives an exhausting life, laboring for her family as if livestock on a farm. She drowns in a swirl of chores and errands, with no time for self-love, no money for self-care, no attraction to the self-help bookshelf. The metaphor refers to a long history of donkeys playing an indispensable role in Chinese agriculture, while being worked to death without a word of recognition. Those who do speak up, however, still risk being mockingly called “equality fairies (平权仙子),” for their mild, peace-loving attitude toward men.

The creator behind all the bitter, withering names is a group of loud, radical feminists in China, whom I call the Feminist Hunting Dogs (FHD). They sniff around the Internet, track down sexist comments, and prey on chauvinist pigs. They designate men as the oppressor, the villain, the Other. They throw some women out of the Self, too, for conspiring with men or adopting a submissive posture. They fire missiles of satirical terms, equipped with the arsenal of Chinese language. In a country where activists cannot protest on the street, they are left with words alone. Attacking “grasshoppers” as enemies, they are no less ferocious towards women in their own trenches, hurting innocent “donkeys” for choosing marriage, condemning “fairies” for staying moderate. For the Feminist Hunting Dogs, the world is sinking into a war between men and women, but retaining a cisgender, heteronormativity.

Striving to rise against the gendered hierarchy in China, a woman easily hits—not a glass ceiling but—a cage of concrete walls. While in the West, the mainstream, first-wave feminists at the turn of the twentieth century fought for suffrage, Chinese women today are confronted by a totalitarian legal framework and forced to keep such discourse out of the heavily censored online space. Fast forwarding to the 1960s, the second-wave feminists urged for equal employment opportunities and reproductive rights. Similarly inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the radical feminists in China today encourage women to focus on their careers instead of housework. What differentiates the FHD is that, after reading “she is a womb, an ovary” and recognizing the systematic exploitation of women as fertility instruments, they taunt childbearing mothers for becoming “fetus containers (胎器).” As a principle, they renounce childbirth, marriage, or even sex with men. In other words, what the FHD hunts for is contingent on the existence of men, who unapologetically remain on the center stage of a women’s play. Such co-dependence diverges from the West’s progression toward third-wave feminism, in which the male-female binary crumbled as an artificial construct through the post-structuralist lens. As fourth-wave feminism grew out of social media, feminists in China joined to march at the frontline of the #MeToo movement—a name transliterated into characters meaning “#rice rabbit (#米兔)” in Chinese.

Contrary to the West’s rising and ebbing of multiple tides, feminism’s influence in China more closely resembles ripples in a pond. Its powerlessness stems from a vicious cycle of chicken and egg: the impossibility of women’s political representation and the stagnation of true women’s empowerment. In the past seventy years of the Communist Party’s ruling history, not once was a woman allowed to enter the Politburo Standing Committee—the Cabinet possessing China’s top, centralized power. In 2022, even the more expansive Politburo (with 24 seats instead of 7) reverted to all-male, breaking its convention of incorporating one female member at a time. As a result, the Feminist Hunting Dogs stay in social media as their only accessible battleground, adopting a bottom-up strategy by imploring women to change their own behaviors. What I experienced on my date night, for example, falls into their new Internet slang “a military service for beauty (服美役).” The term compares women’s involuntary, perpetual hard work to look pretty with soldiers’ quotidian, laborious training for patriotic ideals. A woman conforms to external standards of feminine beauty, in the same way as a soldier obeys every order made by his officer. She endures the pain from cosmetic surgeries, diet-induced starvation, and anxiety from never matching up to influencers—the pagan, assembly line Venuses of our digital time. She wakes up early every morning to put on make-up, wears stilettos to work but shakes on a wobbling subway, and like me on my date, must wear a sexy outfit that torments her all night. Coining a vivid term to lampoon such hardships, the FHD repulses the existing power structure in defining feminine beauty. Isn’t it still patriarchy that dominates the world, that demarcates the lines, that determines if you look pretty or not? FHDs ask us to retreat from petitioning for more in the public sphere, and instead demand that women want less as personal choices. Do not have anything to do with men, they warn. Treacherous ideas like fashion, like marriage, like sex, they argue, tempt women into pleasing men as Female Chauvinist Pigs. “Once she has accepted her vocation as sex object, she enjoys adorning herself,” becoming “flower and jewel for man and for herself as well,” writes Beauvoir in The Second Sex.

A common backlash against feminism on Chinese social media appeals to nationalistic sentiment. “Grasshoppers” accuse Hunting Dogs of being brainwashed and manipulated by “white leftists (白左)” from the West. Feminism in China today, however, can be traced back to the founding father of Communist China—Mao Zedong. In the 1950s, after twelve years of wars (Sino-Japanese War and Chinese Communist Revolution), the country suffered a lack of workforce to industrialize. Consequently, Mao mobilized women to participate in socialist, collective production, claiming that “Women can hold up half of the sky (妇女能顶半边天).” This top-down movement propagated role models with the honorary title “Iron Girls (铁姑娘),” who labored even more strenuously than men in the fields and factories. They reversed gender roles by taking up jobs traditionally considered masculine, such as electricians and truck drivers. Although the term “feminism” was despised as bourgeois, women experienced a de facto enhancement in social status and established a new norm of working full-time. They were liberated from being deemed lesser than men, but confined to looking and sounding and acting like men.

The Iron Girl was the new Mulan of Communist China—a heroine warrior passionately devoted herself to the country. In an ancient Chinese legend (later a Disney adapted films), Hua Mulan disguised herself as a man, in order to stand in for her aged father in conscription; after years of fighting, she declined a high official position to return home. In Mao’s era, all comrades, regardless of gender, looked identical in their navy work suit uniform. The aspiring Iron Girls cropped their hair short, tanned their skin dark in the fields, and never wore dresses; they made every effort to degender their bodies by parading physical strength, and appearing sexually neuter, if not manlike. This early feminism in China, based on Mao’s dictums in the Little Red Book, derived gender equality by glorifying the disregard of biological differences. Resulting in millions of amenorrhoeae and miscarriages, the denial of femininity continued to instrumentalize women’s bodies not for fertility, but economic productivity.

A new “Little Red Book (小红书)” emerged in 2013—a social media application combining Instagram and TikTok, whose over 200 million monthly active users were 70% female. Initially a shopping guide for Hong Kong, the Red[2]community trumpets consumerist feminine beauty like an online version of Sex and the City. Instead of writing a sex column for a newspaper, Red’s Carrie Bradshaws share buying strategies for Birkins, post photoshoots in princess costumes, and vlog meals in luxurious restaurants. Like influencers from all platforms, they show up in front of the camera with impeccable skin, perfect bodies, and fancy closets, helping advertisers launch campaigns selling skincare products, yoga classes, and designer labels. Money announces its omnipresence in Red, nurtured by a swarm of luxury-craving followers and a stream of consumer businesses. The new Little Red Book is everything Mao’s Little Red Book hated—capitalism corrupting minds, the bourgeoisie flaunting its opulence, socialism left behind, and the proletariat made invisible. In the ephemera of time, the contempt appears mutual. Red Girls scorn the Iron Girls’ reluctance to look nice, to dress well, to please themselves with make-up and hot skirts and sweet perfumes. Their lipstick feminism embraces sexuality, in a way that Female Chauvinist Pigs find empowering and Feminist Hunting Dogs find hysterical.

Trends arise in the Red sea, then sprawl to the rest of the Chinese Internet. The “innocent and seductive style (纯欲风)” is giving Lolita: a cherubic face and a slender body in a white dress. Long black hair cascades down past by watery doe eyes. She smiles like the high school girl next door, only paler, skinner, more vulnerable. Sometimes the photo goes a bit uncanny, when she edits her eyes too wide or her chin too thin. “Snake-faced nymph (蛇精脸),” the comment section blows up, mocking her appearace. The key to this vogue is to tune a fine balance between the opposites: an unawareness of spectatorship with a scream of to-be-looked-at-ness, an unadorned, youthful air with a sexually inviting message, an adaptation to the pedophiliac male gaze with a falsely understood power of the female body—what the FHDs criticizes as being “servile to men (媚男).” Asian Baby Girls adopt fake eyelashes and ombré hair and coffin nails from their peers in California. Wearing NBA jerseys instead of angelic dresses, they represent the non-innocent, purely seductive variant of Chinese aesthetics, posing as the strikingly voluptuous, wannabe white sister in a boba-manic sorority. To the other extreme, the “wealthy daughters (富家千金)” only wear velvet, high-neck dresses. Diamonds sparkle on their ears, shouting “daddy has money.” And as an influencer discloses, “the secret is to look expensive.” Material, marriage, men—patriarchy looms in make-up tutorials and towers over fantasized elegance. Smirking at all of these styles is the ultimate feminist-sounding label—the “big female protagonist (大女主).” A high-powered, successful, have-it-all woman, in red lipstick and high heels, starring as the heroine in the movie of her life. In Red Girls’ wildest imagination, she is the perfect role model; yet in reality, she is simply a rich man in a woman’s skin.

When a friend called Red the “Girls’ Google,” I couldn’t help but wonder: What does it mean to be a woman in China? Who defines the standards of feminine beauty? Aesthetics entail judgment and comparison. Only in the presence of an ugly duckling can a swan be graceful. At a time when the landscape of beauty extends and diversifies and complicates, who has the definitive voice to sway popular opinion? In a world where appearance composes women’s value overwhelmingly more than men’s, whose attention rests in prestige, as an endless spring of power? The push-pull tension between the male gaze and female agency never ends. When beauty and feminism entwine, their threads never weave neatly in warps and wefts. Instead, they entangle like a ball of yarn—any attempt to unravel it ties the knot fast.

Divided by hazy, fluid boundaries, women in Chinese social media stamp four major loci on the spectrum of feminism: the Female Chauvinist Pigs, the tame, unintended donkeys, the moderate equality advocates, and of course, the Feminist Hunting Dogs. They meet and ally and feud on the Internet, piecing together a Frankenstein creature who battles to flee from sexist shackles. They have grown louder in recent years, making progress unforeseen in Chinese history, but have now halted without access to political representation. With China’s falling population heralding a demographic crisis, predictably more women will be encouraged, if not coerced, to return to the household and carry more babies. While the Feminist Hunting Dogs keep marching on their crusade, they may discover that they are left alone, howling in the wilderness. In the bleak future of feminism, women in China find themselves trapped between the utility of womanhood, in the monolith of beauty, and in the struggle to break free.

[1] Ariel Levy, “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture,” Introduction, Simon & Schuster, New York, August 2005, 20.

[2] Red is the official English translation for the application. Its original Chinese name, however, consists of three characters that literally means “Little Red Book.”