In this weather, a cold shower is out of the question

Undaunted by the HK government’s wrathful response to its coverage of the History Museum’s NatSec exhibit, the New York Times has a go at local education officials’ advice that hormone-crazed teens play badminton when they feel carnal desires stirring within them…

A 15-year-old girl and her boyfriend are studying alone together on a hot summer day when she removes her jacket and clings to his shoulder. What should he do?

In Hong Kong, the authorities advise the young man to continue studying or to seek a diversion, including badminton, to avoid premarital sex and other “intimate behaviors.”

Critics, including lawmakers and sex educators, say that the Chinese territory’s new sex education materials are regressive. But top officials are not backing down, and the standoff is getting kind of awkward.

“Is badminton the Hong Kong answer to sexual impulses in schoolchildren?” the South China Morning Post newspaper asked in a headline over the weekend.

Hong Kong teenagers find it all pretty amusing. A few said on social media that the officials behind the policy have their “heads in the clouds.” Others have worked it into sexual slang, talking about “friends with badminton” instead of “friends with benefits.”

…“It is normal for people to have sexual fantasies and desires, but we must recognize that we are the masters of our desires and should think twice before acting, and control our desires instead of being controlled by them,” the document says.

This is perhaps more enlightened than the advice we received as little kiddies at my convent school many years ago: don’t look at yourself when you’re having a bath. But…

It also recommends exercise and other activities that “draw attention away from undesirable activities,” and warns students to dress appropriately and avoid wearing “sexy clothing” that could lead to “visual stimulation.”

(I thought the standard government recommendation on ‘drawing attention from undesirable activities’ was ‘focus on the economy’.)

Young people in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan often use slang to talk about sex, just like their peers around the world. If your date asks if you want to go back to their place to “watch my cat do back-flips,” don’t say you weren’t warned.

Now, thanks to Hong Kong’s Education Bureau, new slang is in play. The sentence “I want to play badminton with you” will never be the same again.

HKFP story here…

The document advises students to avoid premarital sex, describing it as “one form of improper handling of intimate relationships,” and says that society “still considers pre-marital sex as a deviant act and that young people should not have sexual behaviours with others at will.”

There was a time in Hong Kong when people wouldn’t even raise the subject of teen pregnancy out of extreme Confucian-Puritan embarrassment. We could also – with some trepidation – recall that there is a ‘rumour’ that a senior government official back in his student days got his, let’s say youthful, girlfriend in the family way. Circumstantial evidence being vagueness about his now-wife’s date of birth, and we will leave it at that. 

Education authorities find another way to take kids’ minds off deviant unwholesomeness.