When Lao Li was a boy, sex was never discussed at home or school.

Little wonder, then, a visit to Shanghai’s Sex Culture Museum with its exhibits of 1,000-year-old dildos and Ming dynasty pornographic porcelain stunned him.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen anything like this,” said 30-something Li. “This should be taught at secondary school. Not even my parents taught me about sex.”

In pre-communist China, sex was less a taboo than it became under former leader Mao Zedong, whose own highly active - and disease-ridden - love life was chronicled by his doctor in a book banned in China.

Under Mao, sex was officially a matter of doing one’s reproductive duty for the state. He wanted a new labor force to build a new country and the state encouraged high birth rates.

Since then, the government has embarked upon a stern family planning policy to control a booming population - the world’s largest - but official attitudes toward sex remain puritan, though they are changing slowly.

They need to change faster, health experts say.

There has been a huge rise in pre-marital and teenage sex. According to state media, 70 percent of urban youth admitted to having premarital sex in 2004, up from just 15 percent in 1989.

HIV/AIDS in China is now increasingly spreading via sexual transmission, which risks exacerbating a problem that already afflicts an estimated 650,000 Chinese.

Ignorance and fear are widespread.

State media has said that some 70 percent of unmarried male migrant workers do not use condoms, and of the 6 million commercial sex workers in China, only a fifth or so use protection.

“Sixty percent of young people in China think you can get HIV by sharing chopsticks with someone,” lamented Ken Legins, head of UNICEF’s HIV/AIDS program in the country.

SEXUAL MISSION

But Liu Dalin, a retired sociology lecturer from Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University and the curator of the city’s sex museum, has made it his mission to educate.

“Making love shows you have culture,” the sexagenarian Liu told Reuters. “People have two natures, one like an animal and the other cultural - animals have no culture.

“If you don’t teach, then people are just like animals, but if you teach then they can have culture,” he said.

“But right now sex education is a serious problem here. Even in the old days, mothers would teach daughters.”

Liu’s crusade has been a long-term ambition, yet progress has been slow.

Although he gives sex education classes in universities, Liu has yet to be allowed into schools. One Shanghai secondary school that had considered taking students to Liu’s museum decided against it after a few teachers went for a preview.

“Some of the exhibits were actually quite enlightening,” the head teacher was quoted as saying in the official China Daily, but she thought certain exhibits inappropriate for teenagers.

“People should really be learning about sex from day dot,” said Liu. “Young children need to understand that sex is a very natural and frequent activity - natural, healthy, scientific. Eating is the most natural activity, and next is sex.”

But Liu is no free-love Chinese hippie. For him, sex is best suited to marriage, or at least to monogamy, and to people over the age of 20.

“You shouldn’t pluck an apple before it is ripe, or else it tastes bad,” he said.

WHORE OF THE ORIENT

Liu’s home city of Shanghai was known in the 1920s and 1930s as the “Whore of the Orient” for its boisterous, “anything goes” brothels and lascivious night life, a past it is today slowly rediscovering as people throw off the Maoist straitjacket.

But many agree with Liu that education needs to be improved.

Organizers of a recent HIV/AIDS forum in Beijing showed a video in which a China Family Planning Association official admitted that in 27 years of working in the field, she still found it hard to talk about sex.

University student Xiao Song said her parents never taught her about sex. She said she and her classmates watched a Japanese video about sex at school aged 12, but they were given no opportunity to ask questions afterwards.

“China needs to work on the widespread misunderstanding of sex, the lack of teaching materials and on the negative approach to youngsters involved in sexual activity,” said Song.

Not all Chinese grow up with sex as a taboo. In the matriarchal Mosuo tribe in southwest China’s Yunnan province, women traditionally move into their own house - and choose between their suitors - from the age of 13.

“When you take in a man, you spend a night with him and, if he performs well, you keep one of his gifts inside the house so that he knows he can return,” said Yang Erche Namu, a Mosuo who has won fame in China as a pop star, model and writer.

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Source: Reuters