{"id":30110,"date":"2015-02-07T04:00:21","date_gmt":"2015-02-07T09:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30110"},"modified":"2015-02-05T15:24:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-05T20:24:00","slug":"now-afflicting-chinese-internet-users-straight-man-cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/07\/now-afflicting-chinese-internet-users-straight-man-cancer\/","title":{"rendered":"Now afflicting Chinese internet users – “Straight Man Cancer”"},"content":{"rendered":"

At The Diplomat<\/em>, Nancy Tang<\/a> explains a sudden outbreak of “Straight Man Cancer” among China’s Weibo<\/em> users:<\/p>\n

\u201cA woman only has one ambition. In her heart, she sees love and childrearing as the most important thing in life.\u201d On January 12, 2015, scholar Zhou Guoping thus tweeted on Weibo<\/em>, the popular Chinese microblogging platform. Zhou later responded to the backlash, saying, \u201cI agree with women\u2019s liberation and equality between women and men\u2026 However, no matter how talented [women] are or what achievements they reach, if [a woman] refuses to, or doesn\u2019t know how to be a gentle lover, a caring wife, a loving mother, the sense of beauty she gives me will be greatly reduced.\u201d Both tweets were subsequently removed by Zhou.<\/p>\n

Chinese commentators quickly diagnosed Zhou, a popular public intellectual at the state think tank Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, with \u201cStraight Man Cancer.\u201d The term \u201cStraight Man Cancer,\u201d coined in mid-2014, refers to chauvinist, judgmental behavior and language that propels sexist double standards or belittles women. Zhou\u2019s controversial tweets exposed him to public scrutiny and attracted state attention. Communist Party mouthpiece People\u2019s Daily<\/em> re-posted an editorial, calling for the use of law and public opinion in order to \u201cprevent \u2018Straight Man Cancer\u2019\u201d in the private realm from \u201cspreading into the public domain.\u201d State news agency Xinhua also published the transcript of a newspaper interview with Zhou, in which he shamelessly called himself a \u201cfeminist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zhou is by no means the sole Chinese straight man afflicted with Straight Man Cancer. In the aftermath of Zhou\u2019s tweets, Chinese netizens have dug up other notable cases of public figures infected by the \u201cepidemic.\u201d Han Han, popular author-blogger and youth icon, is another representative of the cancerous straight male among Chinese millennials. He has stated in an interview that \u201cthere is no way that my girlfriend would [be allowed to] work outside of the household.\u201d The renowned Chinese translator of Haruki Murakami, Lin Shaohua, has warned men against housework, which he thinks of as detrimental to masculinity and having the potential to make men effeminate or gender-bent. Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping has suggested that decreasing female employment and facilitating earlier female retirement would alleviate the social pressure caused by China\u2019s large population. New Confucian scholar Qi Yihu has also advocated that women work only half-time so that they can rear children. Meanwhile, even these infuriating sexist remarks are eclipsed by intolerable misogynistic violence: While most sexists perpetrate unfair stereotypes, some actively hate on women and harm women\u2019s well-being. For instance, the celebrity English teacher Li Yang, misogynist and perpetrator of domestic violence, is considered a \u201cterminally ill\u201d case of Straight Man Cancer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At The Diplomat, Nancy Tang explains a sudden outbreak of “Straight Man Cancer” among China’s Weibo users: \u201cA woman only has one ambition. In her heart, she sees love and childrearing as the most important thing in life.\u201d On January 12, 2015, scholar Zhou Guoping thus tweeted on Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging platform. Zhou […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,28,15],"tags":[987,58,303,43],"class_list":["post-30110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-media","category-technology","tag-feminism","tag-internet","tag-sexism","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7PE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30112,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30110\/revisions\/30112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}