That's it? No wonder adolescents find the dictionary such a poor source of sex education. It's a small word, but how ungenerous can Mr. Webster be? Isn't sex something unbelievably profound: the very issue upon which the shoulder-perched angel and devil debate, the very act by which all of us were forged and, last but not least, the powerful, enigmatic engines in our collective Freudian and Darwinian (or Confucian and Buddhist) boiler rooms? If there are sex maniacs, after all, what are they getting maniacal about? The two divisions of animals and plants?
Until the very recent past, the entire continent of Asia shared the plight of a schoolkid searching for sexual wisdom from that universally unreliable school yard. There was one exception, that unique floating world called Japan, but it merely proved the rule. Asian countries were too poor for a sexual revolution. Or too stubbornly conservative. Or tangled in political ideologies. One thing they all had in common: they were tightly controlled by their stodgy, patriarchal leaders. And it always seemed the last thing on the minds of men like Deng Xiaoping or Lee Kuan Yew was getting a little non-government-regulated action.
Kiss that crummy era goodbye. A continent of 3 billion human beings is getting sexy and kicking the guilt. You can thank satellite television and globalization, and don't forget to say a sincere hosanna to the Internet, which not only allows wired Asians to hook up but also to find out about whatever may titillate or tantalize them. There is, it seems, a chat room for anything and everyone. Spouses seeking greater satisfaction, singles who don't want to wait until marriage, cohabitors, minority groups such as gays, lesbians, spankers, even the pimply schoolboy wondering if autoerotism is ruining his complexion — in today's Asia, there's never been a better time for any of these groups to find answers, action ... and fulfillment.
Just listen to what Asians have to say about their sex lives. TIME has done just that in a survey on Asian sexual behavior. Thais like to be spanked — some 37% of men surveyed and 34% of women. Singaporean women initiate sex more than other Asian women. Virgins are an endangered Asian species almost everywhere except the Philippines, where 78% of the men say they want to marry one.
Asia's sexual revolution is being driven by images from the West — Mitch Buchannon's Baywatch babes, Rose and Jack's steamy coupling on the doomed Titanic — and liberating new phenomena such as Internet chat rooms. Not that the West invented sexual freedom. Medieval Asian courts were the originals for Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion. Ancient India produced the Kama Sutra, setting an all-time sexiness standard for religious texts. China's Tao, or "The Way," cemented for centuries the uniquely Chinese concept that spiritual fulfillment demands good sex — and lots of it. The I Ching named the yin and yang, that most essential description of male and female, but Taoism insisted that yin and yang existed within each person — probably mankind's earliest argument for pansexuality.
But time swallowed those Asian sexual Shangri-las, and history, in the form of prudish colonialism, religious movements and puritanical social engineers such as Mao and Pol Pot, managed to drown the roots of those liberated notions. The Asia of the second half of the 20th century was a fundamentally conservative place, albeit with variations. In the largely Roman Catholic Philippines, men frequently had more than one wife. Few places were as straight-laced as Singapore, but its drag queens thrived. You could be gay in Java — if you liked isolation. "Homosexuality is tolerated in Indonesia," says Dede Oetomo, an anthropologist at Surabaya's Airlangga University, "as long as it's not in one's family." Well, that ruled out everyone but gay test tube babies.
That past is dying and a bold, lusty future is rising. In mainland China, you can't use the word sex in an advertisement or a product name. But Shanghai radio sexologist Chen Kai — his business card features a pop-up penis — recently gave on-air advice to a housewife who wanted to know if it was safe to pleasure herself with a frozen cucumber. (Chen's tip: thaw it first.) In backwater Phnom Penh, the ankle-length sarong is starting to get shorter, and sex educators say some 50% of high school boys are having sex with girlfriends, often in fast-sheet hotels charging $1 an hour. At the Rainbow Pub in Hong Kong, where homosexuality was prosecuted until 1991, openly gay men rest their drinks on color-coded coasters. Red means you're looking for a "chubbie," green means you're not, blue signifies that any type will do. In South Korea, which has a seriously severe side, 32-year-old cyberstud Andy trolls the chat rooms to make assignations with single and married women. His success rate: about one a week. (Never on weekends, though, because that's when he meets, and sleeps with, his girlfriend.) "I am a healthy young man filled with a healthy sexual drive," Andy declares. "I am very normal."
Backlashes are all but inevitable, especially from the preceding generations who feel like they've missed out and from politicians ranting about Western cultural imperialism. They don't get it. If anything, new attitudes toward sex have coincided, and melded, with greater openness in Asia across the board. Listen to Ng Man-lun, vice president of the Hong Kong Sex Education Association: "We have accepted that other aspects of life should enjoy freedom, whether it's political or academic. We can't isolate sexual freedom." Not all Asian countries enjoy Hong Kong's level of political freedom, but some do, and most Asians now have economic liberties unimaginable a couple of decades back. Unless something dramatically changes, sexual freedom will proliferate, no matter how hard the fogies grumble.
With freedom comes responsibility — or heartache on a possibly very large scale. Sex education throughout the region, controlled by all those fogies, is of the "The penis is a finger-like organ ..." school. The young and the restless of Asia need wisdom if the region is to avoid teen pregnancies and an HIV epidemic. "I first had sex when I was 20," recalls Jiraporn Thepitak, a sexually active single woman in Bangkok. "When I go back to my home village, I see that girls are already having sex when they are 15 and 16. Before, everyone used to think sex was very important. Now they think it's for fun."
Fun. That's a word that Webster might think of using to replace that whole "two divisions" thing.