Abstinence for the sake of modest success: a Chinese anti-masturbation group’s path to individualisation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Based on three-month online participant observation in “Jie Se Ba,” a male-dominated pornography abstinence forum with 6 million users, this article explores how low-status men in China recode the requirements of Chinese individualisation by using China’s traditional ethics in order to make individualisation accessible to themselves. I examine their aspirations as desiring selves, their means of self-mastery and the community culture they have established. Due to a lack of financial power, educational background, and cultural resources, members of this group disengage from mainstream desires for financial success and middle-class-style self-fashioning practices. Instead, by appropriating traditional Chinese sexual ethics, they set more modest family-centred aspirations and adopt jiese, or masturbation abstinence, as a means of practicing self-mastery to build their striving selves. In their efforts to integrate themselves into Chinese individualisation, they accept and express a set of conservative gender-sex and familial ethics. This article argues that such a situation is caused, at root, by a social mechanism within Chinese individualisation that restricts, excludes and stigmatises low-status groups.