Portal:Sexuality
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Human sexuality covers a broad range of topics, including the possible biological basis of and the social factors affecting sexual behavior, gender and sexual orientation.
Sexuality varies greatly over time and across cultures. There are different views on sexual ethics and different laws on what sexual behavior is permitted. Sex education programs may promote reproductive health and family planning and try to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Many societies have some forms of erotica or pornography and modern societies have a sex industry with sex workers such as prostitutes.
Prostitution in the People's Republic of China has become more visible since the loosening of government controls over society in the early 1980s. In spite of government efforts, prostitution has now developed to become an industry. Most prostitutes are female, though in recent years male prostitution has also emerged. Venues typically include hotels, karaoke venues and beauty salons.
Shortly after taking power in 1949, the Communist Party of China embarked upon a series of campaigns that purportedly eradicated prostitution from mainland China by the early 1960s. But even then a distinctive feature of Maoist China was women providing sexual services to Communist cadres in exchange for privileges. More recently prostitution has become associated with a number of problems, including organized crime, government corruption and sexually transmitted diseases. There are fears that prostitution may become the main route of HIV transmission as it has in developing countries such as Thailand and India.
The government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) has vacillated in its legal treatment of prostitutes, treating them sometimes as criminals and sometimes as behaving with misconduct. A number of international NGOs and human rights organisations have criticised the PRC government for failing to comply with the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, , failing to recognize voluntary prostitution as a legitimate form of work and penalizing women who sell sex while exonerating men who buy it.
See also Prostitution in Hong Kong and Prostitution in Taiwan.
A model in latex fetish fashion tied to a St Andrew's Cross. This is a piece of bondage apparatus that might be found or in a BDSM dungeon at a fetish club or a private play party.
Paraphilias
Clinical literature discusses eight major paraphilias individually; according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the activity must be the sole means of sexual gratification for a period of six (6) months, and either cause "clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" or involve a violation of consent to be diagnosed as a paraphilia.
- Exhibitionism: the recurrent urge or behavior to expose one's genitals to an unsuspecting person.
- Fetishism: the use of non-sexual or nonliving objects or part of a person's body to gain sexual excitement. Partialism refers to fetishes specifically involving nonsexual parts of the body.
- Frotteurism: the recurrent urges or behavior of touching or rubbing against a nonconsenting person.
- Pedophilia: the sexual attraction to prepubescent or peripubescent children.
- Sexual Masochism: the recurrent urge or behavior of wanting to be humiliated, beaten, bound, or otherwise made to suffer.
- Sexual Sadism: the recurrent urge or behavior involving acts in which the pain or humiliation of the victim is sexually exciting.
- Transvestic fetishism: a sexual attraction towards the clothing of the opposite gender.
- Voyeurism: the recurrent urge or behavior to observe an unsuspecting person who is naked, disrobing or engaging in sexual activities, or may not be sexual in nature at all.
- Other rarer paraphilias are grouped together under Other paraphilias not otherwise specified (ICD-9-CM equivalent of "Sexual Disorder NOS") and include telephone scatalogia (obscene phone calls), necrophilia (corpses), partialism (exclusive focus on one part of the body), zoophilia (animals), coprophilia (feces), klismaphilia (enemas), urophilia (urine).
(See paraphilias).
