China have censored women modeling lingerie on online shopping livestreams, and in order to bypass the ban, online lingerie businesses are hiring men to do the modeling instead.
Before now, Livestreams featuring females modeling lingerie have a history of being promptly shut down and banned as a result of China’s law against spreading obscene material online.
As the Chinese government has banned women from showcasing undergarments online, livestream fashion companies in the country have started deploying men to do the job.
Social media is flooded with pictures, apparently screenshots of livestream broadcast by fashion companies, of Chinese men donning varied lingerie styles ranging from push-up bras to lace-trimmed nightgowns. Some of the male models were seen with cat ear headbands as well.
Taking to social media, some Chinese people have revealed their amusement at the attempt to dodge the loophole while some praised the initiative saying men are better models of lingerie.
‘The guy wears it better than the girl,’ a comment on a video clip of the livestream on Douyin — China’s TikTok.
A few comments on Weibo a Chinese social media platform also say that this trend is ‘depriving women of job opportunities.’
‘If it’s a female model, the livestream would be banned every other minute, it’s not like this hasn’t happened before, this is still depriving a group of women of their job opportunities,’ a comment with 130,000 likes read.
‘Personally, we don’t really have a choice.’
‘The designs can’t be modeled by our female colleagues, so we will use our male colleagues to model it,’ the owner of a livestream business referred to as ‘Mr. Xu’ told Jiupai News in an interview.
According to Xu, many other lingerie livestream e-commerce businesses were inspired by his idea and have started following suit.
Although the livestream e-commerce industry has achieved a massive following in China, the same shopping trend has been failing to replicate its popularity in the US.
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