Erotic fiction is growing in popularity among young women in China, too.

But it’s not the stuff you might think: there, it’s better described as Shades of Gay.

The “boys’ love” genre, which originated in Japan (where it’s called Yaoi – here’s the Wikipedia entry), “refers to female-oriented fiction featuring idealised romantic relationships between two males, mostly as [animated] manga works”, explains sociologist Li Yinhe at the Beijing-based Caixin website, and translated at WorldCrunch.

Readers, who have been dubbed “hopeless women” or “rotten women”, are “drawn to this love between men” in large part because it enables a “non-sexual love since the homosexual will not have sex with girls”.

It has come to wider attention, however, following the arrest of a number of author contributors to a boys’ love website.

Chinese ongoing criminalisation of pornographic writing “is a living dinosaur”, harking from a time when “sex was regarded as evil”, says Li. No matter “how odd the rotten women’s passion may seem, they should not be discriminated against”.