Stuart Wolfendale

Whilst the Chinese University students’ magazine is asking whether you’ve ever fancied yourself buggering a bison or your auntie Bertha, over at the University of Science and Technology, they are being very starchy. They are responsible for a job advertisements  website serving students at eight tertiary institutions and they have refused to run job ads from Nanma Manufacturing of Chaiwan because they make sex toys.

The Puritans at UST say the very least the firm must do is to make a new website so that images will not upset students under eighteen and their parents. I do not know what people under eighteen are doing in a university in the first place, particularly one packed with dangerous chemicals and enough ingredients to make an atom bomb. The website’s manager, Codana Chan, herself named after a defunct line in fizzy orange, said they want to “minimize the potential uneasiness surfers might have”. Anybody who feels unease at the site of a vibrator, an inflatable doll, a vaginal douche or a 13 inch vibrating pink hippopotamus which is supposed to massage you in the bath should not, as I say, be going to university. Those items are all on their webpage. I know. I looked. Its one of the reasons I have given to my shrink for not installing ‘net nanny’. It would interfere with my work.Nanma’s manager, this time Ms Sereena Chan, says that its hard work coming up with a new web site on sex toys that doesn’t show any of them. She’s getting no guidance from Codona, she says. A bit like asking the curate for guidelines on a gay sauna poster suitable for the church notice board, I imagine. What are they supposed to put there? Images of plastic fire engines or Noddy and Big Ears with batteries attached?Sereena bemoans the shortage of young graduates interested in becoming sex toy designers and engineers. “The lack of new blood with academic knowledge of engineering and design really hinders our development in the trade” and I can see that. It’s the sort of business where rushes of blood are important and, after all, there are very few bridges an engineer can get to build. The number of complex dildo interfaces to be dealt with is infinite.Most sex toys are made in the Mainland, you will not be amazed to hear, and competition for Nanma from there is fierce. In the meantime, heedless of the perils of sex dolls designed with faulty seams, the administrators of the UST sit down in their Puritan hats and bonnets to a supper of cream turkey and rice drinking Codona orange heedless of a Hong Kong business out there choking on redundant dildos and all of us who want to experience the benefits of better engineering in our daily lives.