In China, numerous young women have been arrested by police for writing and posting gay erotica on a website called Haitang Literature City. They have been charged with producing and distributing pornographic materials. 

According to the BBC, at least 30 women have been arrested since February. All of them face a series of different charges, including jail time and/or hefty fines, and sentences depending on the money they earned from readers purchasing access to their writing and the number of views each chapter received. 

Their writing is posted on Haitang Literature City, an adult content website hosted in Taiwan that primarily focuses on Boys Love (BL) or Danmei, in Chinese, fiction. The site is based in Taiwan to evade censorship laws, and readers and writers must use a VPN to access it. 

However, crackdowns on the site in 2024 were carried out cross-regionally, and many believe that they were driven by profit, as Jixi County, where most of the arrests occurred, is a relatively poor area. According to Global Voices, the large number of fines from this crackdown would’ve given the government a large amount of income. 

The women who were arrested are reportedly between 20 and 30 and were usually university students. Often, they were pulled from classes or pulled out of their homes by police on arrest. 

One woman wrote on a social media platform, Weibo, that she was escorted to a car in the street, made to strip naked for a search before being put in a vest for photos. The arrests of these women has led to outrage within the Danmei community online. 

Some have argued that heterosexual erotica has been far less policed and censored compared to gay erotica. Other users of Weibo have questioned why sex itself is being policed and why women didn’t get a say in what obscenity laws contained, according to the BBC.

Additionally, users have pointed out that the policing of these writings is strange, considering how many of them were adopted into TV shows or movies. An example of this would be Heaven Official’s Blessing, which was adapted into an animated TV show in 2020 and is currently available on Crunchyroll. 

A user by the name of Teacher Li posted on X that the women who’ve been arrested often come from poor families and have no financial means of fighting charges. 

According to The New York Times, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing wrote on social media that law enforcements are more focused on policing sexual morality than protecting individual rights. Multiple users have also posted on social media, defending their right to creative content creation.

Writers and readers of gay erotica have argued that it allows women to detach themselves from the gendered reality within heterosexual romances such as marriage and motherhood. It gives women a space to explore their sexuality without the worry of gender stereotypes.

Those against the Danmei movement have pointed out that Danmei novels can contain extremely violent or sexual scenes, and the novels are often consumed by minors. BBC reports that some readers started reading Danmei as young as 11; however, this seems to be a problem for all adult content, as China does not enforce age restrictions. This type of content can also sometimes be seen as fetishising the LGBTQ+ community, specifically gay men.