The nude black-and-white photograph of the young Chinese woman is gritty and amateurish. She sits in front of her computer with her face turned away from the camera. A large potted plant obscures her waist.
“Women on the Internet are always lonely,” says the caption.
The photograph and caption are from the blog of Liu Mang Yan, or “Lost Sparrow,” China’s latest controversial woman blogger. Liu’s outspoken posts about sex include a “bedside encyclopedia” of love-making noises, broken down by the type of response it can elicit from your lover, and by geographical regions in China — that is, how pillow-talk may sound in regional dialect or slang. She talks openly about masturbation (“I have no worldly possession, except for two vibrators”) and muses about why men are afraid to say “I love you.”
Liu is the latest of a string of Chinese women bloggers who have become famous, some even worldwide.