Featured Article Summary #292

Eyebrow Talk was a Chinese monthly literary magazine that ran for 18 issues from late 1914 to around April or May 1916. It was one of the earliest magazines aimed at women and the first mainly edited by women, led by Gao Jianhua with a team of mostly female assistant editors. Many women wrote for it, and some men also contributed under female pen names, while it reached a claimed circulation of 10,000 by 1915. The magazine used provocative advertising, cover art, and images, often including semi-nude pictures sourced from French erotic postcards, mixed with poetry and romantic stories. Although it avoided explicit pornography, it attracted censorship from the Ministry of Education’s Popular Education Research Association, was investigated, and was unanimously voted to be banned in August 1916, becoming the first Chinese magazine banned for obscenity. It had already stopped publishing a few months earlier, possibly because it was falling behind schedule or because its publisher anticipated the crackdown. The magazine Eyebrow Talk first appeared in Shanghai on 17 November 1914 and was created by the New Learning Society. It was notable for being aimed at young women and for having a woman, Gao Jianhua, as founder and editor-in-chief, along with several female editors and contributors. The magazine advertised strong early circulation, but issues became irregular; it stopped after an eighteenth final issue in April 1916 (with some sources dating it to May), likely due in part to growing censorship pressures. In 1915, a Chinese education committee set rules for popular reading and, through Lu Xun’s subcommittee, ranked fiction to promote “useful” works and restrict “lower-rank” ones. Eyebrow Talk was repeatedly targeted for “sexual corruption,” and in September 1916 it was the first Chinese magazine banned on obscenity charges. Afterward, reprints and related publications were discussed or watched, and only some later works faced bans, while similar magazines in the 1920s–1930s were generally not banned. During its run, Eyebrow Talk published 154 short stories and 14 novels, and some of the romances shifted toward women’s desires and first-person female viewpoints. Many female-authored romances included love triangles with devoted men, but they still often portrayed women as passive during sex, reflecting traditional patriarchal ideas. Gao and Xu presented themselves as a romantic couple in later issues, and some writings around them—like a story from a dog’s perspective—added a sensual, intimate tone through motifs common in Chinese erotica. Eyebrow Talk started each issue with many pictures and often included erotic, nude or semi-nude images—sometimes taken from French postcards—while avoiding explicit pornography by keeping genitals covered and using only suggestive wording. It also featured suggestive ads and used photographs alongside poetry and fiction, with repeating themes like romance, nudity, and bathing (including references to Yang Guifei). Some stories were adapted from foreign works, and many of the women editors had studied foreign languages.