Report: ChinaJoy’s showgirls offering ‘spend-the-night’ services

It’s well known that ChinaJoy tends to revolve more around booth babes than games or games culture. But every year at ChinaJoy, which ended this year on Monday, there are rumors of things going further. This year is no exception, with supposed photographic evidence and editors as witnesses backing these rumors up.

(See: Behind the scenes secrets with the ChinaJoy booth babes)

Both Youth.cn and 17173.com are reporting that while their writers were attending the show, they were handed business cards. These cards were not for hiring the showgirls for other conventions, but offered ‘spend-the-night services’. Youth.cn described how the beautiful costumes and outfits that they wore during the day were shed when the surrounding afterparties began in the evening, with the showgirls being taken along with local nouveau riche types to “get promiscuous”.

This comes on the heels of some discussion about the nature of ChinaJoy and its reliance on booth babes, similar to discussions that have taken place in the West over the past few years. Yet, when polled by Duowan’s League of Legends subsite, almost 60% of Chinese gamers voted that booth babes were a good thing for the show. In the West, measures to curb such practices has tended to come from the organizers rather than triggered by public outcry.

This might continue to be a hot topic in the West, but for now booth babes are mostly seen by Chinese gamers as just a bit of fun. Without the soliciting cards, criticism of the practice would likely have not hit the news at all. Especially given that the sites in question are somewhat complicit, as they overflow with image galleries of booth babes around this time of year.

Not to mention, feminism in gaming is still in its infancy in the West, and the context can be quite different for women in Asia. It may take many years for the industry to stop catering solely to straight men, and the movement to trigger this change in Asia might take a very different shape from its Western equivalent.

To be fair, ChinaJoy has in fact flirted with the idea of regulating booth babes in the past. But from this year’s photos and reports, it appears that these measures haven’t changed things all that much.

(Image source)

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