Illustration: Luo Xuan/GT

Last week, during the Guangzhou Sex Culture Festival, a sexologist was attacked by a middle-aged woman with a bucket of excrement.Peng Xiaohui, a professor at the Central China Normal University, had been invited to speak during the festival. In the middle of his speech, he was suddenly besieged by the woman, while several people wearing masks at the back of the hall held up signs that condemned sexology as vulgar and indecent.Reading this news, I felt that society had been wrenched backwards 20 years. More people started attacking the professor online, saying that he had brought shame upon our society and was contributing to its moral degradation. I doubt that any of these people have actually read Peng's work or listened to his lectures. If they did, they would realize that he doesn't promote promiscuity or the kind of profligate sexuality some people might find objectionable. Rather, his work simply seeks to promote healthy, rational dialogues about sex, which somehow still remains a taboo subject in China to this day.Sex is a subject that concerns all of us and shouldn't be considered something shameful. I understand many parents worry that their children might explore this area too early in life, but instead of giving their children guidance, most just avoid the topic altogether.Throughout my school years, I only ever had one sex education class. The class comprised of a teacher playing a video about sex, and most of the people in the class just looked down the entire time in embarrassment. I dared to take a peek at the screen out of curiosity, only to be met by horrified whispers - "Look, she's watching!" This was in 2000.Things like that are still happening today. Last year, I visited a center in a rural area that exists to stop teenagers from masturbating. The center claims that too much masturbation is harmful, and provides "solutions" to prevent people from masturbating. One such "solution" is to put a painful clamp on a man's penis, so he won't be able to masturbate.When I entered college in the US in 2006, I was shocked at how liberal about sex people were. At a freshman inauguration party, some seniors put on a skit about safe sex. Until that point, the only things I knew about sex were from that awkward class in middle school, and some magazines I may have glanced at now and then. It was bewildering to me that they would talk about sex so openly in public.It was more than that. There were places one could get condoms in the dormitory. The health center held talks and showed videos once in a while. Countless fellow students were having sex in the dormitories; I was baffled that the school didn't try to stop it.I realize now that there is little point in trying to stop people from having sex. In China, despite the prevalent conservative attitudes towards sex, countless high school girls accidentally get pregnant each year. To avoid such consequences, it makes much more sense to have an open dialogue about sex, rather than to try to prevent it from taking place altogether.I salute the sexologists in China. It's hard enough to be a pioneer in a field, let alone in a subject that's been hushed for thousands of years.