Chinese prosecutors have charged 22 swingers who joined a wife-swapping club with criminal licentiousness, a crime that carries a five-year sentence.
The case has stirred fierce debate among lawyers, sex experts and the public over whether the practice really merits a place in the criminal code at a time of calls for greater sexual freedoms and when brothels are found on many streets in the heart of Beijing.
The mastermind of the club was associate professor Ma Xiaohai, a master of mathematics who worked at an unidentified university in the southern city of Nanjing.
He said that he began to explore online sex chat rooms amid his loneliness and depression after two acrimonious divorces and the loss of his two children in custody battles.
Related LinksFrench teenagers grab free love at le Skins orgy Film reveals Frances wife-swap addictionTom Cholmondeley"s lover says she is cursedMr Ma, 53, has been under police supervision at his home, taking care of his ageing mother, since August last year when he was arrested after a tipoff to police that he was organising spouse-swapping parties at his home.
He told a reporter who him recently: "At first the chat room discussions were very clean, with most people discussing their marital problems." But gradually, as more and more people joined in, the conversation widened until spouse-swapping became the hottest topic. Soon the forum included as many as 190 members.
Mr Ma explained that, as discussion became more heated, so the temptation grew. Finally, people began to gather at his apartment to put into practice their sexual predilections.
He said: Every couple has this or that kind of issue a marriage is like a bowl of water that has to be drunk, swapping partners is like a bowl of sweet wine.
Between the summer of 2007 and May last year, a total of 22 people took part in 35 encounters as members of the unofficial club. Mr Ma took part 18 times. Even though he did not have a wife, Mr Ma was accorded special privileges as the organiser.
Because Mr Mas mother suffered from senile dementia, the swingers used his apartment on 14 occasions. Mr Ma was the best-educated of the group and also the oldest. The members numbered eight women and 14 men. The youngest was born in 1983. They included taxi drivers, several unemployed, security guards, shop assistants and a warehouse janitor. There were only two married couples in the group.
Mr Ma, preparing for his defence, told the reporter that the behaviour of some of those who took part was abnormal and he had closed the club in May last year after several young women refused his advances. He recounted how the youngest member of the group, a woman he described as abnormal, would call him repeatedly in the middle of the night and ask him to set up encounters. When he offered to help her out himself, she would insist that one person was not enough and that she preferred group activities.
A chorus of public complaints about the case has been led by Li Yinhe, a leading scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who is known for her outspoken views on sex in a country where economic reforms have fostered more permissiveness in a traditionally puritanical society. She told the Procuratorial Daily: The crime of criminal licentiousness is seriously out of step with the times and should be abolished. The numbers of people involved with this are not many, the activity is based on mutual willingness, it does not harm other people and it does not harm society."
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