The Rising Sun Anger Release Bar
Online, many Chinese are worried — about the safety of their daughters, the marriage prospects of their sons. Others — presumably the boys themselves — meet the problem with ominous boasts. As one predicted last year on the portal Tianya: “Our national ability to pick up chicks will reach heights unparalleled in human history.”
And still others are coming up with more practical outlets to exploit China’s new cadre of unstable young bachelors. Two years ago in Nanjing, Jiangsu’s capital, businessman Wu Gang opened the Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in a cheap hotel near the bank of the Yangtze River. The bar featured staples of Chinese entertainment like big-screen karaoke and plates of sunflower seeds but also a central catwalk where, for 100 yuan ($15) per minute, customers paid to assault the waiters, single young migrants from poorer cities to the north. If a customer preferred, his victim would dress in drag. Men “are under too much pressure,” Wu explained to me one day, as the waiters high-kicked Pepsi bottles in the storeroom. “They need a way to release it.”
[from a New Republic story about the consequences of the gender imbalance of Chinese society]