With a glazed look in her eyes, the bored production line worker dips her hand into a bag full of short and curlies, peels off a strip of double-sided transparent tape and applies the furry finishing touch to a plastic vagina.
On the table behind, three young migrant workers from Hubei province are a picture of tedium as they fix studs and chains on a red rubber bondage outfit.
Nearby, a more experienced worker inserts small electric motors into giant pink vibrators and then buzzes them briefly into action to make sure the connections work.
The Shaki adult toy factory in Shenzhen, in southern China near Hong Kong, is an orgy of production. And though nothing could seem less erotic to the workers, their output is testimony to the growing passion of consumers for China's latest boom industry: sex.
The country now provides 70 percent of the world's sex toys.
While the bulk of the equipment is destined for export, a growing share is now being sold domestically, to a population that has never had as much money and freedom to experiment.
Thanks to a sharply expanding economy and the liberalization of many aspects of private life, attitudes towards sex have undergone a sea change.
cultural revolution
During the cultural revolution men and woman were often segregated, overt sexuality in dress or behavior was frowned on, and kissing in public could bring condemnation.
Today, conservative values remain strong in the countryside, but in the cities young people canoodle openly on park benches and try out the alternative sexual behavior they see on the internet and on pirated western DVDs.
A survey by the Family Planning Agency found that almost 70 percent of Chinese were not virgins when they married, compared with 16 percent at the end of the 1980s.
Prostitution, the target of a fierce and successful crackdown during the Mao Zedong (
On weekends, gay and lesbian bars, once unimaginable, draw packed crowds in Shanghai, Guangzhou and other large cities throughout China.
The sex toy industry is also going from strength to strength. In Beijing, it was not until 1993 that the first adult health retailer, as such outlets are euphemistically named, opened.
Now the capital is estimated to have 2,000 such shops.
Most of the early establishments were dowdy and staffed by matrons in white laboratory coats, offering potency pills to a largely male clientele.
But increasing competition is pushing retailers to be more imaginative in their presentation. Public advertising is forbidden, but managers are displaying a more colorful array of products on their shelves and expressing a wider range of ideas about their role.
"I feel my business is standing on the front lines of a sexual revolution," Meng Yu, who runs the G-Spot, told the domestic media.
"I believe all adults have the same right to enjoy sexual pleasure. There should be no difference between the orient and the west on this point."
hard slog
But achieving recognition has been a hard slog. Before he was able to open Shaki in 1995, the owner, Fang Hong, said it took him years to acquire the necessary permits from 36 different government agencies.
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