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The age-old obsession with virginity is seeing a revival under both moral and commercial pretenses. Recently, a tea plantation in China put up "help wanted" ads for tea leaf pickers: Female, virgin, with C-cup breasts. Does this sound like reasonable prerequisites for picking tea leaves? The advertising company said it was to guarantee that the tea leaves, which the virgins were supposed to pick with their mouths and place between their breasts, were of the best quality. I'm not surprised. I have heard variations of this job description while touring tea plantations around the country. Virginity of the pickers is always touted as a prized quality of the tea with weather conditions and altitude of the tea-growing areas mentioned as added flourishes. Chinese men's obsession with female virginity has just found a new manifestation as this recruitment effort was obviously a ploy targeting tea drinkers with more active and discriminating sexual fantasies. For them, purity is one thing but the vicarious satisfaction of savoring tea picked by a tribe of voluptuous virgins is closest to having a palace of freshly plucked concubines, which, to a lot of Chinese men, is still the No 1 perk of being an emperor. It is ironic that Chinese women, at least some of them, share this sentiment. Bo Wanqing, affectionately known as "Auntie Bo" and host of a couple of television shows in Shanghai and also a "people's representative", equivalent to a congresswoman, recently admonished on TV that "Virginity is a girl's most valuable dowry to the family of her mother-in-law". | 
