Everyone has heard the saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but most men don’t really believe it. Most men really believe that a hot woman is a hot woman regardless of class or culture.
That’s just not the case!
Today there are tens of thousands of beautiful women in China over the age of twenty-six who can’t find a decent Chinese man because they are too OLD!
That a beautiful Chinese woman might be considered an old maid at twenty-seven is shocking to most American or European men in their forties or fifties. But in a 2010 survey conducted by the Chinese government 92% of men said that they believed a woman should be married before she is twenty-seven.
If you are forty you know that a twenty-seven-year-old woman is NOT old. But apparently, Chinese men see it differently. In fact, there is a term for Chinese women above twenty-seven, a specific term for these women.
Sheng nu is the term; it translates UNWANTED.
Think about that for a moment. An unmarried Chinese woman above twenty-seven years old, no matter how smart, successful, or beautiful is considered UNWANTED. That is literally the term for these women.
But it actually gets worse the more educated, successful, and financially independent a young Chinese woman is the MORE difficult it is for her to find a husband, because of a variety of conservative cultural norms.
Chinese men still want to be the STRONG head of the household and many of them are not interested in a woman who earns more money than them or who is better educated than they are.
Now, there are a lot of American men who consider themselves rock-ribbed conservatives who dream of finding a woman who can support them in the lifestyle they would like to become accustomed to.
Just to put things into perspective, below are some pictures from our Chinese Dating Profile Gallery of some very hot Chinese women above the age of 27! These women would be considered over the hill in China!
Here at International Love Scout, we try to explain that there are good cultural reasons why smart, beautiful, and successful women want to leave their own countries and marry Western men. The situation in China is unusual, but similar cultural forces are at the root of the modern mail order bride movement. It is better to be a Chinese mail-order bride, much better than to be Sheng Nu.
Here is an excerpt from an article about Sheng Nu over at Yahoo news:
Shelly, 34, a highly educated public relations consultant who had just returned from living in the United States, was among the new members. Since her return to China, she had avoided her relatives and even some of her close friends because of their insistence in trying to arrange dates for her.
Yahoo News
“I’m under pressure from all sides. I feel my mother is disappointed and sad when she sees the grandchildren of her friends”.
But with no potential partner on the horizon, Shelly is preparing to return to the United States to do a second Masters degree – a decision partly motivated by her desire to escape her colleagues, parents, and friends.
Can you believe that this poor woman is only 34 years old and has practically no chance of finding a husband in China even though she is about to get her SECOND MASTERS DEGREE!
There is something very wrong with this picture.
I had a hard time believing this so I asked some of my Chinese friends about it – and they said it was absolutely true.
Here is another snippet from the same article:
Twenty-six-year-old Summer was at the Garden of Joy for the first time, desperate to meet a man before she hit the dreaded cut-off age.
Yahoo News
“Nothing in the world will allow me to become a Sheng Nu. Men don’t want a woman over 30. It’s important for them that she’s still pretty”.
A widely publicized survey in 2010 by the government-backed All China Women’s Federation proved the new social phenomenon beyond doubt.
Man, this sounds like some sort of crazy Science Fiction movie, anyone remember Logan’s Run?
That was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. In the future, the people all lived in a giant domed city and at the age of 30, they got incinerated!
OK, maybe this is not quite so dramatic, but for these poor women it must be a real bummer.
You can Read the full article here: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/chinas-unwanted-single-women-feel-pressure-061239030.html
Here’s another great article on the subject from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/opinion/global/chinas-leftover-women.html?_r=0
