Huang Ko-wu, 2016, If It’s Not Dirty, It’s No Joke: Humor, Desire, and the Body in Chinese Masculinity, 560 pages, Taipei: Linking Publishing.

This study deals with the mentality of Chinese men from the late imperial era to the modern period. The author uses joke books, popular songs, erotic novels, and other materials from the Ming-Qing period, as well as medical advertisements from early Republican Shanghai to investigate male emotion, desire, and private life, while further analyzing their intellectual and cultural significance. In addition, he author argues that Ming-Qing joke books and erotic novels reflect male elite attitudes toward the body and desire, as well as relationships between men and women in a male-centered society. On the one hand, these texts reflect humorous descriptions of sexual activities and bodily functions in wild and outrageous ways; on the other hand they follow Confucian moral ethics, Daoist concepts of nourishing the body, and Buddhist ideas of retribution. Early Republican medical advertisements mainly reflect male obsession with sexual pleasure and anxiety in a new context of medical science, nationalism, global capitalist markets, and mass media. The various texts discussed in this book are still widely circulated in contemporary Chinese world, which shows how these mentalities became the basis of sexual identity, the expression of desire, and the concept of privacy in modern Chinese masculinity.