Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

 An unnamed Chinese college in Xi'an has come under fire after asking female students in a class titled "No Regrets Youth" to sign a pledge that they would remain virgins until marriage, and after marriage remain faithful to their husbands. The pledge prompted a huge backlash online, and rightly so. This was an absurd and offensive request by the school, and one worryingly indicative of the levels of chauvinism that still run deep in some institutions.

China is hardly the only country to have such problems; in the US "Purity Balls" and similarly misogynistic institutions damage many young people, especially at private, fundamentalist universities. But given the country's national commitment to gender equality, and the lagging realization of that on the ground, these issues should be taken seriously.

To begin with, why was it only young women who were asked to sign the pledge? If virginity at marriage is a good thing - a big assumption - isn't it equally good for both sexes? It seemed like the pledge was dragging up the same old double standard; men get to behave how they like but women have to follow all the rules. And, of course, with its marriage carefully described as "between one man and one women," there was no notion of any idea that anyone in the class might be anything other than heterosexual.

But the fundamental idea of the pledge was far more deeply flawed than that. Staying virgin until marriage might seem like a romantic idea, but it doesn't work out terribly well in practice. Surveys repeatedly show that couples with less sexual experience are less likely to stay together, have worse sex in marriage, and are generally less happy. The few people who did stay virgins until marriage often later bemoaned the lack of experience with others. David Lodge's wonderful comic novel How Far Can You Go? captures the awkward reality of young English Catholics in the 1950s trying to maintain their virginity, and regretting it later.

"Chastity" education in the US has been a dire failure. Schools that preach pre-marital chastity, rather than an emphasis on sexual responsibility and safe sex, have higher rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that young people are going to have sex; the choice is whether you teach them that's something to be ashamed about or whether you teach them to make meaningful and safe decisions about their own bodies.

The idea that people traditionally avoided premarital sex and that values are under threat today also simply doesn't stand up, either in China or in the West. Read any unexpurgated account of life in the 19th century - when sexual repression in the West was at its peak - and pre-marital sex is everywhere, both in affectionate sex between friends or couples, and in systems of abuse and dominance such as mass prostitution.

Read Chinese intellectual Shen Fu's memoir of his life, written in 1807, and you'll find a world where sex, for many, was treated as a source of pleasure and friendship - including, as for Shen's wife Chen Yun, who's always disappearing to get sweaty with female friends, sex between women. Middle-class Western missionaries were shocked by the levels of sexual freedom in China, but also by their excursions into working class life in England. Of women born in the 1940s in the US, 9 out of 10 had premarital sex.

And yet, it's also true that young Chinese, like young Americans, need lessons in sexual responsibility. They live in a society increasingly deluged by sexualized images that at the same time is still streaked with patriarchal values. Women can feel under pressure to have sex even if they don't really want to; men can be made to feel like failures if they're still virgins.

Those are issues that colleges should be talking about with their students. But they should be talking about them in a way that emphasizes choice, not restraint, that treats sex as a fact of life rather than a source of shame, and that recognizes that people's bodies and what they do with them are their own decisions.

The author is an editor of the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn