The cover of the postgraduate student's research project Photo: Sina Weibo

A Chinese postgraduate student's academic thesis on "sexy underwear" has become a hot topic on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo. Attempting to explain how lingerie design invokes emotion, the very unusual study has received numerous thumbs-up from netizens, who see it as the "epitome" of an increasing tendency in Chinese academia to treat sex as a proper subject worthy of study. 

Published by a fashion student in Dalian, Northeast China's Liaoning Province, the paper covers topics such as how women's thoughts have impacted the development of both Chinese and Western underwear design and how diverse types of lingerie invoke erotic reactions in men. 

The author's peculiar interest, however, quickly sparked anger among conservatives on the internet, who accused him of disgracing academia's serious nature by choosing a subject of zero value. 

"Whether or not a research project holds academic value mainly depends on how the scholar rationalizes it. By looking at the table of contents, I think the researcher's topic has potential. Small and interesting subjects such as this can often produce very unique and fruitful findings. The student is on the right track to establishing a thesis by combining other cross-disciplinary theories such as feminism," Xu, a social science research professor in Beijing, told the Global Times on Monday. 

Echoing Xu's opinion, other netizens also came to the author's defense saying that instead of considering sexy underwear vulgar, it should be considered a type of visual art, which has both aesthetic and business value. 

"Welcome to newness, we young people no longer shy away from talking and thinking about sex, and now you see, we can also be intellectually creative concerning a topic that some of you old-fashioned people are even afraid to talk about," posted one netizen on Sina Weibo. 

Some other postgraduate students said they want to encourage the idea that sexual content should not be a banned topic in academia, and also shared their own experiences researching the subject. 

"Seeing the beauty in nudity and imparting intense sensual qualities to a painting, like Francis Bacon did, are very important to me as an artist. I've completed a collection of self-portraits that focus on depicting my own sexual experiences and nudity. My mentor had no qualms helping me with it, and also helped me to improve the work," Qingzi, a female art student in Chongqing who specializes in oil painting, told the Global Times on Monday. 

"Things exist for a reason. I believed this idea when I started to research the development of pornography in the creative industries. My teacher helped me the most by guiding me step by step to build an academic framework on this rather new topic, and he commented at the end saying, "it was an enjoyable read" and I'm happy," Songli, a postgraduate student in Beijing specializing in feminism and cultural studies, told the Global Time on Monday.