He Wants to Teach Young Parents How to Talk to Their Kids About “Sex” | 100 People With Ideas

“Sex education should come early, not late — ignorance does the most damage.”

Measured from the last time one of his works went viral, Zou Bo has gone almost a year and a half without this much attention. He runs a short-video company called Nutcracker Studio, which currently puts out one episode a week of Minute School, a series that explains science.

The work that made Zou Bo's name, though, was One-Minute Sex Ed. In 2013 the series took off online. It held the top spot on Weibo's trending-topics chart for three days, which brought Xinhua out to report on it. In the end even The Huffington Post and Foreign Policy took notice.

As the series' executive producer, Zou Bo had a faint sense something might happen, but how big One-Minute Sex Ed got still went past what he had pictured — after all, it was one of the first things he made after starting his company.

One-Minute Sex Ed came out of Zou Bo's own worry. In China, sex education is a very sensitive subject. Sex, everyone seems to feel, belongs to the night and the bedroom; it is not something you bring out into daylight and discuss with other people. That furtiveness has left sex education in China more or less at a standstill. The few hygiene classes schools do offer are mostly a formality, because teachers are conservative about it.

None of this had drawn much of Zou Bo's attention until July 2013, when he became a father. His daughter's birth changed a lot of his thinking. As a father, he suddenly saw that sooner or later he would have to teach her how to protect herself — and there was no one on the market, and no textbook, that could tell young parents how to talk to small children about sex.

Zou Bo's view: “Sex education should come early, not late — ignorance does the most damage.” So he decided to do it himself, making videos that were both fun and professionally sound, to teach young parents how to talk with their children about sex.

Sex education is not an easy subject to handle, though: one wrong step and it turns into soft porn. And passing sex-related knowledge to children takes even more care. “Sex education for children shouldn't be too open, but it can't be too conservative either,” Zou Bo says.

What he settled on for One-Minute Sex Ed was heavy use of metaphor. To explain an erection, for instance, the series compared it to a war chariot. The nervous and endocrine systems are the commanders inside: they survey the situation outside, and the moment they judge that battle is needed, they swing the chariot's cannon around to aim at the target.

For Zou Bo and his team, the hardest part of working with metaphors was finding ones that were apt and interesting at the same time. Before the war chariot, they had considered describing an erection as a bicycle tire being pumped up. But the difference between a tire before and after is not visually obvious, and a round tire does not match the actual shape. Settling on the war chariot was, in other words, the product of careful thought.

The advantage of a metaphor like this is that it avoids talking about or showing sexual organs too explicitly, and so avoids the awkwardness Chinese people commonly feel around “sex,” while still laying out the process and the mechanism vividly — a small leap of association and you understand it.

With metaphor solving the question of how far to go, Zou Bo still had to think about whether the videos were appealing at all. He told QDaily: “At bottom One-Minute Sex Ed is a product too, so it needs something personal and stylized to present it.”

He settled on a hand-drawn look — a large hand drawing on screen. The style was not his invention. A hand-drawn series called MinutePhysics had appeared on YouTube and Facebook much earlier, teaching physics. Hand-drawing is a strong stylistic marker, and it already had a track record in popular science; that was enough for Zou Bo to pick it at once.

An illustrator draws live at a Zhihu “Salt Club” event

But Zou Bo does not think the hand-drawn style is the root reason One-Minute Sex Ed took off. “Our core strength is the scripts and the storyboards. Other teams can't copy that way of writing,” Zou Bo says.

Before he made videos, Zou Bo was a serious film buff who had also spent years covering film and television, so he knows exactly how a video should build a laugh and hold an audience. In the episode on homosexuality, the big hand on screen suddenly draws Ultraman and the little monster holding hands — a nod to a joke about the two that was once all over the Chinese internet, and it gets people every time.

A screenshot from One-Minute Sex Ed

What Zou Bo is proudest of, though, is not the jokes buried in the scripts but the scripts' professionalism — for a series that spreads scientific knowledge, that is the minimum requirement. The team he leads came out of Guokr, China's best-known science website, and Guokr has given it a great deal of support.

Yao Di, Guokr's chief operating officer, told QDaily: “What Guokr mainly provides is content scripts for Zou Bo's team, plus advice on scientific accuracy. Big.D, an editor at Zhixing, Guokr's sex-knowledge channel, is the screenwriter for the One-Minute Sex Ed series.”

In short: for One-Minute Sex Ed, the content has to be professional, but the form it takes can be entertaining. Zou Bo says: “Entertainment and science don't contradict each other. You can do the entertainment well as long as the science doesn't go off track.”

That is exactly why One-Minute Sex Ed has been so widely liked — since launch, the series has averaged close to 4 million views.

And attention was not all it brought him. He told QDaily: “It was only after this video took off that we were sure we wanted to make knowledge-based short videos.”

Zou Bo's reason for starting the company had to do with video, but not directly. After years in traditional media, what he thought about most was how a media outlet should remake itself for the internet. “What I most wanted to do was distribute content on the internet,” Zou Bo told us.

He had many reasons for choosing video as the medium. “The technical groundwork — the internet, broadband, mobile communications — is all mature now, so the conditions for spreading video online are mature too,” Zou Bo says. “Audiences have accepted short video as a product. Video travels more easily in the internet era, and it works better.”

Beyond those reasons, Zou Bo had been a film buff for more than 20 years and had worked for years in film and television media; his own deep interest in video as a product was an important reason he started making video shows.

In the early days, to stay alive, he took on plenty of commercial work — videos for PR firms and the like. It was not what he liked doing, and what he made did not win clients over either. “Back then it was tiring, hard work, with no sense of achievement,” Zou Bo says.

The turn came quickly. A friend, moved to hear that Zou Bo had decided to start a company even after having a daughter, offered him angel funding unprompted. The money let Zou Bo, who until then had been running the company on his own savings, breathe a little.

With the financial pressure off, he decided to start doing some things he actually liked — which is what made One-Minute Sex Ed possible.

The success of One-Minute Sex Ed brought Zou Bo plenty of clients who came looking for him. “Serving clients well is really hard, so we didn't take all of them. We were selective, taking only clients whose temperament matched ours,” Zou Bo told QDaily.

One was China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention, with which the studio made an episode for World AIDS Day. Another episode, made with the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the story of the Tiangong-1 spacecraft's mission in space. The clients Zou Bo picked, in other words, were still mostly about popularizing science.

A screenshot from AIDS Might Be Right Beside You

Zou Bo also wants to work his way out from under the lopsided reputation that “sex” has given him. Zou Bo says: “Sex is not a long-term plan. It covers too few people and it isn't distinctive enough. We have to get free of sex — even if the numbers fall, we have to shake off the dependence.”

That is why, after One-Minute Sex Ed, he went on to develop the series called Minute School, which ranges much wider: tobacco advertising, trypophobia, viruses and more.

But the pivot has not been a clean success. These non-sex topics get far fewer clicks and far less attention than One-Minute Sex Ed did. And Minute School still carries a lot of sex-related content.

Nor is Minute School Zou Bo's final plan; he sees himself as making a more diversified set of cultural products. “What kind of product do you think Baozou Comics is? It isn't just video or comics — it's a diversified cultural product spun out of a set of characters, and what we want to make is a bit like that,” Zou Bo told QDaily.

“We'll change on two fronts. First, Minute School will widen from spreading science to more topics about everyday life, fun and entertainment. Second, we'll launch two new shows. We hope this will strengthen a lot of the elements in the videos and open the way to further development,” Zou Bo says.

In the middle of that shift, the biggest problem Zou Bo faces is how to shake the label the internet has pinned on him: “the guy who made One-Minute Sex Ed.”

Still, he says: “I don't mind being ‘labeled.’ Especially when it's a good label.”