Hupu's Male Aesthetic, and the Presence of a Community's Persona

“Come to Walking Street to see male aesthetics — if you're a man, this is the community you have to visit!”

This year's winner of Hupu's Goddess Contest was Tong Liya.

After the list of the top 64 came out, someone lamented that the number of Hong Kong stars had dropped this year: “As Hupu's straight-male user base turns over, how are kids born after 1995 or 2000 supposed to appreciate Chingmy Yau's sultry allure, Brigitte Lin's heroic spirit, or Joey Wong's bewitching eyes? In the end, it's not that Hong Kong stars are fading — it's that Hupu's straight men keep getting younger.”

As in the second edition (the first had only 32 contestants), the Goddess Contest split the 64 film and TV actresses who made the main round into eight groups, and voting through “preliminaries,” “group stages” and “knockout rounds” decided the winner. The whole thing took half a month. Thirteen threads together drew more than 5.86 million views, an average of 450,000 per thread; the final thread pitting Tong Liya against Gao Yuanyuan drew more than 900,000.

This may be one of the liveliest non-sports topics in this sports community. It was first held in 2016, and today its biggest value to the brand is pulling in outsiders who would otherwise never look at Hupu.

During the second edition, Yahoo Japan covered the event under the headline “Japan's Masami Nagasawa and Satomi Ishihara Also Made the List! China's Ranking of ‘Goddesses Straight Men Love.’” The report was surprised that Chingmy Yau took the crown, and said so in a tone of disbelief, because it considered her past her prime. That year, on the Japanese side, both Masami Nagasawa and Yui Aragaki made the top 16.

Votes that rank women are nothing new on Hupu. When Produce 101 was airing, Hupu set up a dedicated 101 section, and the top three in its beauty vote were Yang Chaoyue, Wu Xuanyi and Qi Yandi.

All of these votes start with the users. The creator of the Goddess Contest, a Hupu user with the ID “Woshishengun123” (“I'm a Charlatan 123”), sees it purely as entertainment, no different from World Cup prediction pools or the community's earlier polls ranking Jin Yong characters and basketball stars.

Wang Zhaofeng, a marketing manager at Hupu, is happy to read the users' intent the same way: “Hupu users tend to treat everything as a competition, and then discuss it.”

“For instance, a while back it was Xiaomi and Lenovo phones, and more recently vivo and OPPO — after those phone makers hold a launch event, users will open a ‘post-match’ thread and compare how the manufacturers did.”

Still, the Goddess Contest does something nothing else can. During the competition, you'll see promotional images spreading across the internet through Hupu's official accounts.

A poster carrying the Hupu app's QR code read: “Follow the Hupu Goddess Contest — come to Walking Street to see male aesthetics. If you're a man, this is the community you have to visit!”

If Hupu had a persona, this is the tone “he” would speak in.

“Everyone here is expressing an attitude. If you have to take a side for some group, then I think that group is men — taking a stand as a group of men,” says Shen Ruien, operations director of Hupu's Walking Street.

Hupu's usual image is that of a competitive-sports content platform. Hupu's administrator, who goes by Oberstein, registered an account while browsing online in 2005. By the following year, when he became a moderator, the forum had only about a thousand active users. Today Hupu has 50 million monthly active users. On Walking Street, men aged 18 to 40 who like sports make up more than 90% of users.

Hupu's predecessor was a basketball forum called “hoopCHINA,” founded in 2004 by Cheng Hang, a PhD student studying in the US. At the time, traditional portal sites and the scraps of coverage on CCTV-5 were basketball fans' main source of NBA news. Cheng Hang wanted to give fans at home NBA news as it happened, with the ambition to “build the best basketball website.”

Users come here to read the news, to follow live text commentary, and to sigh, take sides or blow off steam in the “post-match” threads — after every NBA game Hupu posts a recap and the full stats — and some of these discussions become an outlet for users. The post-match threads for Kobe Bryant's 60-point farewell game, Stephen Curry's long-range buzzer-beater against the Thunder in the 2016 regular season, and LeBron James's playoff game-winner against the Pacers this year have each, at one point or another, crashed Hupu's servers.

It has another image too, one that travels less widely — though it is hotly disputed in threads on Douban's Goose Group and parts of Zhihu, where people call Hupu's Walking Street a gathering place for sufferers of “straight-man cancer.”

“Straight-man cancer” is a derogatory term. It usually points to a failure to grasp how women see things, which can produce wishful thinking or an oblivious kind of foolishness; sometimes it also means belittling women — the legendary “male chauvinism.”

Hupu officially refuses to be tied to the “belittling women” label, though the community does have habits that give people that impression: JRs often want threads on Walking Street to include photos of good-looking women, so such photos have become a kind of “perk”; and there is the joking rating scale of “a 10 if you'd sleep with her, a 0 if not.”

Hupu users call themselves JRs. The origin of the abbreviation can no longer be traced. One account holds that it grew inside the forum over time as a term of self-reference, and can be split two ways: when users are trash-talking each other it stands for jianren, jerks; when they are cheering each other on it stands for jiaren, family. The abbreviation also shows up in official branding — open the Hupu app and, alongside the Hupu Sports logo, you'll see the words “Proudly presented by Hupu JRs.”

“The emotional coloring of the label has been amplified. A lot of people only look at the side they want to see, and then express it in exaggerated terms,” Shen Ruien says.

Yet Hupu does not shy away from a phrase like “a man's way of thinking.” As with the Goddess Contest's tagline, it is a matter of operations. Playing up content they consider masculine also helps define what kind of village Hupu is.

Shen Ruien points to a thread on Walking Street with more than a million views: a user's girlfriend wanted to buy lipstick, so he asked her what color she wanted and set out to mix it himself — melting down all dozen-plus of the lipsticks she already had and blending them together.

In the comments, the reply “Kid, this is the most original way I've ever seen someone propose a breakup” got more than 27,000 lights, Hupu's term for upvotes.

Hupu sees a post like this as having a screwball quality: “only a straight man would do something like that.”

“I think the thinking of a good operations team — or even just a competent one — is not to fight what history has already chosen: whatever your users are like, whatever profile they show, that's what you build around. Maybe if these tens of millions of users of ours were entirely Zhihu's vibe, we'd do Zhihu's kind of thing. But they're Hupu's vibe, so we do Hupu's kind of thing,” Shen Ruien says.

Hupu's vibe may lie in keeping the “straight man” while getting outsiders to drop the “cancer.” The “Walking Street Main Thoroughfare rules” ban users from asking for torrent seeds, posting links, posting screenshots from pornographic films or AV covers; ban any “perk” that shows more than swimwear; and ban posts about drugs, gambling, prostitution or personal attacks. Seen from another angle, if the community weren't so overwhelmingly male, rules that detailed wouldn't be necessary in the first place.

Users don't agonize over any of this the way outsiders do. They are happy to confide and entertain themselves inside a straight-male frame of reference.

“At first I mainly read the ‘Soggy Topics’ section, the ‘Soccer Topics’ section and ‘Walking Street,’ because my favorite sports are soccer and basketball,” a user with the ID “Forever DR7” told QDaily. “As for Walking Street, traffic was much lower back then — less than half what it is now. Forty thousand new posts a day was already impressive, and a thread with 400 lights counted as highly upvoted. So a lot of the regulars on the street knew each other fairly well, and there were plenty of oddballs and odd threads — but honestly, the cheating stories weren't as rampant as people think. Everyone was mostly talking about small things in daily life, and the top-lit posts were often really funny.”

On July 9, 2015, “Forever DR7” posted a thread titled “A Must-Read for Anyone Browsing BXJ: The Complete Encyclopedia of Walking Street — Buzzwords and Famous Lines, With Analysis and Origins,” which collected and sorted the various pieces of insider slang that had spread out of Hupu and Walking Street.

By then Hupu had already accumulated memes of every kind.

“Brother Mutation” and “the Mutation Passage” are among the brightest of them.

Here is where they came from. On May 28, 2012, a user with the ID “Hu Tingfei” posted a thread titled “My Girlfriend Cheated on Me.” The first paragraph described how he found out: he called his girlfriend, who was away on a business trip, and after they finished talking she forgot to hang up — so on his end of the line he overheard her arranging a hotel room with another man.

What made the thread famous was the second paragraph: “The mutation invaded like lightning and thunder, like a bullet slamming into my chest and exploding — the instant pressure of the blast traveled from my heart into every capillary, and every cell in my body stopped metabolizing, stopped thinking, and listened closely to the tremor of that instant...”

That second paragraph moved Hupu users' attention from the cheating to the writing. The reply “You can tell from this second paragraph that the OP's elementary-school essays used to get read aloud to the whole class as models...” got 6,272 lights. “A cheating girlfriend makes a literary giant” got 4,242. The passage came to be called “the Mutation Passage,” and Hu Tingfei became “Brother Mutation.”

“Even before the Mutation Passage, people often posted ‘green’ threads about being cheated on” — in Hupu slang, green comes from “wearing a green hat,” meaning cuckolded — “and the peak of that genre, in all my time browsing the street, has to be this one. That someone could put the feeling of being cheated on into writing like that was just stunning,” Forever DR7 says. “From then on, this thread pretty much stood for how green Walking Street had become. Other sites, whenever they bring up Walking Street, call it ‘Green Street,’ and anyone who knows where that comes from thinks of the Mutation Passage.”

Even now you can still find comments on Hu Tingfei's Hupu profile page from people coming to pay homage.

When he wrote the Mutation Passage, Hu Tingfei was a senior in college. That day, on Walking Street, he had opened a thread about the TV drama 《笑看风云》 (Smiling Through the Storm) and played the theme song embedded in it; moved by the music, he sat on his dorm bed with his laptop and wrote down what he wanted to say.

Looking back at the style of the Mutation Passage, he says he never meant to write a “beautiful essay,” only a pure description of feeling. Some of it was exaggerated — his heart had not actually stopped as if hit by a bullet; what he felt was unease and grief. The sensation he used to describe that moment was borrowed from a chance encounter in 2007 with a first love he had lost touch with. They were walking toward each other on the street when she called out his name; the moment he recognized her, a jolt of surprise went through him. “That surprise really did feel like an electric shock through my whole body. So to heighten my emotions, I borrowed some feelings that weren't what I actually felt at the time.”

Hu Tingfei says there was much more behind the story that he left out of the thread, and once he noticed that more and more people were reading it, he hurried to delete the faceless topless photos of his ex-girlfriend he had posted earlier in it.

As confession threads about infidelity caught on, Hupu's slang gained a new line: “For domestic affairs, ask Baidu; for foreign affairs, ask Google; for bedroom affairs, ask Tianya; for green affairs, ask Hupu.”

Not all of Walking Street's memes are about “straight men.” As in any community, what users trade is the full range of life.

The thread JRs, What Was Your Toughest Battle? We're Still Alive, Genuinely Holding Up Every Life was posted ten years ago. It now has nearly 2.4 million views and more than 10,000 replies, more even than many other threads get in views. The most-lit reply under it, with more than 5,500 lights, told one user's road from failing the college entrance exam to earning a doctorate, and the setbacks he went through with his girlfriend along the way.

But “green affairs” always stand out. Walking Street earned the nickname “Green Street.” Even the NetEase Cloud Music comment section for Stefanie Sun's single Green Light was overrun by Hupu users; the comment “the BXJ anthem...” got more than 2,500 likes, topping the section.

When Hupu explains all this officially, it does so on two levels: what Hupu wants to convey, and a response to how outsiders read it.

“At Hupu, men are willing to speak — or rather, they speak more than anywhere else. And generally, in modern relationships, men are basically always the victims. So this impression of a green street comes about naturally. Because it's only on Hupu that you have this kind of place where you can pour your heart out.” That is what Hupu wants to convey.

Shen Ruien says other platforms have topics loosely related to “green” too, such as the hookup threads on Douban in earlier years. But he says the reason “Green Street” left such a deep mark on Hupu is partly that the label itself generates talk. Beyond that: “Why do outsiders say Hupu is a green street? Because when a man says it out loud, it really does sound pretty pathetic — and that sticks in your head, right?”

Under a Zhihu question, “How do you rate Walking Street today?,” a user who said he had been a JR for more than seven years summarized the typical genres of Walking Street threads (“I got cheated on,” “how do I approach this girl I saw,” “who's in the wrong, me or my girlfriend,” and so on) and listed the strengths and weaknesses of the street's culture. The strengths: humor, warmth and level-headedness. The weaknesses: a streak of extremism, and “rather loserish, rather raunchy replies and threads.”

Another Zhihu question, also titled “How do you rate Walking Street today?,” has 246 answers, among them one with 140 upvotes: “Every variety of straight-man cancer found in moderately educated Chinese men under 30 is on display on Walking Street.”

Douban's Goose Group often treats Hupu's Walking Street as a reference point for understanding straight men. In a discussion of a Hupu thread titled “If I Were on the Titanic, I Wouldn't Let Women Go First,” the comment “physically the stronger sex, yet without a strong man's psychology or dignity” got nearly 5,000 upvotes.

Meanwhile, Walking Street's memes are as active as ever.

Each line of the seven-character verse in The Complete Encyclopedia stands for its own legendary thread: Strict Family, Not a Virgin / Bright Future, Upgraded From Junior College / Silver Lining: the Banana Was Delicious / Unmarried Girlfriend Used to Be a Prostitute / Son's Blood Type Doesn't Match / Millions in Family Assets, Richer Than a Nation / Long-Distance Love, Cuckolded / Married Three Months, Surprise — Already a Dad / Pay More, Must Get a Cayenne / If You're Picking, Pick the Big-Chested One / Tattoos and Smoking, Good Girl / One Mutation and Everyone's Cheated On / Fair Skin, Pretty Face, Has a Beard / Huge Size, No Good in Practice / No Breakthrough, Off to Lanxiang / Refuses to Have Sex With You / A Scare But No Harm, Got Into a Junior College / Didn't Go In, So It Doesn't Count as Cheating / This Friend, I've Decided to Keep / Giving You a CD to Listen to About Love / Girlfriend Famous for Being Loose.

The thread behind “Strict Family, Not a Virgin” has since been deleted. In it, a user wrote a post titled “My Girlfriend's Family Is Very Strict, Help Me Figure Out How to Get Her Into Bed,” which mentioned: “Recently started seeing a girl. Her family's very strict — she can't get home later than 9. Not a virgin.” The clash between “strict family” and “not a virgin” was what commenters seized on, and the thread instantly became legend.

“Silver Lining: the Banana Was Delicious” came from a thread titled “Got Scammed Out of 100 Yuan by a New Trick Yesterday, Everyone Be Careful,” in which the user described being swindled while buying bananas and tacked one line onto the end: “But the one silver lining in this misfortune is that the banana was actually pretty good.”

As for why the “Strict Family, Not a Virgin” thread was deleted, Shen Ruien says: “It was a long time ago, so this is only a guess. Probably the moderator felt it set a bad tone and moved it to the off-topic board. But it caught on because it was so catchy.” Hupu says the user who posted it was later put in the “little dark room” — banned from posting — but for a reply that broke political rules, unrelated to that thread.

In early 2017, Hupu raised Walking Street's rank. The “Gambia Continent” board that Walking Street had belonged to was renamed “Walking Street” outright, and the discussion forum that used to be called “Walking Street” became “Walking Street Main Thoroughfare.” This Walking Street even has its own street flag, whose design was inspired by a JR known as “Boss Sheep,” whose ID was “I've Done the Sheep.” He was an early Walking Street moderator, known for a series of threads analyzing Japanese AV actresses. Those threads were deleted for breaking laws and regulations.

Worth noting: that isn't the only meme built on “I've Done the Sheep.” Another, treated as a password marking a veteran Walking Street JR, reworks a line from the Nine Yin Manual in The Heaven Sword and the Dragon Saber: “Let him be as strong as he likes, I'll go do my own sheep.”

“We started out as a sports forum, but now more people are discussing life, food and clothing and daily routines, and how they feel day to day, than are discussing games,” Wang Zhaofeng says.

Threads that reach the Walking Street homepage currently draw somewhere around 300,000 to 400,000 views. Among the top 20 (excluding the pinned rules post), the average is 180,000. According to Hupu, the ten most-read threads each day get around 700,000 views.

If you search the internet for reactions to Hupu's Goddess Contest, you will indeed find that most people come to it out of curiosity — to “watch straight men's taste,” to see “what kind of goddess straight men would pick.”

There's also this take: “Men actually know that many female celebrities?”

Cover image from: Wikimedia Commons, Gao Yuanyuan's Weibo