A major Chinese website has removed a controversial ad that offered Shanghai women the "job of condom tester" because many believed it was openly hiring sex workers.
Screenshots of the deleted ad showed a company was hiring women aged 18 to 25, "lively and good looking" to work as condom testers in Nanhui, Pudong District with a pay as high as 3,000 yuan per day, today's Shanghai Youth Daily reported.
Within three hours after the ad was posted on Baixin.com at 2pm on Sunday, 22 young women applied for the job, the newspaper said.
A Youth Daily reporter dialed the phone number in the post and a man surnamed Chen said he was a worker in a condom manufacturing company in Shanghai and the company had been hiring condom testers for months.
Chen said many young women have passed their job interviews and they already had enough male condom testers.
"Condoms are usually tested by machines but we can't afford more machines," he said. "Though women testers have to do sexual activity with men in the process, the job is different from prostitution."
"If you are not willing to do the job, others will. We have rules that a woman can only do the testing once a day and we won't pay you more if you do more," Chen told a reporter.
The ad post was immediately removed after its screenshots went viral on the Weibo microblogging site, sparking speculation that prostitution was involved.
A lawyer told the newspaper that Chinese laws have no mention of condom testers. It is hard to say whether the job is legal or not.
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