Chinese Porn Identification Officer Says Job Sickens Him

CHINA—Video game blog Kotaku has posted an amusing story about the Chinese pornography identification officer who has watched so much porn it is making him sick at heart. Kotaku reports, "According to China's central news agency, Xinhua, 59-year-old professional porn watcher Liu Chunqi has been deciding what's pornography and what isn't over the last five years. Liu says some of what he's seen during that time has curdled his stomach." A specialist with the Harbin police department, Chunqi says he has watched over 600,000 minutes of pornography since he started this job. Sometimes, according to Kotaku, "he's watched so much in one sitting that he was sofa-ridden. Not only does he have to watch and catalog the material, he's also apparently on call 24/7 should the police raid an illegal DVD shop." That may sounds like a lot of porn watching to the average civilian, but a closer look at the numbers suggests that Chunqu may actually be a wuss when it comes to his porn-watching chops. Assuming for argument's sake that the average porn DVD is four hours long, a single DVD is 240 minutes long. 240 divided into 600,000 equals 2,500 porn DVDs. In any given year, according to the video scribes here at AVN, somewhere around 4,000 porn DVDs, not including comps, are released. What that means is that Chunqi, who has reportedly been on the porn watching job for five years, has barely scratched the surface of even one year's worth of DVD releases, assuming of course that any of them made their way to his area of the country. Still, even if they did not, Chunqi's 600,000 minutes worth of porn watching over five years comes out to his viewing the equivalent of only 625 moves a year, which is like a vacation for your professional Porn Valley porn critic. But at least Chunqi can say that he's making a difference. "Even though it's a hard and thankless job," adds Kotaku, "Liu's job, according to Xinhua, is an important one. Supposedly he's helped close cases and has been integral to determining what is and what isn't porn. His expertise in the subject has allowed him to tour the various provinces of China. It seems he's had an interesting life." For anyone interested, "China hires armies and armies of keyboard warriors," says the site, which also has a link to a notice issued last year by the government seeking porn identification officers for the $200,000 a year gig. With that salary, all we can say is, sign us up! We know porn when we see it. Image: Man reacts viscerally to surfeit of porn.