At the beginning of August 2023, a video of a live broadcast room with microphones circulated on the whole network: a sales person in the financial circle asked for help in the live broadcast room of the blogger "Qu X" and asked "How to choose the current customers and rich people who have spent 20 million?" "Men are channels, emotions are skills", "The essence of relationships is exchange"...... The "emotional business" for women has surfaced.
On December 18, 2023, @微博管理员公布了微博平台新一周的典型处置案例, including the emotional big V "Qu X", according to the announcement, the reason for the account violation was "repeatedly promoting bad love views to gain popularity, and using this to sell courses for personal gain and convey wrong value orientation", and the relevant accounts are currently no longer available.
According to his point of view, falling in love, getting married, and even having children are just tools to achieve "class leapfrogging", and "making money" from men is the ultimate goal beyond emotion. And "Qu X" has also been questioned by many people about "objectifying" intimate relationships.
Slice short videos are still circulating
Divert traffic to private domain live streaming
It is understood that before being banned by the Weibo platform, "Qu X" had traveled to multiple social platforms, but it was suspected that they were all dealt with by the platform for violations. However, some of the live slice videos are still circulating on relevant platforms. According to netizens, Qu's live broadcast has been transferred from the original public platform to the private domain operation tool "Xiao Xtong".
On December 26, 2023, the reporter entered the "Qu X" live broadcast room, and the anchor was analyzing emotional problems for Lianmai fans. In the interval between microphone connections, it will also take the initiative to guide fans to buy 1V1 tutor consultation, emotional courses, girlfriend circles and other services in the live broadcast room, with prices ranging from thousands of yuan to tens of thousands of yuan.
Screenshot of the live broadcast room of "Qu X" on December 26, 2023
"After the account is banned, the works related to it must also be removed from the shelves and can no longer be recommended, including related slice videos", said Zhu Wei, deputy director of the Communication Law Research Center of China University of Political Science and Law, In July 2023, the Secretariat of the Central Cyberspace Administration issued the "Notice on Strengthening the Management of "Self-Media", which requires website platforms to strictly implement the regulations on the number of accounts registered with "one person, one enterprise, two accounts", and strictly prohibits individuals or enterprises from manipulating the "self-media" account matrix to publish and disseminate illegal and negative information. Where website platforms employ measures to ban 'self-media' in violation of regulations, they shall simultaneously suspend their for-profit privileges for a period of 2 to 3 times the period of the ban.
In the name of "emotional counseling".
Blogger women earn money from men
The reporter's investigation found that not only "Qu X", but also many bloggers are doing women's emotional business: they often claim to be emotional mentors or psychological counselors with rich experience, and some self-report have helped tens of thousands of women to achieve upward circle socialization, and teach women to "borrow" from men in emotional relationships to obtain wealth resources.
Searching on the short video platform with keywords such as "emotional counseling" and "women's growth" will show many similar accounts, with the largest number of followers in the millions. For example, a self-proclaimed "elite female growth mentor" blogger "Sister X" declared in a short video that "marriage is a pedal, and men are a ladder", guiding women to achieve class leaps through "bragging" and "packaging"; According to the short video content shared by him, many Lianmai fans received RVs and huge sums of money from men with his "help".
Output "values" and "theoretical system"
Short-term gains are significant
In the self-reports of some similar bloggers, there is no shortage of words such as "earn 2 million in 6 months", "realize 6 million in half a year", "realize 60 million in half a year for emotional training" and so on. Some industry insiders pointed out that most of these accounts have rapid traffic adsorption and monetization capabilities due to "empathy", and their audience is often women with strong spending power.
As for the operation of "Qu X", one of its students analyzed that "Qu X" outputs a complete set of "values" and "theoretical systems", and once they join this "discourse system", they are very happy to pay for it. She explained that the target users of such accounts are mainly biased towards women who are "junior high-level" or "want to make money from men", and the content production is mainly based on microphone connection, and the object of connection will be screened in the early stage, if it can be proved that men pay more than 5 million yuan for themselves, they can get the privilege of "priority microphone connection". Not only live broadcasts, but the streamer and his team also teach "how to deal with men with rice (money)" by selling emotional courses.
The rules for connecting microphones in the "Qu X" live broadcast room disclosed by netizens
According to statistics, on multiple short video platforms, there are at least hundreds of matrix accounts that use short videos to divert the content of "Qu X", relying on the sale of signature courses worth 3,580 yuan, and services such as 1V1 tutor consultation of tens of thousands of yuan, which have a lot of short-term revenue.
In addition to the above-mentioned monetization methods, there are also individual bloggers who play the role of "marriage agencies" and form "blind date bureaus" in the fan group to become a new channel for revenue. A blogger named "XX Talking Media" claimed that he could make a net profit of more than 100,000 yuan a month by relying on offline fan activities with an asset threshold of 50 million. It is reported that it can hold more than 160 blind date activities a year, with an average of two "50 million blind date bureaus" per month, and the per capita admission fee is more than 6,000 yuan.
According to the experts:
"Selling anxiety" and "objectifying women"
From the personal experiences described in their videos, they have common "characteristics": they have experienced marriage failures, entrepreneurial failures, etc., and after getting out of the trough, they think that their ideological consciousness has been improved, and they take the initiative to expose their scars, hoping that their own experience can alert women and help women grow.
For example, "Sister XX", a blogger who preaches that "marriage is a pedal and a man is a ladder", said that after experiencing a failed "wealthy marriage" and a debt of 10 million, she "not only paid off her debts, but also became the CEO of a listed company" with the "big guy" resources linked to in the business school. This made many netizens call it "inspirational", and took the initiative to ask how to buy her "elite relationship" course and ask how to break the circle upward.
Zhu Wei, deputy director of the Communication Law Research Center of China University of Political Science and Law, has long been concerned about this group, and in his opinion, emotional counseling has been around for a long time, but it should be noted that unlike some psychological counselors and family legal aid accounts, some bloggers have not obtained relevant qualifications, and some even have their own marriages "in a mess", but they come to sell emotional courses, which has become a strange phenomenon nowadays.
The reporter observed that many netizens said on social platforms that they had fallen into the "trap" of these emotional courses and consulting services. Some netizens complained that because of empathy, an anchor placed an order for a 1v1 consulting service worth nearly 8,000 yuan, but the tutor was not the anchor himself, but a teacher without any qualifications, and the reply was perfunctory during the consultation, and less than half of the money was returned when negotiating a refund.
Zhu Wei believes that in essence, some of the content and behaviors such as the so-called emotional counseling and short videos of teaching emotional skills made public in the live broadcast room are not teaching a certain skill, but by selling anxiety to women and profiting from it. The remarks advocated in it, such as "spoiling tens of millions of real estate", are actually the objectification of women, and are contrary to the concept of equality between men and women advocated by the "Law on the Protection of Women's Rights and Interests", "Law on the Promotion of Family Education" and "Anti-Domestic Violence Law" in mainland China. And through the so-called "skills", in fact, focusing on some topics to create gender confrontation to gain traffic, it is also harmful. Wang Junyi, a lawyer at Beijing Leiteng Law Firm, judged from a legal perspective that from a long-term perspective, long-term exposure to such content may lead to suspicion of mainstream social values and even distorted values.