The other day when I was perusing the Netease online bulletin boards, I came across the following pictures which were under a discussion with this introduction:
I saw a man and a woman passionately kiss at Wangfujing’s snack food street. The man was a laowai (colloquial term for foreigner) and judging from her appearance, the woman seemed to be a Chinese-made MM. The man and woman filmed themselves kissing, with the woman looking into the lens and letting out a happy smile. I personally don’t like this kind of method – it is a public place after all.
The comments to this post were mixed, with some people saying that the sight of couples kissing at Wangfujing is quite normal, while others wrote negative comments directed at the woman, seemingly because she was with a laowai. Setting aside the obvious racist undertones and prudish nature of the post, I am interested in the definition of the term MM. It is my understanding that MM is an abbreviation of the Chinese word mei mei, with the first mei being the character for beautiful and the second mei being the character for eyebrow. As a compound, the two characters mean beautiful woman. As a type of internet jargon, it seems that MM is quite liberally used when it comes to describing women. Judging from the photos below, the woman pictured is definitely not an MM. This is not the first time that I have noticed that nearly every woman whose photo is posted on Chinese online bulletin boards is described as an MM. It somewhat reminds me of my time in Nanjing, when nearly everyone in my workplace answered to the nickname shuai ge (handsome bloke) or mei nu (beautiful woman).
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