The job offer sounded like an elaborate joke. What man wouldn't want to receive a very high salary to watch pornography every day, and carefully classify footage as either "pornographic" or merely "vulgar," using criteria such as whether the bikini-clad woman was on a beach or on a bed?

The job advertisement, posted by Internet company anquan.org, was indeed real. The company is attempting to recruit for a position called "chief porn identifier," with an offer of a 200,000 yuan ($32,378) annual salary.

By Tuesday afternoon, the "dream job for men," as it had been labeled by most Web users, had attracted more than 4,000 resumes, an HR staff member surnamed Quan from the company told the Global Times. The Weibo post advertising the job has been forwarded more than 125,000 times.

In cooperation with more than 800 Internet companies in China such as Baidu and Tencent, Anquan hires porn identifiers to identify inappropriate material, design certain kinds of software and compile blacklists of porn sites, enabling the websites that use the company's services to filter harmful information.

However, Quan said most of the applicants seem to have misunderstood the job. "It's not only about watching porn, but also having the right mindset to be able to identify what is porn and what is not," Quan said, adding that they are still selecting candidates for interviews.

Fierce competition

In a QQ chat group including 600 people who applied for the job, the discussion revolved around how their accumulated experience watching sexual videos and visiting pornographic websites could make them more qualified for the position.

Typically, married women between 35 and 40 are preferred, according to an experienced porn identifier working at one of China's biggest search engines, who spoke to the Global Times on condition of anonymity. However, nearly 90 percent of the applicants for the position were men.

"Maybe men are more focused and experienced in terms of such things," Sun Jiulong, an applicant who has not yet graduated from college in Anhui Province, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

 "Some of them are not really applying, but just making dirty jokes with this stunt," said Wu Shu, 29, one of the applicants, adding that many people do not know what the job is about.

Wu said the job advertisement for the company gave people the false impression that porn identifiers could watch those things for fun without fear of being found out.

Peng Xiaohui, a sexologist from Central China Normal University, said it was almost like a publicity stunt by the company, but also reflected how pornography has been popularized in China and that people have started to discuss it openly. She said it was also a reflection of how little people know about this kind of job.

Not an easy job

To apply for the job, applicants should finish a test designed by the company, which involved identifying words with sexual connotations in both Chinese and Japanese sentences (as Japanese pornography is quite common in China).

"Being familiar with different patterns of pornography can help one be a porn identifier," an anonymous source from China's top body for dealing with illegal pornography online, told the Global Times.

The government censor said that one should be able to keep emotionally and physically detached when classifying sexual videos or looking at erotic pictures.

"A lot of training is needed to be able to resist the seductive messages that are being sent," she said, adding that this was the reason why someone who is already familiar with porn could be less sensitive.

Another porn identifier the Global Times spoke to works for a large search engine. He said that identification work can get tricky when distinguishing between materials that are merely vulgar and those that are pornographic.

According to the identifier, being vulgar, for example, would be a female actor or model wearing bath towel and smiling with a suggestive hyperlink title like "are you lonely tonight?" whereas for it to be pornographic, the model would need to be wearing nothing.

"When it's a commercial website we can't block everything that's sexy because they help increase the number of clicks and assist advertisements on the site. As long as the pictures don't cross the line in terms of censorship, they'll keep them," he said, adding that it is an open secret among Internet editors that some topics related to sex are left uncensored.

"If no one reports it to the government or the police, we are okay," he added.

A lot of Internet companies need porn identifiers to detect and delete pornographic materials before they are detected by local network police, or they would be punished severely by local public security officers. Punishments could involve hefty fines or cancellation of their registration.

For government censors, the standards are more straightforward.

"Without a rating system, authorities have no choice but to block all kinds of sexual information online to protect children," the government censor said.

She said that when she began working in the position, her teacher trained them with one naked man and one woman, and it was just like having "biology classes."

"My teacher told me that female pictures with half of the breasts were okay as long as the nipples were covered and the reproductive organs of men should not be exposed," she said.

When distinguishing between art and porn, the standard is based on sexual intentions. If it contains sexual descriptions in a very artistic style, as in many Japanese works, a novel is okay, but if explicit details of people's reproductive organs are included, the novel or article should be deleted and the case will be handed over to the police department, which will review it again.

Materials with some harmful sexual habits, such as videos with violent or abusive depictions of sex, which are very commonly seen in some porn sites, should be firmly deleted, she said.

In most of the cases, sexual pictures and words can be filtered by software, but videos and novels often need to be checked one by one by porn identifiers. As many porn sites are disguised or embedded in other websites, more human hands are needed.

Both porn identifiers the Global Times talked to did not have this problem, but they both felt long-term exposure to these materials could desensitize them and reduce people's interest in sex to a certain degree.