It might not seem immediately obvious why someone would want to watch a video of young women eating ice cubes. But once you hear the sound of the crunching fissure in your headphones, whether it makes you wince or tingle, the sensory effect is undeniable.
In China, ice-eating videos have become something of a phenomenon, their stars racking up thousands of views. Along with whispering, tapping, the gentle scratching of a microphone, the unique sound of hair being brushed or skin being stroked – the sound of ice cubes crunching against teeth is a common trigger for ASMR, and the millions of people worldwide who experience the sensation.
Short for “autonomous sensory meridian response”, ASMR was first used online in 2010, and describes the tingling, relaxing or sleep-inducing feeling that some people get when the watching videos.
Suspicious of ASMR and its effects, the Chinese government has decided to ban the phenomenon, ordering the removal of ASMR videos from their biggest video streaming sites, including Youku, Bilibili, and Douyu.
The ruling came via China’s anti-pornography office, which issued a statement explaining that porn was being released under the guise of ASMR, emphasising that this could be a threat to minors, who apparently make up a large part of ASMR’s viewership.
In a statement officials said: “All internet companies must genuinely fulfil their duties, and increase efforts to clean up websites, implement content review processes, and protect minors from harmful content.”
TingTing57 is a Chinese ASMR star based in Los Angeles who started doing it because she watched it herself and wanted to “give something back to the community”. Her videos are on YouTube, which is blocked in China, but they have been re-uploaded to Chinese streaming sites without her permission.
To her, the ban does not come as a surprise, since adult content is illegal in China. However, she hopes that the government’s ban on ASMR is only temporary to “weed out the adult content”.
She explains: “People will always try to abuse what’s trending no matter the subject and a lot of people think an easy way to get views is to be overly sexual. ASMR is just a nice relaxing sensation some people get, there’s nothing sexual about it.”
TingTing describes seeing Chinese videos that are categorised as ASMR featuring girls wearing little clothing and using two cameras, “one to focus on their chest and the other to focus on their bare legs in a miniskirt”. She says: “Is that ASMR? Maybe, but it’s also pretty risky and vulgar and in the long run hurts the ASMR community by giving people the wrong idea.”
A study conducted in 2015 by researchers at Swansea University in the UK found that 85% of consumers of ASMR use it to help them get to sleep, while just 5% reported sexual arousal. The results back up TingTing’s assertion that arousal is not the primary function of ASMR, no matter how much it might resemble a fetish.
Similarly, a new study released this week by the University of Sheffield’s department of psychology,found those who reported experiencing ASMR showed significant reductions in heart rate and positive emotional responses like relaxation or feelings of social connectivity.
Although the study was the first of its kind in looking at physiological responses to ASMR, its leader, Dr Giulia Poerio, believes the tingly sensation it induces is by no means a new phenomenon. Rather, she says, the videos have given people “the language to describe a feeling that they may have experienced for most of their lives”.
Poerio is concerned about the ban in China but says there are workarounds: “Banning the videos could mean that ASMR experiencers are no longer able to harness the benefits of ASMR but there will probably be other video content that induces ASMR unintentionally.” Such as? “A commonly cited example is Bob Ross videos.”
So if people in China are struggling for their fix, let the scratchy paintbrush of America’s most bearded artist soothe you.
