Molly Yen
Molly Yen is a Taiwanese politician, esports presenter, and internet personality who has served as an independent member of the Chiayi City Council since 2022. Her campaign received national attention due to her beauty and satirical sixteen-character Chinese name which she had legally adopted before the election. She reverted to her birth name in early 2024. She is known for her advocacy of regulated red-light districts, known in Taiwan as "special sex zones".
Biography
Yen was born in Taipei County, present-day New Taipei City, on 6 July 1989. After graduating from the Faculty of Sports Information and Communication at Aletheia University, she worked as a host and presenter for several corporate, esports, and sports events.Yen ran as an independent for the Chiayi City Council in the 2022 local elections. Her decision was influenced by an online challenge from another Taiwanese internet personality, Kevin Gto, known in Chinese as "Little Businessman". Before starting her campaign, she legally changed her name to Yen Se Pu Fen Lan Lu Chih Chih Hsing Chuan Chu Yen Se Tien Shen Chieh, which literally means "colour, not differentiated by blue or green, support special sex zones, colour field, be cautious of festivals". The name references Taiwan's two major political camps, the Pan-Blue and Pan-Green coalitions, while "colour field" is meant to emphasize the ostensible bipartisan nature of the special sex zone issue, i.e. the establishment of regulated red-light districts. The last character 節 is also a homophone of 潔, which means "pure" or "innocent". The final part of the name can therefore be read as "be cautious of being pure / innocent", a reference to the, in which a male student who raped his female peer over two years allegedly received leniency due to the intervention of his police captain father. Notably, she met another candidate in the same election, Huang Hung-Cheng, who had similarly changed his legal name into an usually long 15-character one, setting a record at the time.
Yen's campaign centered primarily around a proposal to create in Chiayi "special sex zones" – red-light districts dedicated to regulated sex work. Although the legal concept of special sex zones came into existence through amendments to the Social Order Maintenance Act in 2011, they had yet to be created and implemented anywhere in Taiwan. Yen was elected at-large in Chiayi's first electoral district with 2,813 votes, or 5.57% of the total votes, ranking ninth out of eighteen candidates. This was enough to secure her one of the first electoral district's ten seats on city council. In the Chiayi City Council's last meeting of 2023, held in December, Yen's proposal to create a special sex zone in Chiayi was approved along with 61 other proposals.
In early 2024, Yen changed her legal name back to her birth name.