A Japanese men's magazine has published a list ranking universities on how easy it is to convince female students to have sex at drinking parties. The list appeared in the issue of the weekly magazine Spa!

The article in the magazine’s December 25 issue said the parties were popular among female college students. The magazine was talking about the practice of gyaranomi - drinking parties where men pay women to attend.

The article in Spa! named five colleges where female students were "easily available" at drinking parties, and even described how to "coax" women in to having sex. It went on to elaborate on how to judge whether a woman was sexually available based on her clothing and appearance.

However, the rankings have caused an uproar and the magazine’s publishers have been forced to issue an apology. A woman, Kazuna Yamamoto started a petition on change.org to get the magazine to retract the offending article. She writes on the petition page, "I would like to fight so that, especially on public articles such as this one, sexualising, objectifying and disrespecting women would stop. We demand Shuukan Spa take this article back and apologise, and promise to not use objectifying words to talk about women." The petition has been signed by more than 38,000 people as of today. Yamamoto has also highlighted that the magazine has published similar content before such as stories on “the characteristics of a woman who gets into bed easily” and “the types of alcohol to use to have sex with a woman.”

Japan ranks low on global gender equality rankings as traditional male superiority is still in practice – in family and professional structures. The country placed 110th out of 149 in the World Economic Forum’s global gender equality rankings for 2018. The country faces gender disparity in the pay offered to women as well as the opportunities made available to them.

The magazine has issued a statement after its article began to attract negative publicity. "We would like to apologise for using sensational language to appeal to readers about how they can become intimate with women and for creating a ranking... with real university names... that resulted in a feature that may have offended readers," the magazine said in a statement.

"On issues that involve sex, we will do what we can as a magazine to listen to various opinions," the statement added.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 09, 2019 07:01 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).