801号房. . .内心深处的心声

No one does adoration and worship of foreign icons of cool quite like the Japanese, and to prove that very fact you need look no further than that Nation’s thriving Vespa scene.

Once again, Japanese have taken everyone by surprise with another cool trend: tuning large scooters. Far from the other rebels, this happy mob cannot wait to welcome you into their crazy world. Check out their scooters!

An All Nippon Airways passenger plane with 60 people aboard made a successful emergency landing Tuesday morning at Kochi airport after its nose gear failed to deploy.

The propjet had circled the Shikoku airport for two hours with the nose gear retracted before touching down.

None of the 56 passengers and four crew members was injured, the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry said. Everyone deplaned around 11:10 a.m.

The nose of the twin-turboprop DHC-8Q400 Bombardier briefly gave off sparks as it scraped the 2,500-meter runway upon landing at 10:54 a.m., according to the ministry.

Flight 1603, operated by ANA subsidiary Air Central Co., departed from Osaka’s Itami airport at around 8:10 a.m. The problem occurred around 8:50 a.m., five minutes before its scheduled arrival time, after which the plane circled Kochi airport for two more hours burning off fuel.

The successful landing followed an earlier attempt to dislodge the gear by touching down briefly at around 10:30 a.m., ministry officials said. The plane touched down on the runway with its main gear and then took off again to circle above the airport.

Firetrucks were on hand before the plane landed.

According to aviation expert Akira Maene, the nosegear glitch is a recurring problem with this type of aircraft, indicating there may be a structural or design flaw.

ANA said it has grounded the 12 other Bombardiers in its fleet and nine at an affiliated carrier until an emergency inspection can be completed.

Designed by aircraft manufacturer de Havilland Canada and produced by Bombardier Aerospace Corp. of the Montreal-based Bombardier group, the model has recently suffered a series of mechanical problems.

The transport ministry said 44 incidents affected DHC-8 service in 2005 alone, of which 26 involved the DHC8-Q400.

After which passengers aboard an All Nippon Airways propjet that made an emergency landing at Kochi airport Tuesday after its nose gear failed to extend recounted their two-hour ordeal before their safe touchdown.

No one was injured among the 56 passengers and four crew members when the twin-engined Bombardier DHC-8 turboprop made a safe landing on its main gear and then carefully lowered the nose to the runway at 10:54 a.m.

“The passengers were told about the nose gear malfunction some 20 minutes after takeoff,” said Shuji Kurebe, 30, a travel agency worker in Osaka Prefecture. “But all the passengers appeared calm and no one panicked.”

Another male passenger said no one initially appeared to take the matter seriously. But he said a flight attendant later began to give away candies to help ease the stress of passengers.

ANA Flight 1603, which had left Osaka’s Itami airport and was heading to Kochi, had to circle above Kochi airport for nearly two hours while it tried to deploy the nose gear and to reduce fuel to minimize the chance of a fire if the landing turned rough.

Kurebe said passengers knew the pilot was trying to deploy the failed gear. “Sounds of the gear being moved were repeatedly heard, and we knew the pilot tried many times.”

Kurebe said he felt a chill when he saw the emergency vehicles lining the runway while the plane was circling. “Then I thought something serious was going on.”

A few minutes after the passengers were instructed to prepare for an emergency landing by lowering their heads, Kure said he felt the nose of the plane scraping along the runway. Heat from the friction was also felt, he added. The plane landed at 10:54 a.m.

“I would never want my customers to experience something like this,” the travel agent said.

But another passenger said he was confident the plane would land safety. “I was relieved because no big sound or huge shock was felt. The pilot must be very skilled.”

Aviation expert Akira Maene said Capt. Hitoshi Imazato, 36, did a very good job.

“The pilot followed the proper procedures,” Maene said, adding it was important to reduce speed as much as possible, plant the main gear first and then ease the nose to the runway.

Imazato has flown some 8,000 hours since 1996, including some 3,000 hours on DHC-8s.

Maene noted the same type of aircraft has had this type of trouble often, indicating there may be a structural or design flaw.

You sometimes hear female porn stars and prostitutes declare that what they do for a living is an assertion of sexual independence, that it’s some kind of feminist statement about opening up the strictures placed upon women’s sexual expression. (I’ve never heard a male porn star — not that this is an industry I follow closely — offer or even be asked for a rationale for his line of work; the assumption seems to be that any man would be no more than a rutting animal, given half a chance, which I don’t think is a fair assessment. But I digress.) Scratch the surface of these women’s psyches, though, and for all their political posturing, they don’t seem terribly happy.

Now, I’m emphatically not saying that women would be any happier if we all returned to Wendy Shalit’s girdle-bound world of virtue and modesty. But you have to wonder what kind of freedom there is for a woman to find in an industry like that of pornography, in which men commodity women for the pleasure of other men. It’s like locking yourself in a cage and declaring yourself free. It’s an Orwellian thought process: War Is Peace. Slavery Is Freedom.

In 1995, Grace Quek, known to porn fans the world over as Annabel Chong, decided, as a feminist and artistic statement, that she wanted to have sex, on camera, with 300 men in one day. Why on Earth would anybody attempt such an unprecedented feat? That’s the primary question Gough Lewis’s documentary, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story tries to answer.

A Singaporean native educated partially in England, Quek was a sexually adventurous student at the University of Southern California, sleeping her way through the enrolment roster, when she began her career in porn with appearances in movies like I Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team! It was a form of rebellion against the image of “the good girl” of her native culture — Quek says the Singaporean attitude is to “close you up to the world.” As a passionate scholar of sexology highly praised by one professor, Quek talks about how misunderstood and misused female sexuality is (and she’s right) — she mentions that ancient religions often used sex as part of their rituals. Her adventures in porn are meant to help her redefine female sexuality — or at least her own sexuality — perhaps even recapturing that ancient sense of reverence.

Disturbingly, though, Sex demonstrates that Quek’s rationale for her behaviour has little to do with the psychological needs she is apparently trying, probably unconsciously, to satisfy. Quek is confident only when she talks of her high intellectual ideals. More often, she is strikingly pained and insecure. A trip home to Singapore to visit her parents becomes heartbreaking when her mother — who had earlier spoken happily and proudly of her daughter as a little girl — learns of her claim to fame. Quek is dismayed at having disappointed and shamed her mother, yet she has also told of piano lessons that began at age 3, as soon as she could reach the keys. Has she been rebelling not only against the limits of traditional culture but also against high parental expectations? And in London, where Quek lived for a time, she returns with the filmmaker to the place where she was gang raped — is her “gang bang” an attempt to gain back a sense of control she must have lost then?

Most distressing, however, is the scene in which Quek cuts herself repeatedly, drawing blood with a knife to her arm, just because she needs to feel something… anything. As we watch behind the scenes at the making of The World’s Biggest Gang Bang video, the director announces that since Quek, after allowing 230 men penetrate her within a matter of hours, is now in considerable pain, she’ll only be doing another 21 before calling it quits. Is this just another way to feel something, anything?

For all of Quek’s talk of female empowerment, there’s precious little of that to be seen here. Quek never received the $10,000 salary she was promised for the gang-bang video, and the director who cheated her out of the money has the gall to say on camera what a shame that is. Worse, Quek professes not to care. But money is obviously an issue for her — on a how-do-I-pay-the-rent level — because she has to haggle with porn directors over a matter of 50 bucks for her work. Even after her video is such a huge success, she can’t make more than $1000 for appearing in a porno. And as for her record-breaking marathon, no matter how much she talks of feminism, it’s still couched — by the men producing and promoting it — as a “gang bang.” It’s still about them doing it to her. It’s all about her getting screwed… one way or another.

But the most ridiculous thing about Annabel Chong’s gang bang — and about all pornography — is how absurd and unsex it makes sex look. Fictional depictions of the porn industry — such as Boogie Nights — can’t approach the oozy iciness of the real thing. From Quek’s sleazy agent to Screw publisher Al Goldstein, every man on camera in Sex who makes his living in porn is a disgusting pig whom you have to imagine only gets sex from women who are paid for it. You can practically smell the rancid sweat emanating from porn superstar Ron Jeremy as he takes the place of honour in being the last of the 251 men in Annabel Chong’s gang bang. (Why anyone would want to pay money to see his fat, hairy body do anything is beyond me. I know: Guys watch porn’s for the women. But The World’s Biggest Gang Bang is, according to Sex, the top-selling porno of all time. I have to wonder what it is about seeing all those naked, aroused men — and only one woman — that made this video such a hot item with the mostly male porn audience. But I digress again.)

If Quek was looking to retrieve a sense of the mystical about sex, I can’t see that she can convince herself that she has accomplished that. Dispassionate discussion, in Sex, about the mechanics of “double and triple penetration” sounds like an exercise in engineering. Behind the scenes of the gang bang, all the naked men (some, actually, wear socks and shoes) standing around with, literally, their dicks in their hands, are laughable. And when Quek says that sex is worth dying for, that she doesn’t care if she gets AIDS, it’s hard to believe her: she looks plenty scared when she goes for an HIV test.

Quek avers that having sex with 251 men in 10 hours is “no different than having sex with one guy for 10 hours.” If she can’t see the difference (though I suspect she can), then she might want to rethink her redefinition of female sexuality.

This is a personal insight on the Annabel’s Story . . .

I truly agree with Joey on how tough Annabel is. She is indeed true to herself. Many might wonder that she’s after the money and fame that this industry would brought upon her. I believe she has her own reason in doing so. I believe that she wouldn’t want to talk about it any further. Come on, everyone of us wish to move on, who wants to stay on and linger around all these stuffs of gossips and paparazzi.

Here’s an insight on Sex: The Annabel Chong’s Story

A film titled Sex. It cannot get more explicit or sensational than that. Why choose to be so blunt and crude? In order to shock and attract viewers or because this documentary is actually about sex and other issues around this divine, ongoing controversial topic. Exploration of sexuality, satisfaction of sexual appetites, pushing all boundaries beyond the missionary position and claiming a woman’s right to enjoy sex as much as a man does is Annabel Chong’s story. A frank and profound insight into the personal journey of a young Singaporean scholar turned porn star Grace aka Annabel Chong who takes us to her hell and back in order to heal herself from the tribulations of her past and her oppressive ethnic background.

The documentary paints a bleak yet amusing picture surrounding the sleaze of the porn industry. Like a sordid fairy tale, its setting is no where else more perfect than Los Angeles, USA. We are slapped in the face by the heroine’s journey of self-discovery. Through candid interviews with Grace and close friends, we are presented with an intense exploration into her sexuality; Grace, from humble beginnings as a nude model to her fame as the kinky porn star, and embellished with an English Accent and Asian beauty, has an incredible sense of confidence and determination to reach her mission.

Her most famous achievement is “performing” intercourse with 251 men in 10 hours. A true Olympic marathon, where Annabel’s craving for sex is relentless and paralleled by the horny urges of the chosen candidates. The whole affair, drowned by cameras from the hungry paparazzi and media vampires, seems like a circus for most present. But for Annabel it is an ego trip, while satisfying her huge sexual appetite. So it seems. Glamorous and horny at the beginning, we see her impatiently luring the men onto the stage and ready for anyone and anything. “You can do it to her any way you want in any hole you please. Just make sure you can keep it up and don’t hurt her.” The promoter lays the rules down while the candidates, lined up and naked, are tugging their organs wondering whether Annabel will let them all in.

Her performance proves that women do possess strong sexual urges and that being a porn star is one way to fulfil them. We meet her many sides: as the strong queen of kink with an incredible appetite for anal sex who enlightens us about double and triple penetration. Her own ego explodes a little when she realises how many men desire her. Misunderstood and portrayed as a nitwit by Jerry Springer, who asks her the obvious: why sleep with so many men?

Annabel, aware of the prejudices floating in the room is honest and blunt: why not? she confronts the majority of the audience, who feel embarrassed simply at Annabel’s openness.

Often we see Annabel as the academic confident enough to argue about her sexuality within the Cambridge Debating Club. Upright and proper, she reclaims her right to be a female stud and to discover her sexual powers.

During the course of
the film we return to
the “gangbang” and
we watch Annabel’s
stamina through sweat,
tears and orgasms. We
wonder at times whether
her face melts with
pleasure or pain.
~~~ Gaby Bila-Gunther 2000

Her lifestyle and behaviour indicate how much she enjoys being an extrovert, a sexual deviant who is searching to stretch all sexual boundaries. At a supermarket we are aroused as we watch her buy the largest zucchini and we laugh at her t-shirt which spells “Slut” across her breasts. We see her playing the sex kitten by laying naked at the promotional press conference pushing her sexual assets on to the screen.

Annabel is erotic and ready to devour. One understands where she is coming from.

Family, friends, teachers and colleagues tell us how much they admire her and how determined she always was. Annabel is the new feminist icon who provokes and is not ashamed of showing her body to be viewed as nothing more than an object, assurance she acquired while modelling naked in order to finance her studies.

Her childhood memories portray her as a single daughter surrounded by profound love and secular icons. Sent to a convent and brought up within a strong religious family one understands her need to be erotic and explore her sexuality.

Alongside Grace’s journey we taste the brutal facts about the porn industry in LA. After having intercourse with 251 men, Grace didn’t make any money out of it.

The promoter shifts the blame upon her entourage and greedy gold diggers while he still owes her an outstanding fee. Reality bites her in the face when copycats out-do her efforts and she quickly loser her crown.

AIDS and other sexual transmitted diseases could be her next enemy as she was promised most guys were tested. Disillusioned, Grace physically harms herself to override the emotional pain from inside. Her sense of being betrayed is crushing. Slashing her arms with a knife feels more tragic than the pain from triple penetration.

Her attempt to distance herself from the industry takes her back to London where she was gang raped after getting off the Tube at a wrong stop. Her reunion with her family makes her look almost like a lost child. Her sentiments behind the tears that she shares with her mother bring you closer to the oppressive cultural expectations of Singaporean society. It makes you understand why she needed to overcome negative experiences through sexual liberation. Her mother’s faith in her is also very emotive and empowering.

Along her journey, she experiences a full gamut of human emotions, such as conflict, sadness, tenderness. Shocking and confronting images exist alongside funny ones, such as when during a break from shooting a porn flick the actors stand around, smoking, wearing nothing but their “work clothes” and rubber dildos, totally at ease.

Her courage to become a porn star in order to overcome the tragedy of rape is admirable. Although the perpetrators stripped her dignity away by raping her, Grace refused to remain a victim. She also empowered herself to the extent where she could restore her self-respect as regards her family. Although she can’t tear herself away from the industry which almost crushed her, she remains an academic and graduates.

The final image, pain in her eyes and sweat drops as tears as she completed her mission, left us to watch and feel how she would have felt at the end of the rape.

The film did receive loud responses from the audience I saw it with recently in Melbourne. Amongst the laughs and giggles, sighs and comments under anxious breaths voiced disapproval. The presence of so many Asian faces glowing with opinions overwhelmed me. Whether they identified with or condemned Annabel’s story is their journey.

Here’s another insight on The Annabel Chong’s Story

Is Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (Gough Lewis, 1998) a celebration of sex and female sexuality? Is it a character study of a porn idol? And, considering the presence of a great many porn luminaries is it possible that the documentary is a pro-porn polemic?

It is all of the above and none. Primarily, what is most memorable about Sex is that it is a saddening tale about a vulnerable and unstable young woman, who becomes embroiled in a world she does not fully comprehend, despite her claims to the contrary.

Grace Quek, alias Annabel Chong, starred in the best-selling porno video, The World’s Biggest Gang Bang (John T. Bone, 1995), in which she accommodated 251 men over 10 hours. In Gough Lewis’s documentary about the event, she is presented as a woman with an insatiable appetite for a cornucopia of carnal pleasures; a woman who goes for it with vigour and enthusiasm before internal bleeding puts a stop to the marathon.

In the early stages of the documentary, it was heartening to see Quek create the appearance of enjoying and even revelling in the role of porn rebel. For a brief moment, pro-sex feminists and porn adherents dared hope that they might have found another worthy spokes-woman firing from the trenches, someone who would follow in the footsteps of Marilyn Chambers and Annie Sprinkle. But then Quek throws on the breaks with the first of her many delusional remarks, namely: “I just want my parents to be proud of me.”

So, who is Grace Quek? Although she was born and raised in Singapore, Quek was educated at an English private school. Her further education at Cambridge University, at a time when post-modernism and women’s studies dominated, may partly explain why she uses feminism to justify her work in pornography.

During the course of the documentary, Quek claims that she did not appear in the notorious video for money (she’s still owed the $10,000 promised her), but to “explore” her sexuality, to “reclaim” her body and “empower” herself. She says she wanted to show that women could be “studs like men” and has consequence-free sex. All very admirable and salutary, but this turns out to be the second of her delusions.

When Grace Quek first appears in Lewis’s documentary, it is through footage from television’s “The Jerry Springer Show”. She is highly strung, manic, and surprisingly inarticulate for a university graduate. Unfortunately, she also plays the part of the giggly, girlie, breathy women stuck in Lolita overdrive only too well – hardly the model of self-empowerment and sober level-headedness that is needed to carry the message of pro-sex feminism to the world. When Springer announced to his audience that the woman sitting before them had had sex with 251 men, they were agog, speechless, before erupting into the simian hooting which characterises that proletariat show. Chong read their response as some kind of support and acts accordingly, but close-ups of the audience reveal another less digestible fact.

Later in the documentary, a warmer and more generous Grace Quek begins to emerge. She presents herself as a bright young woman, who is drawn to the edges of society, even though the path has been very obviously laid before her for a more conventional life, should she have chosen to take it. Perhaps due to her middle-class, Christian background she delights in provocation and flaunting convention. She is highly sexed; perhaps even a nymphomaniac, which would explain her more manic displays and lack of self-control at certain points.

What becomes evident very quickly is that, despite her outwardly unconventional lifestyle, Grace Quek remains the product of her middle-class background. Furthermore, she mouths self-empowerment clichés without really understanding their deeper meaning and implications for her as a woman. Inwardly, she continues to believe that her elite education and class will shield her from life’s rougher side; and that mummy and daddy will always be there should she fall. All of which may have led her to commit her worst crimes: not accepting responsibility for her own actions, and not having the courage of her own convictions.

If the three great monotheistic religions of the world hadn’t spent so much time moralising sex, we might not see anything intrinsically wrong with a life of pornography. However, such is not the case in the world today. And since we hold highly ambivalent attitudes towards all matters sexual, we have demonised the people who choose to make their livelihood via the flesh. Consequently, as the documentary demonstrates, if one chooses to live in that milieu, then one must also accept the consequences born of such a life. You need backbone and stamina to survive not only the harsher aspects of the industry itself, but also the judgement of the world.

Once you have been sucked into the porn vortex, you can rarely ever go back. Most pornographers who have made a name and reputation for themselves, forfeited a ‘normal’ life for that of the social outcast, and even sacrificed the love and support of family relationships in order to fulfil their chosen destinies. But Grace Quek wanted to be a pornographer and still have the approval of her parents. She quickly discovered that such is not always the way of world, even in an age when sex saturates the airwaves.

The porn actress and stripper Megan Leigh recently spoke out about the close relationship she enjoys with her in-the-know mother. It still holds true; however, that only the most enlightened and sophisticated of parents would be proud of a child who is a pornographer. And Mr and Mrs Quek are hardly that. They are a Christian Singaporean family, who live in blissful ignorance of their daughter’s fame until the final minutes of this documentary. Interestingly, Quek and her mother keep the ailing father in the dark about his daughter’s occupation – a good example of how women often collude to protect men.

The scenes of Mrs Quek slowly packing her daughter’s suitcase as she tearfully asks her to not return home until she has restored her mother’s ‘dignity’ is the emotional core of Lewis’s film. It contains a nugget of truth and humanity that seems to be lacking in Grace Quek’s world of dizzy friends and lubricous acquaintances. As we discreetly watch her mother’s concept of the daughter she bore, raised and loved crumble, the documentary also uncovers the real victims of pornography.

The true victims of porn are not those who dedicate their lives to it (Grace Quek was emotionally and psychologically damaged before she entered porn); nor are they the consumers; or even rapists and their victims. The real victims of pornography are the virtuous, moral men and women who live all of their lives with blinkers on, denying the unstoppable force of nature that is sex, and the often brutal realities of life that exist outside their safe suburban homes. As we see here, when they are confronted with the truth, they often fall apart.

On the surface, there is nothing about the Quek family that alerts us to the destiny awaiting their daughter. We see no history of abuse or violence, emotional or otherwise. (Though the images of Quek’s distant and withdrawn father, who seemed to be frozen rigid, did leave a lingering feeling of unease.)

However, most viewers will very quickly come to the conclusion that the feminist rhetoric is a salve for that which truly ails Grace Quek, an ailment which may be manifesting itself in her pornographic work and self-mutilation. Long after the documentary was over, the questions linger. Why did she find it necessary to slash her arms with a knife in order to “feel alive”? What emptiness did the blade fill with pain? What had died inside her that only the cut of a knife and the impact of 251 cocks could revive? And what was that skittish uncertainty behind her eyes?

Spiros Markou, the Greek writer and critic, summed up Chong’s dilemma when he recently said to me “emptiness, she seems to be filled with emptiness, and therefore tries to get fulfilled through the body.” While pondering his remark, an early scene from the documentary kept coming back. It is of Mrs Quek reminiscing of happier times, when her daughter was very young. She fondly remembers her daughter’s independence from a young age, and tells of leaving her alone while she and her husband were away. She used to pin a handkerchief to little Grace’s clothes, she says, and instruct her daughter that if anything went wrong, or if she wanted to cry, to use it.

It doesn’t seem to occur to the well-meaning woman that leaving a child with a handkerchief as baby sitter is cold comfort, indeed. Or that this might have repercussions later in life.

Viewers will very quickly realise that this documentary is not a pro-porn polemic. Rather, it is a cautionary tale in a long line of red-light cautionary tales; the most recent of which were Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997) and 8 MM (Joel Schumacher, 1999).

For all its in-your-face tactics and bravado Sex: The Annabel Chong Story is a timid sexual tourist looking for instant gratification and a quick getaway without any telltale stains on his person. I kept hoping against hope that it would rise to the level of psychological complexity of Monika Treut’s Female Misbehaviour (1992), Sex is Sex: Conversations with Male Prostitutes (Brian Bergen and Jennifer Milici, 1995) or the various documentaries about Annie Sprinkle.

On a more positive note, the documentary does unwittingly bring the sleaze back to porn. In an effort to ensure its survival in the face of congressional and feminist attacks in the 1980s and 1990s, the American porn industry launched a laughable campaign to clean up its image. There was much talk about ‘legitimacy’ and ‘wholesomeness’, and how these videos were providing a ’social service’ and a ‘marital aid’ for happy couples spending a romantic evening at home in front of the telly.

But the reality is that porn is sleazy. That’s why consumers like it and why some people aspire to be in it. It’s dirty and secretive, beyond the pale and completely unacceptable to social or Judeo-Christian norms. It is taboo, forbidden. In a world that has become increasingly commoditised and sterile, sexual exploration may well be the last frontier, offering both adventure and self-knowledge. As soon as porn becomes squeaky clean and acceptable, a family pastime, it will lose its allure and significance for those who want to use it as a tool of masturbation, rebellion or self-expression.

This refusal to accept the true face of pornography, even by insiders, is nowhere better exemplified than in the hilarious scene wherein a puffed-up porn actor, Michael J. Coxx, says that he is ashamed of Annabel Chong’s gangbang video and is enraged by its makers. This Mother Teresa in disguise goes on to say that he objects to Chong’s behaviour because she makes porn ‘look sleazy’. After briefly considering what he’d just said, he looks to the camera in some confusion and mumbles, ‘But I suppose it is.’

The antiseptic nature of most modern porn, full of scrubbed, buffed and perfect Californian bodies doing mechanical things under the glare of bright studio lights and the scrutiny of perfect camera work, has taken the eroticism and salaciousness out of watching porn. In response to this sanitising process, there has been an increase in ‘amateur porn’ where ‘real people’ do it for the cameras and beam their digital selves across the world via the Internet. Some porn filmmakers have even taken to scouring the newly reopened Eastern European countries for darker, swarthier talent – a welcome respite from what Camille Paglia calls “the tyranny of the blonde”. And it seems ‘hidden cameras’ are popping up in every locker room and college dorm across the globe. Independent, rebel pornographers like Dick Wadd are also upping the stakes with some highly disreputable, politically incorrect ‘bare backing’ videos that have stirred controversy even within the porn industry itself.

With its eye-popping demonstration of a triple penetration and across-the-board proliferation of body types and age ranges, the other positive thing that can be said about Sex: The Annabel Chong Story is that it brings real people back to porn. Here for your delectation are all the distended bellies, sagging pecks, hairy backs, nerdy looks and nervous, high-anticipation men that have been censored out of pornography; the very people who take their pleasure from these entertainments.

Belying Quek’s own assertions to the contrary, the documentary goes on to suggest that it may be that feminism and pornography have to remain exclusive, unless the participating women are alert and focused on who is holding the reins. Unfortunately, from what we see here, Annabel Chong had lost control of her horses of passion long ago. At a Sexpo, we see her encircled by leering, camera-wielding men who are commanding her to strike all manner of poses. There is no joy evident as she tries to please. She simply comes across like a puppet terrified of disappointing her commandeers. There was no sign of the much-vaunted empowerment or control in her frantic displays, just someone that had sadly become less than human.

Ostensibly, Grace Quek wanted to prove that women could be ’studs’ like men and to have sex without suffering the consequences. What she really meant was that she wanted to exorcise her personal demons through a medium, which ends up devouring her instead. Her lesson seems to be that, due to social and biological impediments, women might not be in a position to have consequence-free sex. Men have a little more leeway than women do in this area. But even they cannot indulge excessively without nature eventually knocking on their door. Just ask Marquise de Sade, Pier Paolo Pasolini, thousands of gay men, Marco Vassi and John Holmes.

The writer Anne Rice once said that pornography is a place you visit, but you do not live there. What this documentary shows is that perhaps for those who do live the pornographic life full time, there is a price to pay. Pornographers may be invited inside millions of homes across the globe daily, but it’s a temporary invitation, quickly, coldly, revoked once the hosts’ senses are sated. The reward stuffed into their glittering g-string is the world’s disdain and ostracism. And you either live with it or you don’t.