Anyone who has even the briefest acquaintance with nightclubs in recent years will have seen girls dressed as Playboy bunnies in almost just their underwear, replete with stockings and suspenders, quite as frequently as one will see girls who are, indeed, dressed only in their underwear or a bikini. Perhaps less often, one will see girls on dance floors kissing each other in order to garner male attention. The latter scenario usually creates quite a scrum of groping limbs where not an eyelash is batted by either side – though some may be fluttered.

Of course, it could be that this reviewer consorts with the seamier side of society but, more probably, it illustrates that the subjects of Natasha Walter’s book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, are commonplace in modern life. The same also goes for pornography, strip clubs and, probably less common, but not much more taboo, prostitution. In her chapter about pornography Walter gives statistics from a 2007 Canadian report showing that 90 per cent of boys aged 13-14 and 70 per cent of girls the same age had viewed pornography, so it’s no great stretch to imagine that most people have seen porn at some time (take a look at Spike’s most popular articles). No stag night, or business lunch, for that matter, seems to be complete without a visit to a strip club – but if that doesn’t do it for you, then why not take a plane to Amsterdam to really see the groom off with a bang, so to speak.

Indeed so commonplace are these elements discussed in Walter’s book that to object to them is viewed as the highest prudery. Therefore, it is testament to Walter’s skill that she is able to maintain a non-judgemental perspective throughout the book and repeats that there is obviously nothing wrong with the desire to appear attractive and that, with something like pornography, it is the individual’s choice whether to enjoy it. And it would seem that the promoters of lad’s mags and pornography alike are keen to emphasise that the whole thing is a matter of choice.

It is this idea of ‘choice’ that Walter opposes: the choice to be ‘empowered’; the choice not to be stuck in a dead-end job if you can use your body your make more money; the choice to divorce emotion from sex (both professionally, if you are, say, a pole dancer, and in your personal life); but it all seems to boil down to the choice to accept the notion that, in order to be a liberated modern woman, you need to be hyper-sexualised and turn yourself into a parody of a glamour model or even an R&B performer – this misogyny repackaged as feminism. As one burlesque performer interviewed in Living Dolls puts it, “serving up misogyny with a tasteful package of feathers”. Whilst more literal in the burlesque dancer’s case, it nicely illustrates how this has become part of the status quo, right down to the marketing of the provocative Bratz dolls to little girls.

The two most prominent arguments about working in the sex industry seem to be of the ‘it’s just a bit of fun, and everyone wins’ kind or the ‘it’s unfortunate that they have to do it, but they do get paid’ kind. If we discount the idea that women get into it because they like sex as risible (though that could be one reason for initially entering the business), money is obviously the chief preoccupation and is an understandable concern. But, as Noam Chomsky points out, arguing that it’s a good thing because they get paid is like arguing in favour of sweatshops because those workers (usually women) are paid and consented; and that we need to eliminate the conditions where women cannot get good jobs. There is, of course, the caveat to that argument that not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer and, taking our society as we find it, some people have to perform minimum wage jobs – so what are they to do? Not counting exceptions such as Jenna Jameson, who produces her own pornography films, for every performer whom we might think of as well paid, imagine how much money the owners of production companies make. Even the most autonomous female performer, director or producer is still fuelling the needs of an industry that, in the vast majority, caters to the male desire. As Chomsky flatly states, women in pornography are “degraded as vulgar sex objects” and this is echoed by Ellie, a lap dancer interviewed in Living Dolls, “If you say it’s really degrading, and you did that, it says so much about you, or it feels as if it does. But it is degrading.”

In 1971 a debate about feminism (filmed as Town Bloody Hall – see link below) was held at the Town Hall on West 43rd Street in Manhattan. Speaking were prominent proponents of feminism and women’s rights Jackie Ceballos, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and, the biggest draw, Germaine Greer. Chaired by Norman Mailer (described by Greer as an embodiment of “the most powerful figure… in male elitist society, namely, the masculine artist”) on his best form, the atmosphere captured in the film almost crackles with passion, there’s something of the rock concert about the whole event and I struggle to imagine a packed hall with such intensity of feeling, banter and heckling flying between Mailer and the audience, happening today. In 1970 Clive James, in a review of The Female Eunuch for The Observer, airs his concerns that the real message of Greer’s work will be obscured by the deluge of publicity surrounding the author. Is there any room in the modern media for feminism between Katie Price busting out of the gossip column and ‘boys will be boys’ stories about the sexual practices of footballers?

So has feminism stalled?

One might be led to think so by Martin Amis’s last novel The Pregnant Widow, which suggests that the sexual revolution somehow lost its way, and by the somewhat shrugging acceptance of the empowerment theory by people like pornography director, Anna Span: “Women are exploring their bodies more”. However, one of the most affecting voices in the book, a teenage girl called Carly, rebuffs this idea. For Carly the pressure placed on young women to conform to a certain type of image of womanhood is “just like you don’t have any choice”. Thus, the only ‘choice’ women really have is to conform.

Another girl points out that she didn’t have the voice to speak out against her friends, boys and girls, that she didn’t know there was anything wrong with the pressure put upon her, like Carly, to look a certain a certain way and become sexually active. This seems to be the crux of the matter, girls need to be equipped with enough knowledge to speak out when they feel objectified and not just about the biology of sex. As Walter says, there is nothing intrinsically with wrong with strip clubs, porn, etc. but, while they can be fun, “in the current context, in which women’s value is so relentlessly bound up with how successfully they are seen as sexually alluring, we can see that certain choices are celebrated, while others are marginalised, and this clearly has a major effect on the behaviour of many men and women”. As for men, obviously one could never, nor would want to, stop them desiring sex, but if, as Walter suggests throughout, women are truly empowered at an early age, given the full range of real life choices available to them and taught that they don’t need to be, or idolise, so-called sex symbols, then perhaps that way there can be a complimentary, gradual effect on the male psyche.

The point is, however, that feminism cannot be rushed and is, and always has been, a continual struggle. Walter points out that those who criticize the status quo suffer opprobrium and are branded with that most disdainful tag of ‘elitist’, hopefully it will be clear from this article that this author is not afraid of such things.

Further Resources:

• Town Bloody Hall on YouTube
• Noam Chomsky on pornography
• Natasha Walter’s homepage

Over the last few years Chuck Palahniuk has revelled in the sordid, the grotesque, and the downright dirty like a particularly literate pig in shit, and for many readers his decision to set a novel within the pornography industry must have seemed like a marriage made in Heaven, or at least the more carnal parts of Hell. He seemed to have reached his high (or low) point with the short story ‘Guts’, which also made a gruesome appearance at the start of his pseudo-horror novel Haunted, but Snuff threatened to eclipse even that snippet of filth when it came to bodily fluids, disgusting urban myths and the deviant imagination.

Unfortunately Snuff comes as something of a disappointment after all that expectation, a few muffled grunts in a dimly lit room when we were hoping for a glorious pop-shot. There’s still plenty to keep the Palahniuk fans happy, including a vast number of his trademark factual asides and fictionalised urban mythology, but somewhere in the mix the story goes missing. If you strip out the non-fiction snippets and deviations from the main narrative, you’re actually left with a story that could have been told in a handful of pages. Snuff would make a great short story, but as a novel it feels thin and drawn-out.

We should attempt at least a brief description of the book’s events, although it’s hard to summarise the minimal plot without revealing everything in one ill-judged full-frontal shot. Legendary porn actress Cassie Wright is intending to make history with a 600-man gang-bang, and the event is to be captured on film with the explicit intention of reviving her flagging career. The narrative flits between four characters in the waiting room, where the 600 prospective porn stars stand around in their jockey shorts awaiting their thirty seconds of fame: there’s Sheila, Cassie’s assistant and right-hand woman; Mr. 600, also known as Branch Bacardi, a veteran porn star; Mr. 137, also known as disgraced TV presenter Dan Banyan; and Mr. 72, a young unknown who claims to be Wright’s abandoned child.

As events unfold there are a few surprises thrown in, particularly when it comes to the relationship between Cassie Wright and Branch Bacardi, but these are largely secondary to the constant stream of anecdotes and factoids about the porn industry, Hollywood starlets, and the history of human sexuality in general. There are even parallels drawn to Valeria Messalina, the wife of Roman Emperor Claudius, but there’s no disguising the fact that most of Snuff exists as a vehicle for a potted history of the sex industry as seen through Palahniuk’s distorting eye, along with an entertaining list of fictional porn movie adaptations in the margins (Chitty Chitty Gang Bang is a personal favourite).

As such Snuff is entertaining enough, but on the strength of Palahniuk’s other work you’d have to say that he could do better. The fragmentary narrative device doesn’t always work, especially when the characters’ voices all start to bleed into one, and as the plot races along to its premature conclusion you can’t help wondering if you’ve missed something along the way. While Fight Club and Survivor treated us to a wonderfully skewed version of the world, driven by a sense of anger and injustice, Snuff often feels like nothing more than a collection of dirty schoolboy stories.

Of course, Chuck Palahniuk is such a master of the English language that he manages to make the most sordid sex act or human degradation resonate with a warped minimalist poetry, but it’s not quite enough to hide the hollowness at Snuff‘s core. Even at his worst Palahniuk is still more interesting than the vast majority of contemporary novelists, but Snuff falls a long way short of the pornographic masterwork that we’d all hoped for. Like every porn movie ever made, this is a novel that eschews plot in favour of titillation and plenty of naked flesh – and ultimately it pays the price.

Bettie Page Confidential

See all books about Bettie Page at Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com



Directed by Mary Hannon and starring Gretchen Mol [Bettie Page], this film celebrates the equally despised and distinguished iconic heroine, in part responsible for the advent of modern pornography.

It is a significant problem when a director attempts to chart the life of a relatively lifeless person, or more to the point, attempts to examine the biographical account of an individual’s life who, whilst very good at their trade, never had the imagination to leave their singular sphere of existence – whether that be Iris Murdoch, Alfred Kinsey, Mahatma Gandhi or in this case, Bettie Page. This is not an outlook grounded in my own pomposity, in which I imagine myself to live outside the singular existence of my everyday life – I have not done this, but neither would I want a film made of my life, should I become a notorious model. (This is not going to happen anytime soon). It is possible that given Bettie Page’s life, no film should have been made of it – other than for democratic means of a public record of a cultural icon. In sum, as a work of art, its value lies in its recording of a vital cog in the cultural machine.

However, I suggest this, not to cast the film into eternal damnation but as an issue of where the film begins – in the depths of sexual perversion and sadism. That is where Bettie Page lived. From her childhood in Tennessee through to her posing trips in Miami, she is a cog in the machine, taking the money where she knows she can get it and to deceive herself that her sexual subversion is some kind of acting career. The film frequently slips through scenes of Page’s wanna-be acting career, which never truly takes off.

I therefore think that the director confronted the most significant problem that a film-maker would need to – that Page had a meaningless trashy-porno life in which she existed as a cog in a brutally unforgiving machine of desires. What’s more, the sexually light photographic entertainment of Page skilfully appears as an extension of her earlier experiences of childhood abuse and teenage gang rape. We often like to talk of that good old-fashioned distinction between light-hearted entertainment and tough illegal porn. Yet, the film reminds me – as much as Andrea Dworkin’s texts on modern sexualised legislation do – that this is an irrelevant distinction. To be an “actor” within the industry is essentially to be an automaton in a genuinely brutal industry – the product of which is the abject debasement of the self.

What immediately takes me by surprise in the film is the subtle and respectable portrayal of Page. It shies away from scenes of sexual abuse, leaving the audience with only smatterings and likenesses of an abusive childhood. It is often sensitive to Page’s impressions and feelings of living as a model – in spite of mainstream public controversy – whilst she tirelessly suffers at the mercy of apish and sadistic desires. It is equally respectful of her attitude to religion and how Page came to make sense of her Christian convictions whilst following a sexual career which she is told is antithetical to the teachings of the Bible. As such, Page offers naïve excuses to those who question this conviction – among others, Adam and Eve lived naked in the Garden of Eden, so, it therefore seems correct to infer that those who are clothed are the people we should really be worried about. … An interesting point Page.

Whilst Page’s Tennessee-outlook on theology may prove mildly irritating, it is this naivety, vulnerability, disillusionment and lack of confidence in character that is most humanizing and most humbling. She desperately strives to be an actor, and even assumes her modelling to be a form of acting, to such a degree that the film demands that the audience gently celebrate the failure – the most important of which, for Page, appears to be not meeting the grade for a scholarship to Vanderbilt University. Her overarching vulnerability is not comprehended as financial security in life but rather as the predicament in which she seems completely incognizant of the nineteen fifties mainstream disgust at “sexually deviant” literature whilst simultaneously becoming its most “notorious” icon. Not until a boyfriend addresses this deviancy does this entire plot seem to dawn on her.

With an outstanding performance by Gretchen Mol, coupled with a carefully crafted approach by Hannon, the film subtly details the notorious life of a primitive porno-heroine. Set among the welcoming industry of pornographers, in open conflict with American public opinion and legislation, the film superbly delivers a personal outlook of the modern heroine’s experiences, defining both the degradation and happiness of Page’s life.

One night, twenty-four-year old recent Minnesota transplant Diablo Cody was walking home from her dull ad agency job when the words “Amateur Night” on a topless bar’s marquee beckoned irresistibly. Even though Cody had only once been inside a strip club – and, with her idyllic middle-class upbringing, devoted boyfriend and conspicuous lack of emotional scars, hardly fit the stereotype of a sex industry worker – one try-out as an amateur led to a year of professional hard graft as a stripper, lap dancer and peep-show performer. The equally hilarious, titillating and gruesome account of her exhausting adventure, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, is far more than just another stripper memoir or dispatch from the dark side: Cody’s analysis of what she found within the walls of upscale men’s clubs and sleazy sex palaces, and within herself, is shot through with a laser-like wit and punk rock sensibility likely to influence all political shades of opinion on sex jobs and raunch culture. Cody – who’s now hung up her white platforms to work as a successful screenwriter and arts editor – talked to me on the phone from Minneapolis.

– Even jaded readers will be fascinated by some of the real-life characters in your book. Like the jizz-licking guy at the peep show.

He’s the celebrity of the book! He would come crawling in and lick up as much as he could. The thing that was really fascinating about him was that he was so clean cut. He was the last guy you would ever think had a habit like that. I shudder to think about it.

– What else did you come across that fazed you?

You know, people who just had really strange fetishes. Incest would come up a lot: People who would want you to masturbate as their sister, or their mother. That was something I was not comfortable with. I tried to be pretty game, but that really freaked me out. And, you know, a lot of cross dressers. There seemed to be a lot of men who wanted to come in and talk about gay sex. To me that was really surprising, that they though of the booth as a safe haven for their fantasies, even though it was obviously straight-oriented entertainment. That was weird.

– So you became a stripper as an experiment – were you surprised to find you became addicted? And was it the money or the attention?

Honestly, I never made that much money compared with the people I worked with. So for me I think it was about the attention, but also sort of an external thing. I found it to be cathartic, a very weird, twisted form of self-expression. I think I got addicted to just how subversive and how fun it was compared to my every day life.

– And you didn’t derive any particular satisfaction from, say, when you got a promotion at the advertising agency where you worked.

Right, I didn’t at all, and it surprised me, because if I got twenty toy shows at Sex World [the porn emporium where Cody worked as one of the "dolls" who are displayed and selected for peep show performances] in a night I would feel proud.

– Is this something mainstream feminism has still failed to sufficiently acknowledge, how satisfying it can be to wield one’s sexual power in this way?

It can. I think it’s something that third-wave feminism has recognized. On the other hand the one thing people have failed to recognize is just how unsatisfying and unfulfilling the corporate world can still be for women. Because no matter how much we’ve progressed, the glass ceiling is still so much in place. And I honestly felt kind of degraded in my day-to-day life, at the white-collar jobs, because I was always being undersold. Whereas in the sex industry it was so straightforward.

– But which would you say is the more exploited group in a strip club: The girls who work, or the men who hand over the money?

Some of the needier customers, the men who were looking for an emotionally connection, were really preyed upon. They were definitely manipulated and victims in that way. But most of the time, the women were disenfranchised. It’s the societal model for a woman to be revered and worshipped as a thing of beauty, and in a strip club, it’s actually the complete opposite. You have a roomful of beautiful women, trying desperately to woo these men.

– Competing with each other.

Exactly. And it really turns the men into little emperors and the women into these sad, groveling creatures. So that was the one aspect that disturbed the heck out of me. You know, I always thought that strip clubs would be the kind of places that celebrated beauty and femininity and it’s really not the case.

– How much do the men kid themselves that it’s anything other than a financial transaction?

Funnily enough, a lot of them sexualize the financial aspect of it and find it a turn-on to be paying for a lap dance or for female companionship. There were others who were obviously in massive denial and seriously wanted to believe, “oh, this girl really cares about me, she told me her real name,” not knowing that the same girl was mocking them in the dressing room and had given them a fake real name. Every dancer I knew had an onstage name and a fake real name for when she really wanted to sucker a guy. But he would actually believe that you shared that information with him because he was so chivalrous and truly respected women. You know, “I can earn her trust.” A lot of guys just want to be the white knight, that’s the persona they assume when they walk into the club. Like they’re going to find some poor little lost girl and save her.

– What do you think about what Ariel Levy has called “the rise of raunch culture”, and the argument that the phenomenon of women visiting strip clubs is regressive rather than empowering?

I guess I’m emblematic of this raunch culture she talks about. I’m the foul-mouthed, trash-talking, salty sex worker who has a lot of fun with that stuff. And I guess I don’t read that deeply into it. I think that any time people get to reverse roles it’s empowering, and for women who get to objectify other women it’s a role reversal, it’s empowering and it feels good. There’s just no way around it. For me, from a purely hedonistic standpoint, I find women attractive, so it’s fun to go to strip clubs and it’s fun to watch porn.

– In the book you describe meeting a high school girl who’s working in a strip club, and for her it was a regular part-time job, no big deal. What does that say about American culture?

I mean, just equating material things with sexuality has become a totally mainstream concept. You hear it in the music… stripper culture is totally mainstream now, obviously. Now there’s stripper aerobics, t-shirts for girls that say “Porn Star”, all that kind of thing. And it’s not the world I come from. I came of age in the nineties, when we had Riot Grrl music and it was just a more feminist time. I know I’m being a hypocrite by saying that I don’t think a high school girl should be involved in the sex industry, but at least by the age of twenty-four or twenty-five I had lived enough to be able to make that decision for myself.

– What would you say to a woman who’s read your book, thinks it sounds like an interesting job and is going to try it?

I would say try it, slowly. And make sure that you maintain control of yourself in the situation at all times. That includes maintaining some level of sobriety. Because honestly, the people who fall down the rabbit hole are the ones who get involved with drugs.

– And the ones who cross the line into prostitution?

Exactly, yeah. You really have to know your boundaries. In a lot of cases I think that escort work and prostitution, to me that’s just another more extreme form of sex work. I don’t beat around the bush. I knew a lot of strippers who were really quick to point out the difference between them and prostitutes, but honestly I don’t see that big of a difference. It’s a controversial viewpoint, but I know that I was selling my body and selling my sexuality and I’m not really sure how much bigger a step it would have been toward becoming an escort. It’s all so closely related that it struck me as funny when girls would get extremely offended by that comparison. I would think, you’re in a peep show with a dildo up your twat and you’re asking me to show you more respect!

– So do you have any regrets?

There are times when I wish I had attempted to take it even a little more seriously than I did. Because it would have been interesting to see what it was like to get really entrenched in the lifestyle and be one of the upper echelon performers. Obviously I have a physical limitation in that regard because I don’t look like a ten.

– And you don’t want to get big fake boobs?

Exactly, I didn’t want to go that far. But at the same time part of me wondered what it would have been like if I had gotten big fake boobs and gone the whole nine yards, had that ambition that some of those girls have. Because then I really could have gained insight into what that life is like, from a purely anthropological standpoint.

– But you would never go back and do it now?

Right – I think it was pretty obvious when I was doing it that I was kind of a dilettante. I probably wouldn’t go back and do it now, but I miss it. I still feel a little twinge when I pass a strip club, and sometimes consider going in.

A collection of essays from women working in the US porn industry and women consuming porn outside it, Naked Ambition is an intelligent and provocative survey of pro-porn female opinions. There’s little in the way of gushing praise about the industry itself – most of the writers agree that newcomers get eaten alive if they don’t know what they’re doing. Tera Patrick’s essay is a good illustration of the pitfalls involved and her own fall and rise on the back of her initial calamities. But where these pieces take off is in praise of porn as something liberating, both in its production and its consumption.

Many women involved in porn are not porn stars – they are businesswomen and entrepreneurs too, or they are pro-porn journalists, marketers and writers, who have turned porn on its head and are using it to create their own independence, whether or not they appear in front of the camera. For some, like Wired sex and tech columnist Regina Lynn, innovations like cybersex have been crucial in helping her overcome chronic shyness to enjoy real relationships. For others, like Emily Dubberley and Violet Blue, setting up their own websites and blogs have been how they’ve created their own burgeoning careers writing about all aspects of sex. In other words, women in porn is not just about some blonde girl humping in front of a camera.

Naked Ambition showcases a variety of attitudes of women in how they think about sex and how they think porn can help make people’s sex lives – and so their lives – better. The adult industry is two-faced in this sense, in that some of what it does – sex toys, better sex guides, erotica etc – is genuinely helpful, and some of it is irredeemably nasty -see Tera Patrick’s essay again for examples. What "nasty" is, and who should decide what it is, and how it is regulated, remains the eternal question. What many of the women do in Naked Ambition is define what their own idea of sex is, which flies in the face of the norms of what women are supposed to like. Some of those opinions may seem distinctly distasteful, like Mason’s descriptions of the extreme videos she directed and shot, but the fact she’s discussing why she likes this kind of porn – and why the girls shooting it like making it – brings it out into the open. As such, the perspectives they bring to the porn industry and its product are genuinely illuminating, if disconcerting.

This is in no small part to the tight editing of Carly Milne, who put together the anthology (and who, a long time ago, gave me free lance work for now-defunct Canadian magazine Can Say). Carly ran the Pornblography blog for a couple of years and worked as a porn industry publicist while she was researching the book, so she has first hand experience of its machinations. What’s best about Naked Ambition is that it feels like thirty one shots of mind tequila – thirty one great essays and arguments and experiences that engage with you bluntly and directly, and that are laced with the greatest aphrodisiac – intelligence.

[See also: Make Your Own Porn Movie: An interview with UK porn director Anna Span]

“Oh my god – this couple just turned around and gave me a dirty look!” Annabel Chong giggles like a schoolgirl. “It’s like, no sex please we’re British.” Perhaps unwisely, she’d stepped outside her film company’s noisy office to do this interview in the street over her mobile phone, and had spent 20 minutes chatting chirpily about blow-jobs and erections. Strange that she should be so easily embarrassed, mind. Ms. Chong’s claim to fame is that back in 1995 she set a new world record by having sex with 251 men in ten hours, the whole event being recorded on film and subsequently edited down to a brisk four hours to become a bestselling hardcore porn vid. Also on hand was a documentary crew making Sex: The Annabel Chong Story, which was the hottest ticket at the last year’s Sundance festival of independent film.

She has always insisted the big gang-bang was a feminist statement, turning the tables on men to reduce them to a succession of cocks of varying degrees of tumescence. There’s a debate to be had about whether pornography degrades women, and whether the appropriate response is to degrade men right back again. But it’s a monumentally boring one. Everyone knows where they stand and if you really want it rehashed once again, leave Spike right now and turn to the Guardian women’s page, where they’re certain to oblige. Opportunities to interview porn icons, especially those as articulate and forthright as Annabel Chong, are few and far between, so I decided to seek answers to the questions people really want asked. After polling a handful of mates of both sexes, who may or may not be more sleazy than the average Spike reader (you decide), I found these boiled down to variations on four themes. Let’s get them out of the way before we go any further.

So Annabel, did you come? “Sporadically, I did. But it’s very much like running a marathon. You go through stretches where it’s just incredibly boring, incredibly awful. And you get to certain stretches where you’re just running on air. That was where I really got into it and enjoyed it. I’ve always enjoyed extreme sexual situations, and this was certainly one of them. There are some people – they may not be Tom Cruise, let’s say – but they’re very comfortable with their bodies and their own sexuality. I find that ultimately more attractive than a stud who’s just neurotic about what he looks like, posing in front of the camera and losing his hard-on. That’s just not very appealing, is it?”

What proportion of the men failed to get it up, then? “About 66% were not able to perform. And between you and me, I would have to say that if I were a bloke I would have tremendous difficulty performing. I think I’d get this performance anxiety attack and just fail. And up to this day, I really wonder why a lot of the men decided to do it. It’s bad enough to fail but it’s even worse to fail on video, where their grandchildren could check it out: ‘Oh my god, grandpa’s such a loser. He couldn’t even get it up.’ Terribly embarrassing I would think.”

Given that they were recruited through porn mags, weren’t you at all concerned that the men would turn out to be revolting, rancid weirdos? “Oh, they were rather revolting, some of them. But the whole point of the entire exercise was not to pick out 251 studs. It’s more like the idea of the UN.”

I’m sorry? “You know, the United Nations. You get a little bit of everything. A little sampling of every single shape, size and, you know . . . colour, I guess.”

Weren’t you terribly sore afterwards? “Well, in actual fact if you watch the four-hour gang bang tape itself, you will realise that a lot of the things were fudged in editing to make it look as though more sex took place. So it really wasn’t that many men.”

Hang on. It says here that there were 251 of them. Have we been diddled? “But they just moved them along really quickly. There was some humping, but not quite that much. It’s actually less sex than if a woman is having sex with a man for 10 hours straight. Now that’s a lot of sex.”

Sex is a fascinating and occasionally unsettling film, whose subject comes across as a complicated young woman, alternately assertive and thoughtful, damaged and deluded. The gang-bang itself is one of the least erotic things you’ll ever see. Silvery pony-tailed Brit director John Bowen, whose nom de porn is John T. Bone, also acts as cock wrangler, leading the leering fornicators in groups of five up onto a plinth where Ms. Chong waits to receive them. We also meet her creepy middle-aged fan club organiser, some sneery rival porn stars at a convention (“I do film noirs (sic),” sniffs the star of Bitches of Hollywood), and watch Annabel playing up to a Jerry Springer audience and charming undergraduates at a Cambridge Union debate. But the story behind the documentary turns out to be even more fascinating. Nowhere is the viewer informed that the director, Gough Lewis, was shagging his subject. Now he’s apparently “gone AWOL” and she’s agreed to publicise the film to put right what she claims are misrepresentations. What’s more, she’s now making her own film about what it’s like to be the subject of a documentary. “I get more self-reflective every day,” she quips.

Annabel Chong was born Grace Quek (pronounced “quake”) in Singapore, 1972. Her Christian parents (mum’s a piano teacher, dad’s a schoolteacher) sent her to convent school and encouraged her to study law but her “dwindling religious faith and burgeoning sexuality” were already causing problems. In a traumatic ritual, she was exorcised in a local church at the age of 17. In 1991, she moved to London to attend King’s College and thence to America and the University of Southern California, where she was so enraged by feminist theory that she took to porn as a kind of practical adjunct to her gender studies course.

Although she still has a tendency to address each question as though it were one of her college essays, to be fielded with maximum cultural studies jargon, Annabel/Grace (“‘Who am I?’ is a question I constantly ask myself”) now seems a great deal more assured than she does in the film. “It’s rather mortifying to look back and think to myself, oh my god, was I that vulnerable?” she admits. “But maybe I was.”

One of the more disturbing scenes shows Annabel cutting herself, the clear implication being that the porn industry has driven her to self-harm. In fact, she says, the sequence was shot on the day that she and the director split up, and both of them were doing it. “I don’t know what came over me. It’s not one of the prouder moments of my life, but when I saw the film I was really astonished to find that he didn’t include the entire context.”

Even more worrying, we learn that not only has Bowen yet to pay her the $10,000 she was promised to take part in the gang bang, but the assurances she was given about the men being tested for HIV were untrue. “I was terribly disturbed by that. I felt extremely betrayed by the fact that they didn’t take the health precautions I thought they did,” she says angrily.

Late in the film, it’s revealed that she was gang raped while in London in 1991. The viewer is invited to conclude that her penchant for group sex flicks (‘I Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team’, ‘All I Want For Christmas is a Gang Bang’) is born of a desire to regain control over this part of her life. She thinks that’s too simplistic an explanation. “Nobody ever does anything for any single motivation. I felt that it was a cop out for Gough to say that A caused B, because there’s actually more of a story behind the entire rape event. The immediate outcome of it was that I was sent through the legal system and National Health Service counselling system, which was incredibly dehumanising. I felt that I was nothing but a statistic. Then I looked back on my entire life in Singapore and realised that all my life I had been processed. I led the perfect life. I went to all the right schools, I attended the right social functions, hung out in the country club, went to church, got the humanities scholarship. I was the perfect child, but none of it was really my choice. First thing I did was to quit law school and go to art school. It was a big issue. My relatives, bless them, actually called my parents to offer their condolences. ‘She’s going to starve. We feel so sorry for you.’ So it affected me in the sense that control became a huge issue in my life. I think what you see in the documentary is the process of regaining control, and it really is a work in progress. Even today, I’m asking myself whether I’m in control of situations.”

These days she’s made up with her parents, who were unaware of their daughter’s novel career and a little baffled by her popularity when the documentary was being filmed. Partly as a result of her experiences of being exploited in front of the camera, she’s now decided to go behind it, producing her own porn. And she’s on a crusade. “What I’m trying to do is to target market my product towards a younger crowd, which no one is really addressing right now. Or at least to make it more contemporary. I mean what’s up with the big hair? It’s so over. So eighties.”

Do you really think porn consumers look at the hairstyles though, Annabel? “Well, if I was a bloke, I wouldn’t want all that frizzy hair crackling all over my blow-job. It just seems rather intimidating. It’s like being blown by a hedgehog. I don’t think it’s very aesthetic. Men have to have jerk off somehow. They need to have a wank over some images of people getting it on. They’re just going to buy whatever’s out there. And if there’s product out there that’s done rather well – like the films from the ’70s, which I really admire – the women actually do look like women, which is kind of nice. Because nowadays the women don’t look like women – they look like drag queens. And half the time I’m just sitting there thinking, they don’t look terribly female do they? As a female viewer that bothers me, because I want to be able to relate to the person onscreen when I’m doing my own private thing.

“I may not know necessarily what good pornography is,” she concedes. “I know what I like, so I’m just going to make what I like and hopefully it will sell.”

Of course, it won’t sell over here because we have some of the most draconian censorship laws in the world. “I thought about that when I was coming over here. I really believe that when you talk about banning porn because it’s exploitative of women or because it’s obscene, then it’s terribly fascist. A lot of people derive enjoyment from watching adult films. I certainly do. I have been a porn consumer for years, and proud to be one. I think a lot of things are more obscene than the average porn film. Like ‘Patch Adams’, the Robin Williams film. I think that’s incredibly obscene – it’s like total emotional pornography.”

What with the porn and the documentary and her journalism and art exhibitions, there’s just one thing Annabel doesn’t have time for anymore. “Your average Brit probably has a better sex life than me,” she moans. And on that cheering note, I bid her farewell.

[phpzon keywords="Annabel Chong" num="10" country="US" searchindex="Blended" trackingid="spike" sort="none" templatename="columns" columns="2" paging="true"]

It’s a well-worn joke that any dinner-party discussion of the Internet will inevitably include a mention of finding pornography while on- line. As Lawrence O’Toole points out in his book, Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology And Desire, the Internet has been the biggest leap forward for the distribution of pornography since the advent of video. For people in countries such as the UK, which has much stricter pornography laws than the US and Europe, the Net has opened the floodgates for what was previously considered taboo and banned.

“New technologies have always come into the country bringing the idea that our restrictive conditions can be cast out,” explains O’Toole. “But it rarely turns out to be the case. Look at video, which was meant to herald the end of the censor – it’s actually become a great tool for the censor. But censorship is always thought of in absolutes. You cannot restrict access to illegal materials – you can only make it very difficult to get hold of them.”

“I’m certainly not an advocate of unrestricted access to porn,” O’Toole stresses, “but teenagers will get hold of this material.” Certainly the Net has made that access easier, but in doing so, not only has it begun to change attitudes toward porn but the very nature of the Net itself.

“The Internet has certainly helped make porn become more mainstream,” says O’Toole. “We’ve now had a pornographic presidency – oral sex in the White House and Monica Lewinsky’s semen-stained dress broadcast continually on the news. Or, as another example, George Michael on Parkinson talking about having sex in public toilets. Once all that has been brought out into the public, there’s no way back.”

Inspired by the passionate debates about porn taking place in Usenet newsgroups such as rec.arts.erotica, Pornocopia is part history and part analysis of the ways and methods by which porn has emerged from the shadows in the last couple of decades and become ever more accepted within conventional society.

“The general reaction to the book has been very healthy and positive,” O’Toole claims, “which shows that people are less concerned about porn and I think the Internet has partly contributed to that. People are beginning to realise you can look at hardcore imagery and not go mad or blind or whatever.”

“Hardcore is a very nasty term,” he continues, “when all it means is pictures of adults having sex. Fair enough, a lot of people are revolted when they see their first hardcore imagery, but I think that comes from their own sexual insecurities, which are then transferred back on to the pictures. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically revolting about people having sex or seeing pictures of it.”

Even if you strongly disagree with O’Toole about the moral implications of people having access to pornography, it’s hard to deny that porn has irrevocably changed the Net: because of the huge revenues involved, porn has always been a catalyst for technology.

As Pornocopia reveals, porn singlehandedly established video as a commercially viable product and is now doing the same for DVD and, of course, the Net. Secure credit card transactions, password encryption, and streaming sound and video are just some of the Web technologies that have been pioneered by porn, and the industry is at the forefront of demanding bigger Net bandwidth for all. Whether you like it or not, the future experience of the Web is being built on the back of the on-line porn industry.

However, O’Toole is sceptical that the evergrowing popularity of the Net in the UK will bring about a change in our obscene publication laws soon. “Where we differ from America and Europe is the attitude of the British establishment, which maintains that they know what’s best for people,” he argues. “Attitudes won’t change until the intelligentsia change their mindset, which will creep in eventually from the ground level. But the Internet does let people see that there are other attitudes towards pornography.”

Bristolian born and bred, 40-year-old Julian Murphy studied Design for Print at Brunel College. His acclaimed fetish art, which he describes as “sciperepics”, transforms everyday household appliances into extraordinary objects of desire. Critics have compared Julian’s work to that of Escher and Giger, and it has been featured widely in the fetish press and beyond.

His first book, the lavish The Singular Art of Julian Murphy, has just been published by the Erotic Print Society. A further two volumes are in the pipeline. He also has a range of T-shirts, prints and posters and an excellent web site at www.julianmurphy.co.uk

“Being surprised by art is a genuine rarity these days,” said Design Week, “but judging by the facial expressions of those shown this book it’s a trick Murphy has pulled off.”

You weren’t involved in the fetish scene when you started drawing, so what provided you with initial inspiration?

The initial inspiration came when, as a designer, I used to design greetings cards for companies such as Athena back in the mid ’80s. I always felt the ideas were too strong for such a flippant product, and they had short shelf – or should I say mantlepiece – life. My marriage broke down six years ago and with the lack of clients allowing me to really express my imagination to its full potential, this kind of amalgamated into my art. I also believe good ideas never date, and nor does sex if I come to think of it. Sexual imagery, especially these days, seems to lack any class or style. Why shouldn’t all consenting aspects of sexuality be treated in a classier manner? I just can’t stand cheap crap, or degradation. I guess in a nutshell I’ve always thought this way, about all of life. Sex is just a huge throbbing tool for my creativity.

Are you able to do the housework without becoming aroused?

It’s difficult, and I feel selfish keeping all that pleasure to myself. So to be a more generous individual, I let other people do it. Too much self-indulgent sexual fun on your own is a real wank.

Have you ever been accused of ‘objectifying women’ in your work? If so, how do you respond?

I have been accused of objectifying women, but my answer to that is quite simple: if people think that of me, I feel they are being sexist in their assumption that I’ve actually drawn a woman. How do they know it’s not a woman dressed up as a man, or vice-versa? My work is androgynous – both or neither male or female. It is more to do with fetishism in its purest form, the objects of desire that surround sexuality. But rather than limit that to a pair of high heels or a corset, I’ve expanded the repertoire. I believe no one yet has really explored the total sexuality of inanimate objects. We see it in car design, or packaging. It’s all around us in a subconscious way.

What exactly are ‘sciperepics’?

A word of mine that means: knowledge (sci) from (per) repeating (rep) images (pics) – of which the shoe pattern is a perfect example. The word also reads backwards the same!

Has any household utensil defeated your attempts to eroticise it?

No household objects have yet defeated my observations on an erotic level. Only my relationships seem to do that!!!

Have you ever been banned from hanging out in B&Q?

I have not yet been banned from B&Q, but being single at present, you do find yourself relying quite a lot on “do it yourself”. Given a chance, I’d be more of a “do it all” kind of a guy.

Is it important to you that people should find your work funny as well as erotic?

I hope people find my work amusing. Heaven forbid that sex should become a more serious a matter than the media presents it. I hope my work will create smiles, understandings, challenge the intellect, and maybe change the way people look at objects. A woman sent me a Swiss army knife she saw it at the airport, and it triggered her memory of my illustration. It’s great that I have an ability to pervert a person’s feelings over a completely innocent icon.

What’s the difference between an erotic print and a dirty picture?

I think erotic art celebrates sex, whereas pornography degrades sex and the people within it. But unfortunately it is the degradation that is very often the key to peoples’ excitement.

Has your art made you fabulously wealthy?

Yes, but not in a financial way. If you are talking about soulful wealth, and an inner peace that only comes from being respected for who you really are, talents and failings, then, yes, I’m a rich bastard.

Who likes your stuff, anyway?

On my travels, or at book signings, the one thing that I most love is that about 70% of the people who show an interest in my work are women. Too often I hear that too much sexual imagery is very male orientated. Women seem to be attracted to my art because it does have an intellectual element, and is generally more cerebral. Without sounding sexist or anti my own sex, women are not just physical lovers. Someone once said, “a woman’s most erogenous zone is her mind.” I’m inclined to agree.

Pornocopia – Laurence O’Toole

See all books by Laurence O’Toole at
Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.com

"To write, as I have, with an enthusiasm for something so loathed in certain quarters is maybe asking for trouble," acknowledges Independent, New Statesman and Daily Telegraph contributor Laurence O’Toole in his introduction to this excellent survey of "porn, sex, technology and desire". He’s certainly seen enough of the stuff during his three years’ intensive research, as evidenced by his familiarity with such industry lingo as "reverse anal cowgirl" (don’t ask) and "blow, dog, mish, pop" (the standard formula for sexual variation in the average hardcore porn flick), and a review of the best porn movie ever made (‘The Opening of Misty Beethoven’, apparently) that can only be described as "in-depth".

But as O’Toole knows only too well, this is a book that could not have been published ten years ago, especially by such a progressive imprint as Serpent’s Tail. In the late ’80s, anti-sex feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon had liberal thinking on the subject by the balls, as it were. Bristol South MP Dawn Primarolo introduced a Private Members Bill aimed at restricting the sale of pornographic materials, while ‘Off the Shelf’ campaigners regularly invaded Smiths to tear up the publications that offended them. One of the great strengths of Pornocopia is the way in which it teases out the roots of the shift in attitudes that has brought porn into the mainstream in the ‘90s.

O’Toole identifies the turning point as the shameful behaviour of Liberty – then the NCCL – in briefly overturning its longstanding policy in favour of freedom of expression to support parliamentary action on porn. This so enraged those who objected to feminism becoming associated with censorship (ironically patriarchal society’s traditional tool of choice when it comes to silencing dissent), sexual puritanism and the great British dread of erotic representation, that it led to the formation of Feminists Against Censorship. Liberty promptly did a dramatic U-turn and the newly empowered pro-porn feminists, emboldened by the backlash against Victim Feminism, ensured that the Dworkinites’ outlandish claims about the alleged harm caused by pornography never went unchallenged again. Or as one left-wing porn enthusiast quoted by O’Toole puts it, succinctly: "Anti-sex feminists were such a disaster because they managed to police the left with regard to sexuality and desire, while not really stopping much porn from being sold. So people were probably still buying their magazine and having a quiet wank, rather than going down to the Labour club and having an argument."

The history of porn is also the history of censorship, and as O’Toole notes with exasperation, "There are times in this perpetually frowning nation when it seems some people simply can’t get enough restriction." Through a wealth of fascinating archive material and interviews, he reveals how the meddling state doesn’t even trust its own citizens to recognise the dangers of filth. Juries have always been obstinately reluctant to label any material "obscene", which is why the police prefer to go to magistrates for forfeiture and destruction orders. Consequently, all claims about the amount of "filth" flooding the country are untrustworthy as they’re based on untested definitions made up by cops and customs officers to justify their actions.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of kiddieporn. Anyone who objects to ever-increasing censorship in this panic-prone society is used to the immediate accusation of defending child pornographers, since the censorship-oriented mindset seems incapable of recognising that child sex abuse – illegal in every country in the world – is the crime, rather than the image, which is merely a record of the crime that should be used to prosecute offenders. But O’Toole takes the argument further by exploring what materials are actually out there, in magazines, videos and on the Internet.

Child pornography was legal only in Denmark for a brief, insane period in the late ‘70s. Virtually every pornographic image that has been seized since then derives from that era. These are constantly recycled for each new medium, including CD-ROMs and the Internet. A 1992 academic study concluded that virtually no new child pornography had been produced on a commercial scale anywhere in the world over the last 15 years. Ironically, the main producer of paedophile materials in America is the US government, which for many years published the contact magazine ‘Wonderland’ as part of an ongoing entrapment project. Most of the photographs branded as child porn in this country are not pornographic, deriving from naturist journals and art publications. But as a number of dispiriting high-profile cases have shown, the zealots have ensured that any image of unclothed children is now assumed to have been made with sexual intent.

This is unquestionably a highly partisan book, and while O’Toole’s self-selecting band of anonymous Internet chatroom chums provide a voice that is all-too-often absent from the debate – that of the user – they aren’t entirely persuasive in supporting his thesis that they’re happy wankers rather than sad ones. But if he helps to discredit puritans of left and right, who dishonestly exploit genuine concerns to further their hidden agendas, we might finally be able to have a real debate about what he rightly describes as "the dread of the power of the image in Western culture".

[This review previously appeared in Venue magazine]

Rebel Inc was started in 1992 with the intention of promoting “a new wave of young urban Scottish writers who were kicking back against the literary mainstream”. Laura Hird first appeared on their “Children Of Albion Rovers” collection and Nail And Other Stories is her first short story collection for the publisher.

The opening “Nail” starts promisingly enough, the tale of a beauty-obsessed style queen who develops a boil on her finger, but Hird’s hatred for the character is too transparent for the story to sustain 30-odd pages. Similarly the beautifully-drawn characterisation of “Routes” stops dead as Hird clearly runs out of ideas for the story – a shame, as her monologue from the persona of a young male “schemie” is particularly empathetic. “The Hard Sell” is simply a waste of paper, a short tale of a drunken car-park coupling which makes up in detail for what it lacks in plot or insight.

While Hird clearly has a talent for characterisation – the people in these stories jump vividly from the page – it’s a shame that she then buries that talent in the usual semi-pornographic nonsense we’ve come to expect from so many of Rebel Inc’s writers. It’s not so much lack of talent as lack of ideas; promising stories are depthcharged for facile “all men are bastards” endings, particularly in the closing “There Was A Soldier” which makes the tired connection between soldiers and violence towards women. The tale of a squaddie who sleeps with a decomposing corpse and then buries it on Culloden Moor, any suspense or shock is abandoned in favour of political comment worthy of Ben Elton: the stench of burning flesh is “a familiar and evocative smell that he’d no doubt encounter again as soon as he was on tour with a battalion in Londonderry at the end of the month”.

“The Initiation” is the only real success in the collection. The story of two teenage girls and their manipulation of a naïve outcast is shocking, powerful and for the first time in the book showcases Hird actually using her writing ability to the full. It’s all the more marked as the following “Tillycoultry / Anywhere” returns once more to the territory of downtrodden women and bastard men, in this case the ongoing attempts of a husband to persuade his wife to try partner-swapping. Although the story manages to show “swinging” in its tawdry reality, Hird’s own thoughts are too prominent and overpower the character, reducing her to a mouthpiece for the author’s heavy-handed conclusion.

The most frustrating story in the collection is “I am gone”, narrated by the spirit of a recently-dead woman as she watches her girlfriend grieving. Hird has a great deal of fun with the idea of a spirit who can see but who can’t affect the world around her, but all too predictably it once again descends into cheap voyeurism. Although the early sections of the story show a writer with genuine talent and a fierce imagination, the ending is an anti-climax in more ways than one.

Laura Hird is a hugely talented writer who has the potential to produce a masterpiece. Nail And Other Stories isn’t it.