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DID IT FEEL AS GOOD EMOTIONALLY AND PHYSICALLY AS YOUR PUBLICIST AND PRODUCER INSISTED?
Well, it was not fun all the time and I never did claim that it was. Although the porn press always says that it's really fun because that's what they think will sell the article.
SOMEONE — A PRODUCER MAYBE — IN THE DOCUMENTARY SAYS THAT YOU'RE ONE OF THE PORN GIRLS WHO REALLY DOES LOVE SEX.
Well, I mean, I do. More than a lot of girls. I find this even more now that I'm directing my own shit and I have to hire talent. I interview the girl first and go to other people's shoots to see what the girl does. It never ceases to amaze me that so many of these girls, they just get into position and, you know, tune out. So many girls I spoke to said, "I'm just doing this for money. I really don't think much of this job. I don't hate it, I don't like it, but it keeps me in money."
WOULD YOU SAY MOST PORN ACTRESSES ARE LIKE THAT?
Yeah, I think most girls are in it for the money; they don't mind the sex. Sometimes they might have a good time but the majority of the time it's just what it is.
YOU'RE NOT IN IT FOR THE MONEY?
Well the money is always nice but I wouldn't do it if I hated it. It's kind of like getting laid and getting paid for it — why not? And that's why I don't work every day. I put myself on contract and I work every now and then so every time I do it it's like going to a theme party, you know, theme sex. It's something special.
HAVE YOU EVER PROSTITUTED?
No, I haven't. I've had many opportunities to. There's a time when someone offered me, like, a thousand-five to do it and I just didn't think it was a safe, controlled situation, whereas having sex on a porn set is much more controlled.
SO, IS CONTROL THE ONLY THING THAT SETS PORN-SEX-FOR-MONEY APART FROM HAVING SEX FOR MONEY IN YOUR ROOM?
Having sex on a porn set is sex as performance, it's sex for the purposes of video. Although you're still having sex for money it's under very, very controlled circumstances, where you can say, "STOP. STOP, I need to have a drink. STOP, this asshole is hurting me." You know, most of the time, the girls request the guys they work with, so the male actors have to kiss a lot of ass so the girls will request him the next time. So when I get to set, the guys are very civilized. And they might like grab my ass a bit, but if I tell them not to, say I'm not going to request them next time, they stop. And now, because I'm their boss, they're even more scared of me; I can just slap them on the butt and say, "Shut up, I'm the boss."
SO, IN REAL LIFE AS OPPOSED TO PORN LIFE, DO YOU LOVE SEX?
Well, I enjoy having sex. People have this impression that I have sex a lot. But I don't actually because most of the time I'm either too stressed to do it or my friends are too stressed to do it.
WHEN'S THE LAST TIME YOU HAD SEX?
Um, let's see, the last time I had sex was a very long time ago — before Sundance when I was completing my movie. I last had sex in January and now it's April.
WHAT'S THE BEST SEX YOU'VE EVER HAD?
I guess I'm being nostalgic, but for a certain period before I became Annabel Chong I went through the student party thing at USC. I eventually got really, really bored with it and the sex really sucked but in the beginning the sex was very, very good. It was just fun, kind of responsibility-free. Here I am at a university, away from home, let's have some fun, let's party, let's drink lots of beer, let's dance to very loud music and let's, you know, play punk rock and have sex.
WHAT WAS IT THAT MADE IT GOOD?
I felt young and invincible.
WHAT ABOUT NOW?
Now I definitely feel my mortality. Every day.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT HAVING STARTED THIS TREND?
Ambivalent. I really didn't do it to set a world record. I just wanted to do it. But it's turning into this massive female one-upmanship contest. All these women coming out and doing the whole bravado thing, it really plays into the whole reversal of gender roles. It's usually the men who are bragging, "I can fuck more women than you and I'm more macho and I've got a bigger cock," and now women are doing it and that in itself is kind of funny. It's kind of slightly subversive.
ARE YOU SURE THAT THE GENERAL POPULATION WOULD CONSIDER A MAN WHO HAS SEX WITH THAT MANY PEOPLE WORTHY OF RESPECT?
He wouldn't be considered respectable but he'd be considered a stud and secretly admired. I mean, there was this article in Playboy about this guy who had sex with a total of 20,000 women and he was being portrayed as a stud.
WHAT ABOUT YOU AND ALL OF THESE WOMEN — HOW ARE YOU BEING PORTRAYED?
As supersluts, ultrasluts. And of course, there are jokes about extensively probed orifices. Some of the press — and it really depends on what paper is covering it — some of them profess a kind of admiration. Some of them profess extreme disgust. I'm really interested in how it's being perceived in the gay community, where it's very much a generational thing. The younger men, the gay men from my generation — and I'm not trying to generalize — but some of them find it really cool. They're part of the post-AIDS generation, and they're like, "Yeah! Orgies!" For a lot of the guys in the post-AIDS generation, the good old days of the '70s when men were having orgies was a kind of golden age.
YOU THINK THAT NOW WE'RE IN THE "POST-AIDS GENERATION"?
Not post-AIDS as in AIDS is over as a crisis. After the crisis became the big issue we had to grow up dealing with it, whereas the gay men who went through the '70s and the loss of their friends to AIDS in the '80s — they were very upset by my event. They were very, very upset. But I don't think people are going around having gangbangs and orgies because of my video. Instead the video represents what couldn't take place in reality. It's a cartoon. In some ways most porns are cartoons, especially '80s and '90s porn. If you look at the narrative, the conventions have changed. The sex has become more mechanical. All these performers have become more and more like cutouts. If you watch some of the porn films from the '70s — I'm thinking of Behind the Green Door and, say, The Devil and Mrs. Jones, the golden age of porn or whatever, there's a focus on the specificity of the performers — male and female, especially female.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN "SPECIFICITY"?
A lot of '70s porn focuses on the little nuances of their interactions when they're having sex, and every woman is made to seem different than the last one. Whereas now, every single girl seems to be the same. They're all surgically enhanced boobsy bimbos with blond hair that's styled with too much gel, the guys are just these throbbing penises and they fuck the same way.
WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS?
It happened in the '80s when porn moved from film to video and suddenly it became more marketable and easier to distribute because of it's video format, which encourages a lot of people to start churning them out. So, now they're producing a lot of porns through quotas. And the second thing is — I don't want to go so far as to say "the dumbing down of America" — I think that's too extreme — but it's almost like directors are beginning to feel that the audience has a shorter and shorter attention span, that they have to cut out all the dialogue and all the extra stuff and go straight to the fucking because their audience is not going to have enough time or patience. People have a million things to do, so it's almost like porn with a McDonald's mentality.
SO THEN HOW DO YOU, BEING A SINGAPOREAN WOMAN WITH VERY SPECIFIC PREDILECTIONS AND IDIOSYNCRACIES FIT INTO THIS NEW WORLD OF HOMOGENIZED WOMEN AND HOMOGENIZED SEX?
First of all, when I went into the industry one of the reasons I sold is that I was not a big, blond-haired bimbo. I looked fairly natural [Laughs], although makeup artists wanted to make me up like a drag queen. Also, in my films that I'm directing right now I personally believe that while the distributors want certain money shots, I can still spin a jolly good yarn within these conventions.
HAVE YOU EVER APPEARED IN THE MAINSTREAM PRESS AS GRACE QUEK — MINUS ALL THE "MALE BRAGGADACIO" — INSTEAD OF AS ANNABEL CHONG?
Jerry Springer, for example — that show was heavily edited so a lot of the things I said were cut out because it didn't fit into the talk show format. The press tries to cover their sensational angle. Over time, I've learned to steer them away from the gangbang. It's kind of me being very firm and going, "It's fine that we talk about this but it's not all I want to talk about."
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©1999 Amy Goodman and Nerve.com
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