In Lust We Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema

by Gerrie Lim

  But, really, did it help advance the cause? Kobe Tai, the Asian-American Vivid Girl, playing a professional slut in a scene where she did the bump-and-grind before being killed off. Some would surely call that a cliché.

  Kobe was only active in the adult film industry from 1996 to 2003. She’d starred in sixty-two movies before retiring. It was not a prolific output in porn terms, though her legend was secure among hardcore fans of Asian erotica. I remember her in Michael Zen’s Jade Princess, a scene with the extremely well-endowed hunk Julian, which covered three positions—he started by taking her standing up, followed by missionary, and finally doggie—a scene obviously meant for the viewing pleasure of white guys who liked watching a big white guy take on a petite Asian girl.

  That was the Kobe Tai “branding”—she was small, but was she ever mighty. I never met her personally but was intrigued by her legend. Vivid boss Steven Hirsch had given her the Japanese-sounding name Kobe Tai because he wanted “something that sounded Asian,” never mind the fact that she was actually of Taiwanese heritage. In an industry where most people never used their real names, such poetic liberties were surely forgivable; what did it matter, anyway, since one always played a shadow of oneself—a sexual persona that, for all its impassioned elements, remained very much an illusion?

  In her last film, the critically-acclaimed Jenna Loves Kobe, released by Vivid in 2003, she appeared in two sizzling scenes with Jenna Jameson, one shot Andrew Blake-style with European haute-glamour hats and corsets, the other shot in slick MTV-style in a jacuzzi with hot pink lights and soap bubbles drifting down. Kobe was then twenty-nine years old, and it was, however surprisingly, the very first time she had worked with Jenna, so it was actually a very good time to quit—the final scene ended with her applying some very serious tongue action on a writhing, moaning Jenna, so she was literally going out on top.

  Strike one, then, for the yellow fever babes! The need to maintain appearances was what kept the industry going, and Asian girls knew how to play to fans of Asian porn. Including their fans in Asia—Asia Carrera told me that a lot of her website hits come from her fans in Japan as well as places like Singapore and Malaysia, where porn is illegal; Annabel Chong told me that, out on the road, the majority of her strip-club patrons were Asian and her best markets were Sacramento, San Francisco, Hawaii, and New York. Four out of ten emails she received were from either Jewish or Asian fans, on matters academic or philosophical and often unrelated to porn.

  However, in the last interview I did with Annabel, for AVN Online in July 2002, she told me she was “beginning to question the validity of the entire concept of empowerment within the adult industry. Even if one could be a successful entrepreneur, one is still subject to the whims and tastes of the fan base, which is rather limiting.”

  For people like Annabel and myself, who’d both left Singapore because, as Annabel herself so accurately put it, “we don’t fit the one-look, one-style, one-choice nation,” perhaps our own world views needed to be more open-minded than most. But it was hard to stay so receptive, when all people saw in you was a glorified geisha.

  “What I really treasure right now is my privacy,” she concluded, in that last interview. “I do not feel the need to rehash my life for profit. I now find satisfaction in being a non-famous, behind-the-scenes sort of person. Capitalizing on my notoriety holds little appeal for me. Pursuing fame is a double-edged sword. It may bring money and adulation but at the same time you are confining yourself to a public persona that you have created. I personally find that tiresome, having to play the same role after I have evolved into a totally different person. I’ve had my little ride, fame-wise, and it was interesting while it lasted. But now it’s time for me to try something new.”

  “Something,” she laughed, “where I get to use my brain for a change.”

  And that, ultimately, was why she quit.

  Foreign Affairs

  London Lust

  I first went there on a cool, windswept afternoon in June 2005, when I was in London. I walked from my hotel on High Holborn to Oxford Street, and cut across to Charing Cross Road before wending my way right into Soho. There was a whip-smart sex shop called Swish, and the famous jazz club Ronnie Scott’s was still there, but what really interested me lay a stone’s throw from the gay bars of Old Compton Street: a modest flat in a nondescript building, right in the middle of the red-light district, where Anna Span appropriately kept her office.

  “Back around 1988, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I was anti-porn and into women’s rights,” this most erudite of English porn directors, aged thirty-three, calmly told me. “Back in the 1980s, most people here were against porn if you were a feminist or had any sort of inkling that way, which was naively seen as the female voice. And I was walking down Old Compton Street one day—then it was full of sex shops, not like now—and I just realized that my anger was due to the fact that I was jealous. I was jealous because if you were a man you can go watch a sex show, you can buy a sex magazine, you can see a prostitute, or get a video albeit illegally, and this whole place was for men, for their fantasies and their sexuality to be catered for. There was nothing for women. There wasn’t even a Chippendale’s there, nothing on television. It was that sort of climate.

  “I just realized that I was jealous and, what’s more, I was completely justified in being jealous. Because it is unfair. So from that point on, it seemed that it was completely logical. I was traveling and I was wondering what I wanted to do for a career. And I was a person who liked sex, I had gone traveling and had experiences, going to sex clubs, and I wanted to create something out there for women. I am the first woman to do it in England. I know that in America there have been girls from England but not directors, not in terms of having the power to do it and doing it properly. So I started the company in 1998, right after I graduated. I still shoot entirely in England, mainly in London.”

  Anna had graduated from the prestigious Central St Martin’s School of Art with a B.A. Hons degree in Fine Art (Film and Video), with a dissertation entitled “Towards a New Pornography,” about her female perspective on porn. She reexamined her feelings and, eventually, in early 2005, expressed them on her website (www.annaspansdiary.com), stating her beliefs that “to sexually objectify, that is to fleetingly view a person’s sexual attractiveness separately from their personality/person, is a natural human experience, not just a male one, as traditionally depicted” and “censorship only proves to change direction of the censored thoughts, not eliminate them.”

  Seven years after her Soho epiphany, she started directing for Britain’s Television X softcore cable channel, beginning with a show called Eat Me/Keep Me, shooting seventy-five episodes over three years. She was already working full-time at Television X as a film editor, watching thirty-five hours of porn a week and shooting on weekends, eventually writing her first book, Erotic Home Video, a handsomely illustrated coffee-table tome published in March 2003, based on her own experiences of making whoopee for the home video camera (aimed at helping couples do the same, which clearly worked since it sold 20,000 copies.)

  Seven Anna Span features followed on DVD, all with amusingly British titles, like A&O Department (satirizing the medical profession, “A&O” connoting “Anal and Oral” as opposed to “A&E”—“Accidents and Emergencies”), Good Service (spoofing the oft-heard London Underground subway service announcements), and the more obviously entitled Uniform Behaviour, Anna’s Mates, Hoxton Honey, Pound a Punnet, and Toy With Me. (A&O Department later received some unexpected publicity when its star and cover girl, McKenzie Lee, won the coveted “Best New Starlet” trophy at the 2006 AVN Awards; Lee had since become a contract girl with Jenna Jameson’s company, Club Jenna, and received her award wearing a low-cut dress patriotically emblazoned with the Union Jack, reflecting her own wry sexy English manner, an onscreen tic that was now part of her “branding.”)

  At the time of writing, only the first three aforementioned titles were available in the United
States, released by Union Jaxxx, the American arm of Anna’s British distributor Rude Brittania. By the end of 2005, she had directed 165 scenes—a total of some thirty-three films—for the two biggest British cable entities, Television X and The Adult Channel, and also executive-produced Women Love Porn, a new DVD feature showcasing the work of five new British female directors.

  “I started to watch porn with boyfriends in my late teens, but I didn’t watch an awful lot,” she remembered. “I did a lot of research for my dissertation at college and watched a lot there—Michael Ninn and Andrew Blake and Ben Dover and people like that—and then I worked at Television X where I was watching 350 films a year! I was full-time watching porn, basically, and shooting at weekends and just about keeping my sanity.”

  She started her own film line in February 2005, all the box covers proclaiming “Genuine Female Point of View,” so that “women will buy it and men can buy it out of curiosity,” as she posited it. Ann Summers, a chain of female-friendly sex shops in London, started selling her DVDs, though only in softcore versions. “Television X has at least seventy percent male buyers and sex shops are seventy-five percent male, so I’m selling to men predominantly still,” she noted. “I think the things I put in my work, there are deliberate aspects I will put in a porn film to attract women, which men really don’t see or don’t need to see them. They’re looking at the models and the sex and whatever, but women notice them—eye contact, talking to each other, there’s a storyline, there’s comedy, all the underwear and the clothes I buy for the scene. I do the casting fairly carefully. I won’t put a young twenty-one-year-old model to play the part of a forty-year-old businesswoman who’s supposed to be really successful, because she wouldn’t be at twenty-one. Little things like that.”

  “I have good-looking guys—I don’t sell them by body parts, like blokes with nice butts,” she added. “Because for a woman, that’s not enough. You’ve got to have a nice face, a nice personality, you’ve got to make the girl feel comfortable in a scene and not make her look like she’s being degraded. Also, I shoot female point-of-view camerawork, from the female eye, not just shooting at the woman from between her legs but looking at the woman with lots of shots of her face and also from the woman’s point of view, looking at the guy. So I will have a penetration shot of the guy’s dick the way a girl will see it. It’s a much bigger picture, much more epic. It’s ‘couples friendly’ but the sex doesn’t err on the side of being plain.”

  She says she was greatly inspired by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, particularly his idea that “when you have access to what gives you pleausure, you have power. And if you are denied access to pleasure or you allow that to happen through your own lack of confidence or whatever, then you’re disempowered.” In such manner, she explained, a major American porn star like Chloe who has a reputation for getting pleasure from being choked while reaching orgasm is, in actuality, being empowered. Porn can, despite what its detractors say, be empowering.

  “I mean, I shoot bukkake and double-penetration and anal and spitting and deep throat, stuff like that,” Anna told me. “No pissing, though I wouldn’t mind shooting that, but you can’t sell it in England.” Her film production budgets typically peaked at £6,500 (US$11,400) per movie (or £1,200/US$2,000 per sex scene, with usually five scenes to a film), excluding insurance and office overheads. Her girls got £250 (US$440) each for girl/girl, £300 (US$530) for boy/girl, £350 (US$600) for boy/girl anal, £400 (US$700) or a d.p. and £450 (US$790) for a gangbang. It was pretty much on par with most American productions, though in the UK this is more the exception than the rule. Most get paid considerably less than what Anna splurged out, though there were two significant ways in which remuneration for talent in the UK differed from America.

  For boy/girl scenes, her guys were paid the same as the girls (whereas in the US, the girls were always paid double what the guys got). And nobody got paid extra for appearing on box covers (“because in England we don’t shoot them separately”). For anal, d.p., and gangbang scenes, the men received £300 (US$530) each.

  Some of her girls were certainly good-looking enough to work as high-class escorts. “Some of them are,” Anna affirmed. “They can actually make more money doing that than working for me.” So why do they even do it? “They think they will become immortalized by appearing on video.” she replied, with a shrug. “There’s so much shit porn out there, because everyone thinks it’s easy.”

  Until recently, she informed me, there was no mandatory testing of performers for sexually transmitted diseases. British porn was now a newly rejuvenated industry; the sale of hardcore porn was declared legal only four years ago, and even then people were doing boy/girl scenes without HIV or STD certificates. The situation had improved, Anna grimly pointed out, but only within the last eighteen months. “I was one of the production companies that was right up there saying, ‘We have got to get this down, we have to say: You have to be tested every thirty days or you don’t work.’ Previously, people had certificated but kind of irregular, like every six weeks or three months or something like that, with nothing organized. People would get the clap and all sorts of things because there was no testing for them.”

  “I was the only company, really, making girl/girl models go and get any sort of tests at all, and having to pay for them myself,” she sighed. “The models would say, ‘I’m not paying, I don’t need this.’ Part of the problem with the British industry is the attitude of the models. The hassle I get to look after the models’ health and the risks they’re willing to take, just because they’re not thinking. I wrote a piece on bgafd.co.uk (British Girls Adult Film Database, covering 2,117 British porn stars), on advice to people getting into the industry, and one of the things I said was that British models need to up their standards so the performances will look good. They need to look after themselves, keep their nails good, go to the gym a couple of times a week. There’s lots of people that aren’t doing anything like that. They just turn up looking a real mess.

  “I’ve been campaigning to get the money put up for models over here, because it’s ridiculously low compared to the States. But then, we don’t make as much money because we don’t have as many customers on our doorstep as you obviously have in the States and we’re not so established and don’t have the massive distribution channels that people like Vivid have.”

  And then there was the statement made in a Fox magazine interview, by Sin City contract girl Hannah Harper, twenty-three, a perky lass with blue-green eyes hailing from a small fishing town in Devon. Anna had shot Hannah in some of her first-ever videos in 2000—one episode of a series called Planet Nadia and one episode of another series, Majella Mates, both for Television X. Succinctly explaining why she left England a mere four months after making her onscreen debut in the Ben Dover film End Games, Harper said: “The rates are so low. It’s hard to get paid, to get travel expenses. Nothing is provided on set. No towels. It’s like, we’ve got a room, two people, and a camera, let’s go. The porn industry in England is still in the state where everyone thinks everyone in the industry is in trouble and needs saving.”

  Anna nodded in agreement. “Yes, there’s still an underlying feeling of that. People ask me how I got into it, with questions like, ‘Oh, did you have no other choice?’ And I tell them it took me bloody ages to get into it and I had to work very hard. And I’ve got a bloody degree in porn, more or less, from the best art school in England. I’m now doing a Master’s in philosophy, from the University of London.” She felt encouraged, though, by the media attention that was almost non-existent four years ago. “There’s a documentary now on porn or escorting or something like that every week. I’ve had two hour-long documentaries made of me, quite decent ones. The attitude has changed for sure, in the last four years. Now you have shops like Agent Provocateur doing expensive underwear, high-end shops like Myla doing sexy underwear with a bit of kink all the way through it, and websites selling sex toys.”

  But the indus
try in England still lags behind the United States in terms of production values, and Anna said she saw herself as a forerunner in the movement for change. “Most of what’s out there now is fucking terrible,” she observed. “We don’t shoot in 16 mm like in America, and we don’t do any film at all. It’s just too expensive. We do DV cam—digital video camera—and a lot of them still shoot on mini DV. And you don’t work with a proper crew, like having a lighting person come in. There just isn’t enough money in England to do it. That’s why England’s kept at this sort of gonzo stage, this street-style. There’s loads of problems, like getting insurance as a company—up until three years ago, I couldn’t get insured because I was a porn company. I was asking for public liability insurance and employer insurance and they all said no. I had to go through my director’s union to get it. Ninety percent of production companies here are uninsured.”

  “The British industry wants to have more freedom,” she added. “It wants to be able to show female ejaculation, it wants to be able to do mail-order selling throuh the post.” (Female ejaculation, or “squirting” as it’s known in American porn, remained classified as an act of urination in the UK, even though biologically it wasn’t.) And what of all those bad clichés associated with British porn, including the proverbial casting couch, which usually meant girls giving free blowjobs before shooting? “Yes, that’s all true, it does happen, but I would hasten to add that I am better than that—I certainly don’t expect any sexual favors,” Anna laughed. “I provide towels and baby wipes and stuff, the lubes and all that, and I shoot with an all-female crew, with two cameras. I find that this creates a relaxed atmosphere, and that to me is the key to getting a good performance out of people.”

  “The thing is, I like London,” she said of her hometown. Originally from Bromley, in Kent (south of London), she noted in her online bio that her films pay tribute to the British comedies of the 1960s and 1970s—“very reality-based, like a soap opera, it’s British people having sex in realistic settings.” Hoxton Honey, for instance, is a send-up of London life (mildly lampooning the “scruffy, trendy media people living in Hoxton,” as Anna put it), while Good Service and Uniform Behaviour take on the English workforce, featuring equal-opportunity sex from the cast in a variety of wacky roles (including policemen, firemen, waitresses, mechanics, soldiers, hairdressers, and, of course, gynaecologists).