Annabel Chong

So Netflix recommended this documentary to me called Sex: The Annabel Chong story. Annable Chong apparently started the trend of the "World's Biggest GangBang" genre of pornography and set the world's record for continuous sex when she did 251 guys in 1995. I don't know how exactly the decision to document her was made, but I would imagine she had something to do with it. Very quickly the film indicates that the reason this is interesting is because Annabel Chong was a 22 year old undergraduate student at USC studying Anthropology and Gender Studies.

Now in some ways this is not entirely interesting; alot of the interviews are stupid and with stupid people saying cliched shit about the porn industry that even people who don't care about porn could know or figure out. It also has alot of the lame-ass indie-College-girl things to say about sexuality and such that don't intereest me at all. The woman, whose actual name is Grace something, appears pretty intelligent. Everything she says is better done than the majority of the population, its not brilliant or anything, but certainly not something any random person could come up with.

Yes, women should not be considered passive sex objects in the face of male-dominant sexual activity. Yes, it is ridiculous that while it is considered masculine to have many sex partners as a man it is considered anti-feminine for a woman to emjoy and participate in alot of sex. Yes, sexuality is often repressed or ignored even in "enlightened Western democracies." I don't want to get into the Foucauldian question of repression or expression but you get the point. This film spends a good majority of its length exploring those three issues and they are not fantastic or anything. If the Concordia women are reading this maybe they will really get a kick out of it or whatever. It was not a bad film certainly and at the very least it was interesting. A better way to spend the afternoon than watching reruns of SNL episodes I have seen at least 20 times.

There are a couple times during the film where there actually are some really really cool things done or said. I will mention them briefly, but you can check out the flick if you want to see more. First off, there are a number of other people who are interviewed who are also in the porn industry. Obviously the producers and directors of Annabel's gangbang are there as is Ron Jeremy, who apparently works for this company and was the MC for the event. Well, Jeremy is on her side for no particular reason, he is all like, she is a very intelligent and talented young woman and she should be able to do whatever she wants and I respect her and blah blah blah. Ron Jeremy, regardless of what you think about what he does, has always seemed to just be a nice guy who is generally concerned about other people. Most of the other people are competing porn stars. The only other porn star I can remember saying anything supportive about this woman's decision to do 251 other guys is an obvious drag queen guy who is the star of "Chicks With Dicks."

Everyone else interviewed at this giant porn convention in Las Vegas pretty much said that she was slapping them in the face. One dude said really explicitly that she was re-exposing that porn wasn't as dignified as he thought it was and instead she was exposing porn as the dirty thing that it is. Seriously, there were a bunch of people who were pissed, who said this kind of shit. The film was really explicitly making fun of them, ridiculing the idea that people considered porn something other than sex for money in several ways. First of all, all the people commenting on this were listed as "Mark Johnson-Star of Anal Police 1-4" or whatever on the bottom of the screen. The point of the documentary of course was not to make fun of porn stars or to indicate that they were not intelligent, since Annabel herself was marked as really really smart, but rather that the woman who tried to distinguish herself as an actress in film noirs etc. was upset only because Annabel made it impossible for her to identify herself as something other than someone who fucked for a living.

There was also a segment in which Annabel comes back to porn after a brief hiatus due to the efforts of a new porn director to get her back into the biz. This guy is the "new porn director" who is not pretending to be a real actor director etc. but intsead is the real explicit version of what these other porn stars had accused Annabel of doing. His negotiations with his actors included the phrases "fuck and suck" and "piss and fist" which quite literally made me laugh out loud. The interview with him turned into the conversation about how once you put a camera in the room prostitution becomes legal. Then he simply explained how ridiculous he thought it was that you couldnt "Pay someone to suck your dick. I mean, tell me why not. Why can't you pay someone to suck your dick?" Hilarious and well done. Unfortunately, this portion of the film's argument was only about 5 minutes of the overall run time.

I wrote longer about this than I expected to, so hopefully I will return to the other interesting argument later tonight. Its pretty complicated as well and I am nervous that it may result in a complicated discussion about the encounter with the real. Anyway, I am going to watch Trading Spaces now. Katie tribeuce.

Peace,

MB-K