The story of Annabel Chong is that she is the star of the World's Biggest Gang Bang in which she had sex with 251 men, 5 men at a time.
Chong was known for her contradictions. She was an Asian college feminist porn star who was open to do what was sexually deviant on screen; "Chong achieved fame particularly for her affinity for doing perverse acts while proclaiming herself to be a feminist...she is regarded as a 'thinking' porn star in a kind of eroticization of the model minority stereotype" (Celine Parrenas Shimizu 13). Chong acted her way through college and was not silent about her feminist views. Although she is the Asian model minority in college, she contradicts this stereotype by not being passive and being a porn star, all attributing to her popularity; "her navigation of contradictory words and worlds- wholesome, intelligent student speaking in an educated manner, coexisting with porn stardom- and the specificity of her fame as based on extreme perversity, combine to contribute her appeal" (14).
Further, she contradicts what it is to be an Asian woman porn star. She is anything but passive and her physical appearance is not typical of other Asian women porn stars before her; "the smaller, shorter, and darker (more visibly Asian and less racially ambiguous) Chong fulfills the extremely perverse expectations for racialized sexuality in order to offer a radical critique of commodification and stardom," (14). Her fame and assertiveness challenges the idea of the passive and objectified Asian woman porn star.
Although Chong is assertive in her feminism and sexual desire, she may have been playing the fool to some extent. In doing the gang bang film, she wanted "to prove that women can work as 'studs,' not 'sluts'" (14). She is "a porn star that enjoys seeing herself sexually represented as a feminist claim to power" (15). However, we can't ignore that factors within the production of the video that exploited her. For example, the overall tone of the men working on the film to her is that she is the star, but still just an object. It is the male actors who receive a "pep talk" on being able to take breaks, eat, and making sure that they are pleasured because that is what they came there for. Chong does not get the same talk and no one is counting her orgasms. In addition, we only see her receiving oral pleasure at the start of the gang bang.
What further complicated her feminist stand is that she wasn't even paid for the project! "It is clear that she's been totally commodified in their minds- Bowen (director) doesn't even pay her for the gang bang video that he himself calls the best-selling video in porn history," (14). It seems true then that "her economic exploitation somewhat silences her powerful intellectual critique" (16). And, after her completion of this video, she is seen as used goods that can no longer be profitable in the business; "once her record of 251 guys is eclipsed, she's dismissed as 'all washed up,'" (14).
The question then is what has Annabel Chong really done for feminism? For women in the porn industry? For Asian women? It is difficult to tell. For myself, I am still having trouble equating what I saw on the screen as pleasurable. But those thoughts are part of the hegemonic view that women are degraded in porn and that that type of sex is not pleasurable at all. I suggest a personal investigation, as I still reconcile my own.
Celine Parrenas Shimizu, "Sex for Sale: Queens of Anal, Double, Triple, and the Gang Bang: Producing Asian/American Feminism in Pornography," Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 18: 235, 2006.
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