{"id":616,"date":"2010-01-30T22:47:52","date_gmt":"2010-01-31T06:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libidot.org\/blog\/?p=616"},"modified":"2010-01-30T22:47:52","modified_gmt":"2010-01-31T06:47:52","slug":"morph-into-me-gerrie-lim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/?p=616","title":{"rendered":"Morph into Me, Gerrie Lim"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was just thinking that this blog may need a man, a male presence, or\u00a0a male subject. Some people had already pointed it out to me and yes I agreed time to look for a male. I had already met Gerrie Lim a couple of times and knew that he had written several ground-breaking books about the porn and sex industries in LA and Singapore. Lim was born in Singapore\u00a0but lived in Los Angeles for many years, where he wrote columns and articles about pornography, sex work, music & celebrity branding.\u00a0He\u00a0recently had moved to Hong Kong and we were introduced to each other by ex-TimeOut-journo Bourree Lam, who probably figured we were two\u00a0curious spirits\u00a0in the porn zone. Yes it can be lonely in that zone. I\u00a0 bought and read\u00a0Lim’s books Invisible Trade: High Class Sex for Sale in Singapore<\/a> <\/em>(Monsoon Books, 2004) \u00a0and In Lust we Trust: Adventures in Adult Cinema<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Monsoon Books, 2006) <\/em>and was very impressed. I recommend them highly as they are very pleasant and unusual at the same time. I am actually amazed by the amount of genuine and sex-positive information and compelling stories he has been able to pull from these different women. I personally prefer the book about escorts in Singapore because I could relate better to\u00a0the stories about non-celebrities and their hidden affairs, maybe because\u00a0this book is more critical of the Confucian\u00a0orthodoxies that\u00a0at times\u00a0make me\u00a0miserable in\u00a0Hong Kong. Both books did an amazing job representing the everyday lives and aspirations of women involved in sex industries. Then recently he published\u00a0<\/em>Absolute Mayhem: Confessions of an Aussie Porn Star<\/em><\/a>, (<\/em>Random House, 2009) which is a memoir about his friend Monica Mayhem written in the first-person from\u00a0her point of view.<\/p>\n

\"39973021\"<\/p>\n

I met with Lim a few weeks ago in an almost deserted pizza place in Times Square. We had a big booth all to ourselves and talked for several hours.\u00a0 He showed me\u00a0a column that he had written\u00a0for the magazine\u00a0Penthouse Variations\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0and a photography album of himself with different famous porn stars: including Asia Carrera,\u00a0Monica Mayhem, and Nina Hartley. After 30 minutes or so into the conversation, I asked Gerrie why he spent so much time interviewing and adoring with sex workers. He told me that there were two answers to this question. The first asnswer was that the female voice is obviously underrepresented in most literature about sex workers. The second answer was that he thought he himself had been a\u00a0famous Venetian courtesan\u00a0in one of his previous lives. He also told me that\u00a0he\u00a0believed that\u00a0I had\u00a0a strong male presence\u00a0and that this was maybe one of the reasons for us getting along.\u00a0 At that moment it was hard to steer the interview. My gender morphing ghost had been quiet for quite a\u00a0while but they then\u00a0felt like coming out of the box. I was affected by his\u00a0declaration right there\u00a0and understood that he\u00a0had really captured\u00a0the intimate lives of his sex workers, maybe like nobody had done it before. \u00a0We talked on and on and were indeed\u00a0morphing while exploring this new ground between us.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He wrote me a few days ago and\u00a0asked me to read an article by the famous sex blogger Violet Blue <\/a>about women and pornography. I wrote back that I don’t believe in pornography for women but\u00a0I like\u00a0the concept of cross-voyeurism. I like to morph into\u00a0different genders and viewing positions while peeking into\u00a0the habits and tastes of others–other genders, other orientations, other fads. I belong to the Internet and like to eavesdrop on people and then depart. I like to enter domains that would be traditionally closed to me. He answered that he is likes that too and would like to talk more about the concept of cross-voyeurism.\u00a0He then asked me how I would\u00a0try that explain that concept in a “strictly Chinese” context.<\/p>\n

Well, let’s see where we would go next with that, Gerrie Lim, my lewd sister, my demon brother!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was just thinking that this blog may need a man, a male presence, or\u00a0a male subject. Some people had already pointed it out to me and yes I agreed time to look for a male. I had already met Gerrie Lim a couple of times and knew that he had written several ground-breaking books… Continue reading Morph into Me, Gerrie Lim<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[25,44],"class_list":["post-616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-proceedings","category-sex-art","tag-hong-kong","tag-sex-art","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}