Match of the day: Happiness vs. depression

I had a good day socializing yesterday. GASP! Righty-ho. We went to Brent Cross yesterday to visit Nazir's friend and from there, together (errr.....how keramaian is that?!) we went to Oriental City - a mini Johor Baru in London. We had lunch - Malay food! - and went shopping where I proceeded to get Calbee Prawn Crackers. Prawn crackers in London tastes so much better than prawn crackers in Singapore. Sigh. Anyway, we had dinner at their house in Brent Cross before finally going home at ten. Wow-ee. That's nearly ten hours of non-stop socializing. I didn't even mind (much!) missing Enterprise, one of the two shows I regularly watch. Amazing.

Well, it helped that the people I hung out with (Nazir's friend's wife and her sister) were kindred. There's nothing quite like talking to people who get it. So yay to that.

So, that was a pretty good day all in all.

Then, at home I watched Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. Such a S'porean title don't you think? 'The Airforce Show' comes to mind (Read The Teenage Textbook for the reference). I bet if there is a documentary/docu-drama on porn made in S'pore it would be called Porn: The movie, or something like that. I am starting to suspect we inherited more than Raffles from the British; London's tag for their Olympic bid was "Back the bid". :D

Right....back to Annabel Chong. For those not in the know, or just plain too young to remember (eyeroll), she did 251 men in 10 hours for a porn movie. Watching the documentary, I felt really, really sad for her. I don't often get that way, especially about porn stars and prostitutes etc, but at the risk of sounding middle-aged, middle-class, moralizing and everything in between, it's really quite sad how she has degenerated.

She starts off pretty annoying, truth be told. For eg, the pseudo-American accent favoured by certain sectors of the population, how she insists she was just born in S'pore, but was brought up in London (while it was a blatant lie - she went to school in S'pore!), how she slagged S'poreans in general. It was the slagging that got to me - yeah, you have issues, you might hate S'pore but really, telling the whole world what an uptight, prissy nation of people we are (not in those exact words, actually. She isn't THAT articulate. Or at all.) AND saying "Fuck them all", it really got me incensed. For someone who "grew up in London" and "was just born there", she has loads of opinions and knowledge about Singapore.

Personal umbrage aside, she also spouted some pseudo-intellectual sounding (what I thought to be) nonsense about why she did the deed. How it empowers women, upturns the stereotypes of women as sex objects and wants to be a 'stud'. In theory, it sounds vaguely empowering but with the video titled "World's biggest gangbang 1", it seems to fall short of female empowerment. Who's banging whom? The title implies the men are banging her. Not vice-versa. Want empowerment? Try Thelma and Louise. But limiting to the world of porn, I watched this
documentary some time back, and in my opinion, Anna Span does more for empowerment than Chong. As Span kindly points out, who wants to see aging, saggy men shagging gorgeous women? (rephrased). Men. Just that alone shows how exploitative the porn industry is in general.

Anyway, before I go on and on, I felt sad for Chong despite her pseudo-intellectual babble, as the documentary drew on, as she became self-destructive (cutting herself etc) and just a tad unhinged. I got so depressed by the obvious pain she's undergoing and she'd put her mother through that I switched off the TV right after her mother found outabout the porn thing and was crying, wailing, more like. Then, I escaped into "Last Chance Saloon" by Marian Keyes. Annabel Chong was just too bloody depressing and disturbing to go on watching.