If the sexual allure of Asian women didn't exist, a Webmaster would have invented it. Once consigned to the realm of the merely "exotic," Asian adult fare has come a long way from the early days, when trawling Usenet newsgroups was the only way to get any decent online porn. Craving the Asian-oriented, so to speak, meant searching past alt.binaries.pictures.erotica. That was around 1993, ancient history in Internet years, and the changes seen in the past decade have been nothing less than a tsunami.
These days, it's not just a tidal wave but a veritable turf war. Asian-girl photo galleries are plentiful inside Asian adult portals with bizarre names like Porno Panda (www.pornopanda.com), while a site like Hot Oriental (www.hotoriental.com, accessible from www.asiangirl.org) offers banner links to pay sites like the Asian Frenzy (www.asianfrenzy.com) with its clickable national flags (Japan, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore - all linking directly to the membership sign-up pages!)
The more discerning Asian adult fan might prefer the higher-end graphics at Asian Peaches (www.asianpeaches.com) or revel in the down-home, rough-and-raunchy look of the lusty Thai girls at Saothai (www.saothai.com). The latter, commendably, has a page of "Newbies Sales Tips" offering new adult Webmasters some valuable advice on the age-old problems of amassing traffic and generating revenue, with links to the myriad charms of Adult Check, Cyber Age, and Sex Key, not to forget billing agents like Globill.
Verily, even as many a mouse clicks away and curious eyes ogle onscreen images of inscrutably horny black-haired beauties with dripping-wet lotus flowers between their outspread legs, deals are being hatched to ride the crest of this popularity wave. And the current growth of broadband connectivity in Asia plays no small part - Asian porn is big business is the more developed "dragon economies" (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore) blessed with the highest broadband penetration in the region.
South Korea, according to a 2001 Nielsen//NetRatings (www.nielsen-netratings.com) study, has the highest (95 percent of Korean Web surfers, with a remarkable 50 percent of all Korean homes already wired for broadband, compared to less than 10 percent of homes in the United States). Hong Kong is second-highest (53 percent), followed by Taiwan (35 percent), and Singapore (24 percent). Japan, viewed as a separate, self-contained Asian business economy, was not included in the study.
More recent findings, by the research firm NetValue (now part of Nielsen//NetRatings) in May 2002, showed that the popularity of porn on the Web in Asia is directly proportional to the availability of broadband. The upsurge in online porn consumption was significantly marked for all four countries throughout the same course of the year. From March 2001 to March 2002, unique visitors to adult sites in South Korea jumped from 6,233,700 to 10,726,500 (a 72.1 percent increase). Hong Kong claimed the second-highest (from 501,600 to 715,700, a 42.7 percent increase), followed by Taiwan (from 1,955,000 to 2,542,700, a 30.1 percent increase) and Singapore (from 288,800 to 373,100, a 29.2 percent increase).
To get around the draconian obscenity laws existing throughout most of Asia, many of the "home-groan" sites are hosted and administered outside their native lands, usually in the United States. Asia is a vast and diverse continent, and the amicable resolution of an issue like censorship is chimerical. Communist regimes will likely remain rigidly policed; Vietnam requires all organizations setting up Websites to obtain licenses from the culture ministry, while over in nearby Myanmar (formerly Burma), mere computer ownership requires government authorization.
In Communist China, a country of 34 million Internet surfers hampered by poor connectivity and prohibitively expensive personal computers (a PC in China costs the equivalent of one year's salary for the common man), Internet cafes are hugely popular but deemed subversive so they routinely get shut down, only to illegally reopen again. Some 5.2 million Chinese currently log on at these cafes, where surfing time costs just five yuan (US80 cents) an hour, despite some sites of a sexual or political nature being predictably blocked by filters (Playboy and the Dalai Lama share such an honor).
The South Koreans, living in a real democratic society, are a lot luckier. And, it appears, pluckier. "The number of Korean-language pornographic Websites operating overseas has shot up nearly 50 times in the past one and a half years," The Korea Herald reported this past September. "At the end of August, 202 foreign-based Korean-language porn sites were in service, compared to less than half-a-dozen in January last year. About 90 percent of the sites are presumed to be based in Los Angeles, where many overseas Koreans live."
Sociologists studying this phenomenon are surely having a field day. In the aforementioned NetValue study, South Korea recorded the highest percentage of student visitors to adult sites (50 percent of all visitors in the month of March alone), whereas the highest numbers of PMEBs (Professionals, Managers, Executives, and Businessmen) visiting porn sites occurred in supposedly straight-laced Singapore. In Thailand, a Buddhist kingdom with a famously sex-positive culture, a recent survey from October 2002 by a think tank called ECPAT International (www.ecpat.com) revealed that 71 percent of young computer users aged 12 to 15 had visited porn sites, 45 percent of these comprising regular visitors. Of these regulars, 73 percent said they were not at all bothered by "inconveniences" like pop-up windows.
Some cultural observers attribute such numbers to the general curiosity among young people in Asia for sexual information, particularly since they usually come from conservative cultures where sexual matters are taboo. "Asians really haven't many alternatives to hardcore porn or textbook discussions of sex, while discussions of how to improve romantic relationships is also almost nil," notes Leslie Kenny, an American expatriate in Hong Kong and the CEO/Co-founder of Dotlove (www.dotlove.com), the first-ever Asian Website devoted to sex education. "Although there is a temptation to say that people in Hong Kong and South Korea are more repressed and therefore demand porn quietly at home more, I think that all non-Muslim Asians have a fairly healthy demand for pornography.
"If the broadband connections in other Asian countries were as good and affordable as they are in Hong Kong and South Korea, I'm sure the demand would be high there, too," Kenny added. "Singapore and Japan also have good broadband, but Singapore has filters and Japan's basic monthly costs are much higher than other countries, to the extent that the uptake among the 18- to 30-year-old demographic is lower than in other comparable countries."
Kenny feels today's home-bred Asian porn sites are "not as kinky as those from the U.S. and Europe. There are more anime sites, and far fewer fetish and BDSM sites, from what I have seen. Of the animated sites, I think the hentai sites are funny because all the hardcore stuff is done to 'toons and even in the 'toon versions, sometimes the guy's penis is 'digitized' out. There must be something in that alone that is a turn on!"
If many Asian sites deviate little from the typical pretty-girl nudie sites that save the hardcore penetration shots for their members' sections, it's because of the strictures involved in procuring adult-oriented images. "Some of the material from Hong Kong is derived from movies shot in Macau," said David Pecker (not his real name), a London-born executive with a Hong Kong Web-hosting firm. "The trend now is this: The money's in Hong Kong, the girls are from mainland China, and the movies are shot in Macau.
"In most of the movies shot out here, the girls get paid HK$8,000 (US$1,000) per film and the guys get paid around HK$1,000 (US$125) per film," he says. "Unlike in the U.S., nobody here gets paid by the scene since a movie is usually just one long scene." Macau, the former Portuguese colony which now belongs to China, is a safe haven for porn filmmakers, since the Macanese adopt a typically laissez faire attitude; after all, they only have three main industries - manufacturing Portuguese wine, gambling, and prostitution. Adult filmmaking, presumably, helps keep alive the winsome threesome of wine, women, and song.
The other safe haven is Taiwan, a nifty springboard for online entrepreneurs like producer Shirley Young, whose site AV Watcher (www.avwatcher.com), an online emporium for adult DVDs, was launched in November 2002. "It is not legal to film porn movies in Asia, and Taiwan is the only place where we can replicate porn DVD legally," said Young, whose DVDs are mostly Japanese ("AV" being the acronym for "Adult Video" that most fans of Japanese porn prefer to the more traditional pinku eiga). Young's present company ships Japanese and European DVDs to wholesalers, and her product is currently available in the U.S. only in the very Asian neighborhood of San Gabriel Boulevard in Rosemead, California, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. (For store location and other information, e-mail Shirley at [email protected])
Young's long-term plan is to enter the realm of production, shooting films in the United States featuring "girls in traditional Chinese costumes" for sale on the site. Meantime, AV Watcher also links to a "live chat" site, www.webj2120.com - showcasing girls who can talk dirty in Mandarin Chinese and aimed squarely at the Mandarin-speaking man logging on from 8:30 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. Users can view the girls by keying in a PIN number from a smart card. "Similar to a game point card you can get from a 7-11," Young explains. "A $100 PIN card has 100 minutes air time. This is the rate for Asia only." (Plans for the U.S. were not finalized at time of press.)
People like Young are emerging now because online porn surfers are now clearly spoiled for choice and expect more bang for their buck, bored with the usual photo galleries and video clips which they can obtain on regular American and European sites anyway. "Most Asian adult sites in the U.S., like all niche content, pretty much appeal to an American audience with promises that these sexy Asian girls really do want American and European men to look at them," notes Pervy (his nickname only, by request), a 35-year-old British expatriate Webmaster of a porn portal cheekily called Flog-on (www.flog-on.com), launched in early 2002. Based in Hong Kong, Pervy deviates from the norm by aggregating images and real information - topical items for porn fans, Web statistics, an archive of erotic stories, private message boards, plus the usual banner-exchange links. The latter leads to familiar places like Cybererotica and Amateur Pages, as well as to more esoteric Asian sites like AsiaNaked (www.asianaked.com) featuring Japanese "schoolgirls" performing hardcore boy/girl sex, spanking pigs (yes, the barnyard kind) and, of course, excelling in that most consensual of sex acts, bukkake.
"Flog-on," Pervy explained, is an Internet slang term meaning "to access the Internet for the sole purpose of looking at porn." He hosts the site in the United States "not entirely because of a need to be outside Hong Kong, but also from a price and performance standpoint. Nothing here is actually done in Hong Kong, other than remote management and updates. The site is, for now, entirely free. The primary revenue model is through affiliate programs. We don't do any billing ourselves, so we have no chargeback problems. I can tell you that, when I was involved in sites that did, chargebacks were a minimal problem, but only because we didn't over-promise. Webmasters that say 'thousands of pictures' and then have hundreds or even, say 2,000, are asking for chargebacks. If I see the term 'thousands,' I expect hundreds of thousands. And more being added."
And then, with a wink and a nudge, Pervy adds: "I am also about to announce an exciting new technology for protecting digital copyright. This product can protect any digital file with as close to 100 percent effectiveness as it's possible to get, like military-grade protection, and I have modified it to suit the adult industry." (Inquiring minds can email Pervy at [email protected])
Equally cutting-edge yet off the beaten track is another British Web entrepreneur: Steven Gallon, CEO of Grooby Productions, 31, a film school graduate and ex-BBC staffer now based in Hawaii, where he specializes in transsexual porn. Grooby also has a strategic partnership with American porn performer and producer Joey Silvera; Gallon's company site (www.grooby.com) links to Silvera's site (www.joey-silvera.com), which boasts an "Asian Dolls" section.
"Joey Silvera works with us," Gallon explains. "We run his site as a partnership and also help get him most of his transsexual models. Joey loves Asian girls and he gets quite a few in his tapes. When we set up the categories for that site, we decided an Asian section would be worth putting in. It contains all of Joey's Asian models, including superstars and girls he shot before they became porn stars, like Tera Patrick and Kobe Tai.
"About 99 percent of our revenue is through membership," Gallon discloses. "We offer a better price than any of our competitors, for more content. Because we were the first in the 'ladyboy' niche ('she-male' in Thai parlance) through our site ShemaleYum (www.shemaleyum.comm), we've had many members nearly five years now, and we have a monthly 70 percent retention rate. The majority of our members are U.S.-based. Five percent come from Japan, and we also have members in Thailand, Korea, China, and Hong Kong."
One of Gallon's proudest achievements is his company's Webmaster referral program. "It refers extra members to us, and we pay 40 percent recurring to Webmasters," Gallon explains, "which I think is a better deal than some of the so-called big shots who pay higher percentages but it's a one-off or the subscribers just don't stick with that site. Members can stay with us for many months or years. As we use a cookie on the referrals, if a customer joins another Grooby site within 60 days, which is very likely, that referring partner get credited for it."
Gallon attributes his current business to his own wanderlust; his own Asian travels resulted in the hugely popular Adult Travel Guide (www.adulttravelguide.com), a Grooby site with a heavy focus on Thailand featuring photo galleries shot on Bangkok's infamous Soi Cowboy strip of girlie bars as well as a page devoted to transsexual escort services (even in the U.S.: in New York, Pennysylvania, Florida, Nevada, and Texas). Members can also salivate to live video feeds ($29.95 for 30 minutes, $54.95 for 60 minutes, $79.95 for 100 minutes).
"We now have five full-time staff here in Hawaii," says Gallon, "and four other full-time staff worldwide and 15 photographers. The Asian sites have eight guys who shoot regularly, myself included, in Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, and the Philippines." Of late, they have even shot transsexuals from Singapore, acquired from the otherwise staid Muslim kingdom of Brunei.
Indeed, Singapore stands out as a fascinating case study, since one of the most intriguing of Asian sex sites hails from there. Sammy Boy (www.sammyboy.com), launched in 1997, is the brainchild of graphic designer Samuel Leong, who offers hardcore photos of mainland-Chinese nude models and sex-scandalized Taiwanese politicians, tips on locating the best prostitutes in Singapore, as well as a popular Southeast Asia Sex Forum (a newsgroup, also directly accessible at http://forum.sammyboy.com/). Of late, he has been championing the cause of "foreign talent" (a sarcastic dig at the Singapore government's plea for foreigners to help boost the economy by joining the workforce). Leong's idea of "foreign talent" is a Spanish girl named "Sophia" who performs anal sex on video. "See the spunk gently ooze out of her brown eye after Harry shoots his almighty load down the Hershey Highway," Leong eloquently narrates.
"My intention was to poke fun at the Singapore way of life, especially the sexual aspects of Singapore society," he recently told the Singapore rock music magazine BigO, in a rare e-mail interview. "The sexual services industry is thriving in Singapore. What is missing in Singapore is not the provision of sexual services but the publication of explicit sexual information. My site is an attempt to fill this void." Naturally, the site is hosted in the United States. "I take great pains," he added, "to ensure that the actual act of publishing the Website does not take place within Singapore."
According to a veteran Singaporean journalist (who, naturally, asked not to be named), the porn-averse authorities have yet to take action against Leong because "they are interested in studying how the site works as a business model." Or, in the opinion of "Harry Han" (not his real name), a Singaporean who does Internet business consulting in Silicon Valley, "They're probably keeping it alive because it's too difficult technically and legally to shut it down. The resulting public relations backlash would be mud on their faces, so they feel it's better to let it operate quietly. Also, the rulers want to get a feel for what the grassroots are really saying and thinking, and it provides a lot of entertainment to those in power as well."
Singapore is also unique in being the only Asian country to have produced a bona fide celebrity porn star: Annabel Chong, she of the infamous 1995 World's Biggest Gang Bang video and the biopic documentary Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. Chong built from scratch her own site, www.annabelchong.com, and still maintains it by herself. No longer actively in porn, she now works as a Web designer and computer programmer, and this past summer created her dream home environment: Her entire house in Los Angeles runs on a wireless home network. ("Yes!" she posted in her online diary. "Now I can do my e-mails while taking a crap.") For those in her homeland forced to seek out porn by clandestine means, Chong's site offers a perfect solution: CCBill-enabled membership, through which her fans can see her frolicking nude and performing fellatio.
The site, surprisingly, is not blocked by the Singapore authorities. Recent negative publicity in the international press, with regard to Singapore's reputation as a paternalistic "nanny state," has apparently led to a relaxation of the rules. Indeed, the sheer futility of trying to counter the embarrassingly high online porn consumption in Singapore is now causing the powers-that-be to reconsider its anti-porn laws. At present, people there can be jailed for three months and also fined for downloading porn and saving it on their hard drives, yet porn star Asia Carrera revealed to this writer that Singapore ranked second among Asian countries in unique visitors to her site, Asia Carrera's Buttkicking Homepage (www.asiacarrera.com) - Singapore came in at #24; Japan at #17. Also, in a May 2001 AVN Online story about porn on PDAs, Singapore was revealed as the second-biggest subscriber after the United States to PalmStories (www.palmstories.com), which services erotica to Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs.
In November 1998, scholar Joshua Gordon from the East-West Center in Honolulu, wrote in the International Herald Tribune: "Belatedly, Singapore seems to see that a reputation for impeding the flow of information is bad for business. Authorities have said they would increasingly rely on 'industry self-regulation' as part of a 'light-touch' approach to policing the Net." Gordon also quoted Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore Senior Minister whose usual dictatorial approach has suddenly taken on a strangely muted tone. "The Internet is rapidly undermining whatever monopoly control of the media governments might have had," Lee conceded. "Governments that try to fight the new technology will lose."
Indeed, for many of the 35 million people currently online in the Asia-Pacific region, the Internet is their conduit for the freedom of expression reflective of real democracy. And within the context of Asian adult content, the tide continues to rise. Bring on the tsunami.
