Sex and the city state

Wine, women and song. That's what my whole career has been. I write about wine and I was a music critic before. I spent a lot of time with rock stars. That's how I met porn stars: rock stars date porn stars and that's how I got involved in the porn business.'

Whatever lurid images he may invoke in writing and talking about the industry, occasional Hong Kong resident Gerrie Lim is not the sort of pornography practitioner you find credited on the back of a DVD box. The author of the irresistibly titled In Lust We Trust (Adventures in Adult Cinema) and Invisible Trade (High-Class Sex for Sale in Singapore), among other books, is a sort of self-styled intellectual diversion on the rough, direct, low road to the heart (and nether regions) of all things flesh flavoured on screens large and small and between book and magazine covers.

Lim's books might reach the parts usually touched by 'Thai sex kittens' and other 'damsels in undress' as he puts it; no doubt the forthcoming Absolute Mayhem, a porn memoir ghostwritten by Lim and partly completed during several recent months in Hong Kong, will do the same. But for Lim, who describes himself as an 'ersatz scribe and enthusiastic chronicler of lust', the allure is not merely skin deep. His interest - no sniggering at the back please - is also psychological and academic. What makes women bare body and soul to make countless permanent records of debauchery?

'Exposing the real person behind it all,' as the cover of the Mayhem musings has it, might be the glib answer. More seriously, Lim is concerned with the darker side of the motivation for such extreme 'show-womanship'.

'I learned a long time ago not to get involved with those girls because that's just trouble. I dated a stripper in Los Angeles; those girls have a lot of issues. You end up dealing with a lot of emotional baggage, 90 per cent of which is working out childhood problems - often it's over-compensation for earlier neglect.

'I was good friends with a porn star who had nothing but pictures of herself all over the house. Can you imagine being involved with someone like that?'

Prurience is far from the agenda in Lim's related, quasi-academic studies: those of the lives of sex workers in Southeast Asia. As he writes in Invisible Trade: 'The sex industry in Indonesia rakes in US$3.3 billion a year ... two per cent of the country's gross domestic product ... impressive for a supposedly underground industry.'