Then & now: the money shot
Whether it’s in print, on film or over the internet, sex sells. And Hong Kong, as usual, was quick to cash in, writes Jason Wordie
Hong Kong has long been a purveyor of titillating “erotic” material. Every newsstand stocks a variety of Chineselanguage titles. The curious combination of prudery and prurience that characterises the Hong Kong-Chinese approach to anything to do with sex – of whatever orientation – creates a ready market for these eye-catching products.
Many magazines offer loosely disguised advertisements for prostitutes and, in this respect, little has changed for decades.
Hong Kong’s legions of sex workers advertised themselves, with photographs, as far back as the 1920s. Shanghai’s foreign-run concessions were major production centres for Chinese pornography in this period.
The Christian-inspired New Life Movement, started by Madame Chiang Kai-shek in the early 30s, took Nationalist prudishness to new limits, and their crackdown on porn merely fuelled public interest.
Magazine sales extended to the overseas Chinese diaspora.
Obscenity laws were more liberal here than in Malaysia or Singapore, and as high-quality printing became a Hong Kong manufacturing staple in the postwar era, “yellow” publications, as sexually titillating material was commonly known in Chinese, became more widely produced.
Post-war novels such as The World of Suzie Wong (later made into a successful Hollywood film), and the pages of innumerable Hong Kong-themed penny dreadful novels, encouraged generations of (mostly Western) men to disembark in Hong Kong in breathless anticipation of a steamy night ahead. Most found the reality – as ever with commercial intimacy – rather underwhelming.