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'Shoushou': her naked truth
By Brad Webber (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-08 10:09
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Did "Shoushou" do it?
Well, we all know that "Shoushou", the alias of Zhai Ling, pinup model and Internet porn star du jour, did it.
Vivid proof is on the grainy videos that have launched thousands of computers on the mainland to be, well, unlaunchable, thanks to viruses embedded into what purport to images of the deed.
But did Zhai, a 23-year-old woman - her primary occupation is to splay herself seductively across the hoods of luxe cars - act in concert with a former boyfriend to upload the tape to promote a budding film career?
A Hong Kong movie director is said to be wanting to work with her, and there's nothing like a sex tape to build buzz, say netizens.
Let's assume that, while she's not exactly chaste (Zhai concedes it is indeed her in the videos), she would neither endorse the release of the tapes, nor calculate to build publicity.
For the record, people at the New Silk Road Model Co, the Beijing agency which handles her modeling career, have said the entire affair has left them shocked, shocked, shocked.
Online wags aren't convinced and they cite Zhai's apparent lack of tearful remorse or shouts of betrayal as evidence. To them, their beloved's image is now as tarnished as an '86 Yugo.
Could Zhai - whose transformation from car model to carnal model has come at a torrid pace - be following a sad template of extreme publicity chasing?
The doyenne of dirty remains the "celebutante" Paris Hilton, whose former sex partner Rick Salomon sold a video of themselves having sex to a pornographic film studio in 2004.
Hilton's publicists' salvos were total denial, that it was not her on the tape, and finally, that she had been drugged. None were true.
Hilton and company then set about suing Salomon and the distributor of the DVD. The saga ended with Hilton reportedly taking hundreds of thousands of dollars plus a split of the profits.
But the most astounding result was that Hilton became a household name.
When the tape came out, I thought it would be interesting to hear what Salomon, a serial husband of various Hollywood B-list starlets, had to say, so I interviewed him on behalf of a big US newspaper.
I envisioned a highfalutin' treatise on the fickle nature of celebrity in American culture or foolish somesuch.
What I ended up with was a telephone conversation that went something like this:
Me: So, have you heard from Paris lately?
Rick Salomon: Um, yeah, Paris is really cool. She's cool with everything now.
Me: What exactly do you do for a living?
Salomon: I'm an Internet entrepreneur, I run an online poker site and I'm a gambler. I'm in Las Vegas now.
Me: Do they permit you to enter the Hilton casino?
Salomon: I haven't been there yet, but I can see it from my hotel room.
Not one word of this 40-minute exchange hit print. Not because it was XXX-rated, but because it was inane. Yes, some people will go so far as to display their genitals for fame. Most of them are not too smart.
Shortly after the Hilton scandal, the market for titillation went global.
The uploading of dirty pictures for fame is a technique honed and perfected in the West but now replicated at warp speed with Chinese characteristics here.
The hall of shame includes the "Kappa Girl at Shanghai No 1 Department Store", who figured she'd find fame one smutty way or another.
The most prominent case, the 2008 episode involving Edison Koon-Hei Chen, however, points out the perils of porn.
Chen, the Chinese-Canadian rapper and film star whose laptop computer was found to hold hundreds of nasty photographs of Hong Kong starlets, committed the grave offense of picking the wrong computer repair shop.
One perverse aspect of perversion is that while Chen seems one of the few celebrities to be contrite, he still gets death threats.
He will forever be known more for his indecent exposure than for his dance moves.
