Australian Penthouse

How does power come into it?
One critical aspect of our relationships with other people is dominance. That’s where power comes into play—the power we have over other people or that other people have over us, whether that be political, economic, workplace, or down to the relationships we have within our families where there are incredible power plays.

Which is more impactful: societal or interpersonal relationships?
Well, they’re both pretty important. Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher, said, “Power is the fundamental substance of human relationships, just as energy is the fundamental substance of physics.” Basically, human beings are a group species; we evolved to live and hunt and survive in groups and therefore most species that have groups have dominant hierarchies within them.

How exactly does power affect people’s interpersonal relationships?
On the small scale, most husband/wife or partner relationships involve a certain degree of power. The definition of power is having control over resources that the other person or other people fear or want. If one person is more in love with the other person, there’s an imbalance. The fact that one person is more emotionally needy will give the other person more power. There are a number of psychological mechanisms that can lead to distortion and a negative cycle of behaviour of the powerful person, so the powerful person starts to see the less-powerful person in progressively more negative terms because of the power imbalance.

How does power actually affect the brain?
Power makes people feel good because it increases testosterone, in both men and women. And that testosterone, in turn, increases the level of dopamine activity in the middle of the brain in an area called the ‘reward network’. That’s the area of the brain that activities like sex and taking drugs act on: it’s the feel-good centre. When that up-regulates, it gives us that ‘glow’ we get when we have sex or when we achieve or when we get that promotion. That glow is the up-regulation of dopamine in the reward network. And being given power operates through the same system.

What are the mental benefits of power?
Being given tiny amounts of power temporarily makes you smarter, it makes you more focused on goals and makes you more confident that you can achieve them, it makes you more action-oriented, it makes you less depressed, and it makes you less anxious. It makes you think more abstractly and strategically.

What are the effects of an absence of power?
A powerless position down-regulates dopamine and increases the activity of noradrenaline, which is a kind of threat transmitter, and that activates more of the right-front part of the brain, which is the cautious ‘accountant’ part of the brain.

How does the brain maintain balance?
In a way, the human brain is two people, metaphorically speaking. One is the kind of gung-ho, confident chief executive and the other is the cautious chief financial officer, always worrying about the downsides and the plausible threats. They make a good team, but the problem with unfettered power is that it basically bullies and inhibits the cautious accountant side of the brain and you get the kind of recklessness and bizarre distorted judgement that led to the Global Financial Crisis.

What do you offer that other porn directors don’t?
Authenticity. I want to show real situations, real people, real settings, real sex.

What difference does a woman’s perspective make to adult cinema?
What arouses women is often opposite to what’s shown in mainstream porn. Good feminist porn focuses on female pleasure. In porn, women are in a minority, both in voice and audience. But when women watch and enjoy porn, regardless of what type, they are owning and exploring their sexuality, which can only be empowering and further social equality.

Why do you think Cabaret Desire won Porn Movie of the Year at the Feminist Porn Awards?
I think it offered viewers something they’d never seen before in adult film; an original premise, cool Barcelona locations, beautiful cinematography, authentic sex scenes, and a great balance of whimsy and realism, eroticism and intimacy.

How do you choose your actors?
I spend a good deal of time finding the right people and then making sure their values align with mine. It’s easy to tell when someone wants to work in adult films but doesn’t enjoy their work. I make an effort to get to know potential cast, their reasons for acting, and their attitude to sex.

What can men learn from your films?
The main thing men can take away from my films is a better idea of women’s fantasies and desires. Most of my male fans breathe a sigh of relief after seeing something close to their real experiences, which mainstream porn fails to do.

How successful have you been, in terms of actual sales?
My movie Five Hot Stories for Her (2007) sold about 240,000 copies and about a million legal downloads between my website, pay per-view and video on demand. Goodness only knows how many illegal downloads there are…

What new trends are you seeing in the porn industry?
Amateur and gonzo-scene collections still dominate the mainstream but remain formulaic. But indie adult filmmakers like myself have benefitted immensely from doing business online, where we can deal directly with consumers and really expand our fan-base.

What was that first meeting with your parents like after they Googled you and discovered what you do?
I was really embarrassed that they found out on the Internet rather than from me, but they were so great and supportive that the awkwardness was relieved right away.

What are your thoughts on the Australian adult industry?
I don’t know much about the Australian porn industry, but I was impressed with Australian filmmaker Anna Brownfield. Her film The Band is incredible.

What sort of porn do you enjoy?
L’Amant (The Lover) is passionate, sensual and erotic. It takes place in French colonial Vietnam and tells the semi-autobiographical story of an impossible love affair between a young French girl and a wealthy Chinese businessman. My favourite adult book is Little Birds by Anais Nin. Written in the 1940s, when erotica was particularly taboo, the stories pioneered the expression of female sexuality.

You’ve also produced the Erotic Bible to Europe. Do you have any personal favourite places?
The places I like best take something ordinary and create something totally erotic. For instance, London’s Icecreamists… so much more than an ice-cream parlour… they have elevated something as innocent as dessert to delicious adult status.

What fun sex trends have you come across recently?
Right now, I’m in love with pasties—the nipple covers made famous by strippers. They’re a great alternative to bras; you can wear them under sheer tops, avoid ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ in a bikini, and they’re insanely sexy. There’s a ton of variety, from rhinestone to rocker to snakeskin to tassels.

Sounds like a great concept for a movie. Why did FOX sign off on a game?
Games, as a medium, have really gotten to a point where we can create a narrative experience that people have a really good time with. And everyone sees where this is going and how games are impacting people’s lives and just the culture itself. Films are great as a passive medium but, as an active medium, games are even better.

How much time has passed between Aliens and Colonial Marines?
It’s actually a handful of months; we’re not really specific in the game. Basically, it’s enough time for some ‘stuff’ to have happened.

So after Ripley’s dead!
Oh yeah, this is way after Ripley’s death. She’s been gone for a while, and you actually don’t experience that event.

What familiar locations from Aliens should fans expect to explore?
Definitely the Sulaco and also Hadley’s Hope, which is on the surface of LV-426.

Hang on. Wasn’t Hadley’s Hope destroyed in a 30km-wide explosion at the end of Aliens?
If you look at any nuclear explosion, it doesn’t necessarily destroy everything next to it: there’s a radius and there’s a fall-off. Hadley’s Hope was also relatively fortified. So you see the wind barriers and lots of other stuff they’ve built around it to withstand the hostile environment. Hadley’s Hope didn’t fare very well in the explosion, but it survived, to a certain extent.

Is there an Aliens formula that you have to work with?
There’s no real formula to it. As fans, we kind of think about what people are interested in and excited about seeing; what hasn’t been explored before in those spaces. And so the formula is not really a formula as much as it is [a recognition] that everyone has cool ideas and we build on top of those. But really, at the end of the day, you can still check to see how fans received it.

How has fan feedback been?
This is a franchise that people really care about. For instance, fans make custom armor sets, so they do know a lot more about certain things than we do. So when we have an opportunity to work with those fans, to learn from them and what they’ve devoted a part of their life to, that’s really awesome. All feedback is really good: some of it we can implement in the game, and some of it just isn’t compatible. We try to find a happy medium [when it comes to consistency of
fan feedback] and we always incorporate it if it fits.

With the London 2012 Olympic Games thankfully now well and truly over, James Buckley lifts the lid on the amount of shagging that takes place at the world’s premier sporting event in his e-book Sex & the Olympics: Condomania…

by Nathan Lawrence

That’s the sequel…
Honestly, the IOC probably wouldn’t be too impressed with this material because the Olympics is all about perfection and purity, and achieving your best and sportsmanship. This is the other side to that sportsmanship.

How many condoms are usually supplied to Olympic athletes?
You get Olympic Games with 100,000-plus condoms distributed for two weeks, and they run out! In Vancouver, they ran out a couple of days early, and the same thing happened in Sydney. When you do the math—100,000 condoms divided by 10,000 athletes—it works out to 10 per person.

Why so many?
You get 10,000 athletes around the ages of 18 to 30, they’re all hormone-charged and competitive, and have been building up for 12 to 24 months for the Olympics. All of a sudden, they compete, and 90 percent of them don’t even make it past the first round. Then they’re stuck in the Olympic Village with nothing to do.

The big sponsors like to throw these big parties where the athletes attend as VIPs. You’ve got a few past athletes and that sort of thing, and most people can only peer through the doors and wonder what’s going on in there. And, from what we can tell, it gets pretty wild.

There were only 1700 athletes, but there were about 40,000 condoms, so you’re looking at 26 condoms per athlete. If you couple up there, that’s 52 per pair for a two-week event.

Are these athletes perpetually horny?
It comes back to this: you’ve got all these people together of a similar demographic. They’re all essentially beautiful people, very athletic and chiselled. They just generate sexual energy, really.

What sort of condoms are being handed out at the Games?
They play around with them at different Olympic Games. At the Sydney Games, they offered a bronze, silver and gold range, to mix it up a little bit. I think [different colours] is the extent of it, though. They do the job they’re meant to do, and at the end they’re thrown around.

Literally?
At the Seoul Olympics, the British team got in trouble because used condoms were all over the roof of their building. Outdoor sex was banned on that occasion.

Who won the sexual Olympics?
We have a promiscuity index that rates each country on how likely they are to engage in casual sex. England was very high up on that list. Travellers to this year’s Games, statistically, were more likely than ever to engage in casual sex with one of the locals or, if they’re lucky, one of the athletes.

Did organisers at this year’s London Olympics run out?
They distributed 150,000 condoms this year; they tried to make sure they didn’t run out. But the Games were in a western country where sex is not as taboo as it is in some places, and there were a lot of athletes : 10,000-plus. I reckon it was tight in those last couple of days; I don’t know if the 150,000 held.

Can you sum up your book’s findings?
That a group of, well, they would probably call themselves ‘British Australians’, such as Robert Menzies, actively undermined the policy decisions of their own cabinet, ignored the advice of the head of the Australian Air Force, and pushed aside local aviation heroes like Sir Charles Kingsford Smith in an effort to ensure that Australian aviation, both militarily and in civil air transport, conformed to the interests of Britain.

What exactly were the consequences of their irresponsible actions?
The consequences were that in December 1941, when the Japanese entered WWII, there was not a single fighter aircraft in the whole of Australia, there were no radar sets to warn of the approach of enemy aircraft, there were no heavy bombers, and those combat squadrons that did exist only had half their trained personnel. So the fierce determination to build the Australian aviation industry in the image of London had very sharp consequences in early 1942.

What difference would it have made, having those defences?
Firstly, the Australian defence system would have known that Japanese reconnaissance flights took place over Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart two days after the fall of Singapore. The Japanese were able to mount reconnaissance flights over those key Australian cities without the Air Force even being aware of the fact. On February 19, 1942, Darwin was bombed unopposed by any Australian aircraft––more than 250 people died.

Would it have been practical to arm Australia to a reasonable extent in the time frame you’ve described?
Absolutely. Arguably the best military mind that Australia has ever had, a chap called Richard Williams––who was the head of the Australian Air Force in the 1920s and ’30s––had advanced plans for the construction of an Australian fighter aircraft in 1938. And it was that kind of rational, national-interest planning that Menzies and his colleagues pushed aside.

Did they have a stated reason for doing so?
One of Menzies’ colleagues in this was a chap called Stanley Melbourne Bruce, who was a conservative Prime Minister in the 1920s, and then went on to be the Australian High Commissioner in London. Bruce advised the government in 1937 that the Australian people had to be convinced that only Britain could defend them. What we see at this time is a competition between those like Menzies and Bruce, who had no belief in Australia, and those like Richard Williams and Charles Kingsford Smith, who had a positive vision for Australia.

But without the backing of Britain, Australia would have had a hard time standing up against almost anyone, wouldn’t it?
Australians have a sense of insecurity because it’s a big place and there’s few of us, in relative terms. But from a military and geopolitical point of view, those problems are much more profound for an aggressor against Australia. A successful invasion of this country would be a very difficult thing to mount because there are huge distances involved and we’re a long way from any kind of supply base that would support an invasion force. The Japanese did consider an invasion and discounted it precisely because of the reasons I’ve just indicated. But the Japanese certainly had very advanced plans to bomb the east coast of Australia and destroy the industrial infrastructure. Had that happened, we’d think back on 1942 in very different terms, and the only reason it didn’t happen was because of an accident of history that Australia had no control over, and that was the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Were the upper echelons of government really convinced that Singapore wouldn’t fall, as the population was?
No, not at all. The Australian military through the ’30s was telling the Australian Government that relying on Singapore was not a viable national defence strategy. Those propositions were put by a chap called John Lavarack, who was the chief of the general staff through the 1930s. He was kind of the Army equivalent of Richard Williams.

Did the Japanese know that Australia had no air defence?
Presumably they did because one of the things that I uncovered in the book is that the Japanese actually undertook reconnaissance of Australian air bases six months before the outbreak of the war. And in June 1941, the Australian Army recorded that a Japanese reconnaissance flight had taken place, but that there was nothing on hand to oppose it. When they bombed Darwin, the leader of the Japanese attack formation––who incidentally led the attack on Pearl Harbour—described the air defences as “contemptible”.

Why bomb Darwin? It was hardly an eastern seaboard industrial hub…
You’re right; Darwin was more of a tactical target for the Japanese. In February 1942, the Japanese had conquered what was then called the Netherlands East Indies––now Indonesia––and they were in the midst of invading Java, Sumatra and Borneo, for their oil reserves. Darwin was the last supply stop for the Allies fighting in Java and Timor, so the Japanese mounted that raid on February 19, 1942.

I understand that there was some warning of the impending attack, but that went unheeded as well…
Yes, that’s right. It was a bit like Pearl Harbour. An American fighter squadron was staging through Darwin to go to Timor, and it turned back because of bad weather. The Australian Air Force commanders thought the incoming Japanese might have been those American fighters, so the base wasn’t put on high alert.

You’ve said defence personnel based around Darwin were more concerned with their own welfare than that of the civilians they were there to protect. How so?
Without effective leadership, because few of the Australian commanders had been in action, and indeed the Air Force base was commanded by a reserve officer who had no combat experience, command and control broke down, rumours got around, and there was an exodus of service personnel into the interior because of the fear of Japanese invasion. If there were some failures among the rank and file, there were many more failures of command and, of course, the greatest failure was a political one, in that the Menzies Government of the late 1930s refused to take the advice of their military professionals.

Had the Battle of the Coral Sea not gone the way it did, what do you think would have happened to Australia?
The Japanese were committed to cutting the supply route between Australia and America through the invasion of New Caledonia, Fiji and Samoa––there were very advanced plans for the Japanese to do that in the middle of 1942. But for the Battle of the Coral Sea, we’d have had Japanese aircraft carriers off Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong, and probably Melbourne, bombing industrial sites that were irreplaceable.

How come, 70 years on, the average Australian doesn’t know about this?
There are a couple of reasons. Immediately after Darwin, the Curtin Labor Government wasn’t keen to publicise Australia’s vulnerability, so there was a measure of censorship, and the Royal Commission reported in Canberra, so I suppose the worst defects were not released to the public. After the war, interest in the dark hours was probably less than it might have been, so there was little reflection until quite recently, with this re-emergence of debate over whether 1942 really constituted a defence crisis.