I like watching other people's porn. As a porn tourist, you sometimes surprise yourself by discovering new things you like, and sometimes you most assuredly do not surprise yourself. Both are important, for while it's fun to find new, back rooms of the libido and to add a few new flavors to one's spice rack, it's also comforting to know that the id is not a complete free for all, that if the doors of repression were opened wide we might not all turn into massively depraved monsters.

This was what I was thinking as I prepared to attend eight straight hours of adult screenings at the 1st annual Big Apple Anime Festival in New York City. A midnight-to-8 a.m. marathon of animated porn from Japan — would I survive? I had seen anime's flightless cousin, the manga cartoons that got the whole thing started. I had flipped through page after page and familiarized myself with all the clichés — the kewpie, gigantic-eyed, noseless, miniscule-mouthed, pig-tailed, eleven-year-old-seeming schoolgirls of indeterminate race, the obsession with panties (no, the unfuckingbelievably relentless any-excuse, any-opportunity mega-obsession with panties), the gang rape, the bondage, the tentacled monsters and demons and their enormous, toothed, devouring penile shafts, the transformations of man into monster, the technology, the time travel, etc., etc. — and I have to say, I kind of liked it. Manga is certainly not PC, but porn rarely is, and it can, I'm convinced, provide a relatively benign outlet for some of mankind's less savory impulses. And yet my enjoyment of manga was tainted by a building suspicion of its obsessions. Like many other realms I'd traveled, this seemed liked a fine place to visit, but I wondered about who'd want to live there. Suspicious, concerned, sleep-deprived, but more than a little curious, I filled my backpack with Evian and Slim Jims and headed for the theater.

Adult anime-fest: X-rated Speed Racer, start your engine. I arrived to a screening room for about two hundred, half-filled with people I seemed to remember from my Dungeons and Dragons days. (I saw a cloak. Yes, a cloak.) There was a guy dressed all in black, including fatigues and jackboots, whom I heard saying that he's going to learn German and Japanese, "but it has nothing to do with the war." Okay. The handful of women in the audience were almost all wearing technicolor wigs: pink, green, blue. The semiotics of this continues to elude me. There were very few Japanese people in attendance, which surprised me. There were very few tans, which didn't. And there was very little evidence of grooming.

But just as I was thinking to myself, yet again, that there are as many different, completely distinct New Yorks as there are people in New York (and this was certainly a peculiar one), the announcer got up in the front and indicated that the porn stars Asia Carrera and Kobe Tai did the voices for characters in two of the movies that we were going to see and were on hand to kick off the festival. Very exciting, seeing women live who you've seen have anal sex. They said their few words, clearly disconcerted by the wall of dweeb staring back at them, then snuck out the back. But I, intrepid journalist boy, chased after to see if I could get a few more tidbits.

Interviewing porn stars, like interviewing other disaffected automatons or the undead, is a maddening business of trying to get them to say something other than the most saccharine, joyful platitudes about how much they love doing what they do. Well, Ms. Zombie, how do you feel about killing villages of the innocent? "It's very nice, thank you. It makes me feel like I'm doing good." No, really, Ms. Zombie, thank you. Well, Kobe was true to this standard porn form, but Asia actually let some reality slip through the PR force-field. She said she wasn't sure how she felt about her film: "It was pretty shocking, actually, and it's hard to shock a porn star. They do things we can't do in porn. And three weeks of screaming: 'I can't take anymore' was, well . . . "

"Made you want to scream, 'I can't take anymore'?" I interrupted.

"Yeah," she responded. "Something like that."