Updated below….scroll to bottom.
There has been a lot of ink spilled and pixels used in analyzing the latest porn scandal in Los Angeles, where a still unnamed performer was found to have been tested positive for the HIV virus, and just as inadvertently performed a scene with another performer while infected.
As it stands right now, the sole performer (identified only by “Patient Zero”) is the only person to have been confirmed as HIV+; and the male performer whom she did the scene with has thus far tested negative….as has her only other contact, which is her significant other, and six secondary contacts.
That would be considered in most quarters to be an effective victory in containment.
Problem is….the mainstream porn industry isn’t “most quarters”; and when there is ever an oppurtunity for politicians and selected self-styled “experts” to manufacture a sex panic and a riot to promote their personal and political agendas, especially when those agendas concern controlling sexual expression, you can be guaranteed that the vultures won’t be far from the bloodshed.
In this case, the blood happens to be that of Dr. Sharon Mitchell, the founder and principal head of the Adult In Media Medical Foundation (AIM), who is the principal organization for testing of porn performers for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STI’s); and the vultures are the regulatory health officials at the California branch of the Occupational Health and Safety Adminstration, certain AIDS activists, a portion of the alternate “sex positive” community, and the Los Angeles medical political establishment….who for their own reasons want to exploit the latest breach to fulfill their long-standing goal of full government regulation of the Cali sex media industry.
The heart of the controversy is in the breach of the system in monitoring and testing performers. It’s pretty complicated, but Thomas Roche pretty much consolidates it down in an understandable fashion…so I will quote him:
The short version: AIM publishes performer HIV test results to a database, accessible by subscribers (porn producers). They notify the performers’ partners within the industry. They also notify the County Health Department. They do not release the performer’s name to the press. They do not “publicize” an outbreak.
The tests are required every 30 days, and anyone who does test positive initally is immediately informed (as is any performers who has perfomed scenes with him in the last 30 days). Due to California’s strict confideniality laws and client-doctor privileges, the names of any performers infected is never released to the press by AIM.
According to Roche, the breach may have been in the reporting end:
The performer who tested positive through AIM is not being named, because AIM doesn’t do that. On June 4, the patient was tested at an AIM clinic because her previous test was then 36 days old. Industry producers accept HIV tests that are 10 to 30 days old, but somebody fudged on that. The fact that one producer fudged the dates shouldn’t necessarily tar the whole industry. If we are talking about a system that failed because it is not effective, that’s one thing — but if talking about a system that “failed” because someone didn’t follow the rules, that’s another thing entirely. These are rules that performers trust producers to follow; they should be sacrosanct. But they are not rules that are ever, in any way, “enforced.”
The implication here is that the performer may have simply assumed that since the 30-day window had passed without incident, she decided that she was safe and underwent the second test on June 4, and then went ahead with the shoot the next day. It could also be that the producer for that particular shoot was in such a hurry under time deadlines to shoot his movie, and in a hurry to use this particular performer that he was willing to fudge the procedure and allow the shoot to proceed before getting a valid result.
Roche’s report also clears up another meme that has been spread around: that AIM’s offices “approved” of the performer being cleared to work in spite of her being HIV+.
After her June 4 test, this unnamed woman performed in a scene June 5 and found out her test came back positive on June 6.
Some sources, however, reported that AIM received the test results on the 4th, which is impossible, or that AIM “authorized” the performer to work. The general public (and therefore porn performers) frequently misunderstand and/or disregard medical protocols, and here someone appears to have played it fast-and-loose with those protocols. Dr. Sharon Mitchell of AIM said the following in a statement published in AVN:
Since AIM does not authorize performers to work, but merely reports their current status to the industry, there is no way that the actress in question could believe that anyone at AIM told her she was cleared to work unless a negative written report had been received and the industry so notified. No such written report had been received before June 6th.
That seems to indicate that the performer and producers didn’t care about waiting for current HIV results, and probably didn’t take the risk seriously.
It should also be said that the shoot in which the infected performer ultimately performed was a standard vanilla het scene leading to standard PIV sex and the usual external facial; a stark comparison to the double anal acts that became the center of controversy in the earlier outbreak of 2004 — the one that ultimately claimed Darren James and Lara Roxx, amongst others.
That is not to say, though, that AIM doesn’t have their issues in the breach of protection.
One of the main issues raised by Cal-OSHA, and other proponents of mandated condom usage in “mainstream porn”, is that somehow AIM is tainted by their closeness to the industry at large, and that they did not act according to rules in immediately revealing the infection to LA health officials. That might have been the main motivation for yesterday’s raid on AIM’s headquarters by Cal-OSHA; to obtain records from the company and the performers involved to clear up the issue. Again, quoting Roche:
However, also to be considered are the comments by Dr. Peter Kerndt, an MD/MPh with the LA County Public Health Department. New HIV infection, as Mitchell implies in the above statement, must be reported to the Public Health Department within 7 days. Kerndt claims AIM didn’t report the case promptly because on the Friday the 12th, six calendar days after the positive result, it still hadn’t been reported.. He was quoted in a Saturday XBiz Article as saying that AIM was using this 7-day requirement as a stalling tactic, presumably to protect the industry. Said Kerndt:
AIM is not providing us with information sufficient to confirm what they are reporting . . . we are extremely concerned with the information that is coming in, but we are not surprised, since this industry has been out of compliance with Cal/OSHA requirements for barrier protection . . . What’s disturbing about this is that they’re using the regulation to withhold the information and delay an investigation of a serious health matter . . . They’re saying that this is not a major event. I think if they were to ask the performer, it’s a devastating, major, life-altering event for that individual. It’s inexcusable that it would occur in the workplace.
There is no indication at press time that the performer was infected on a set. She may have been infected outside of the industry, though she certainly exposed someone on the 5th, which unquestionably makes it an industry matter, and one for Cal/OSHA. AVN doesn’t appear to have reported yet, now well past the 7 day mark, whether LA County received the disclosures he was expecting from AIM.
Now, it should be noted that Kerndt happens to be underling of Dr. Johnathan Fielding, who is the chief spokesman for the LA Health Care Offices, and who is one of the main boosters of mandatory condom usage, even going as far as to propose to force such usage under existing California law regulating “unsafe” and “hazardous” workplaces. For their part, AIM has responded that the only reason they have delayed in filing the requisite reports is that they are waiting for summary confirmation of the testing results of all the secondary contacts….which, they say, should be released shortly.
Naturally, that will never assuage the folks who want to impose mandatory condom usage, since they are more than convinced that the minor breach of the system is still proof that the system is a utter failure, that self-regulation is simply not enough, and that government intervention to impose mandatory condom usage and other means of regulation to “protect” performers are not only justified and vindicated, but a matter of life and death.
Of course, the real goal of the new “reformers” might be more than just simply “protecting performers”: it might just as well be to impose a certain narrow definition of “safe sex” to sell to the public as an alternative to the rampant “unsafe sex” that is out there in the public. In his detailed rebuking of the Cal-OSHA/LA Health Care/AIDS Health Care Foundation memes supporting mandating condoms in every scene, Ernest Greene (who happens to be on the executive committee of AIM) provided what he says is the true agenda of the condom-only crusaders:
All these individuals, and a few converts they’ve made at the margins of the industry, support a truly mad plan by Fielding’s deputy Dr. Peter Kerndt to implement state-legislated regulations requiring condom use throughout the industry that would make it illegal to distribute sexually explicit materials created without the use of condoms, even though Kerndt himself admits that digital post production effects could theoretically render it impossible to determine after the fact whether condoms were used or not.
If these individuals were mainly concerned with the health and safety of performers, their views might at least be worth a second hearing, and their methods, while still questionable, would at least be well meant if misguided.
But their real objective has nothing to do with performer safety and everything to do with porn content, which they regard as setting a bad example to viewers following safer sex precautions in the viewers’ private lives. Kerndt makes his priorities crystal clear in his 2007 jeremiad published by the Public Library of Science:
“The portrayal of unsafe sex in adult films may also influence viewer behavior. In the same way that images of smoking in films romanticize tobacco use, viewers of these adult films may idealize unprotected sex. The increasingly high-risk sexual behavior viewed by large audiences on television and the Internet could decrease condom use. Requiring condoms may influence viewers to see them as normative or even sexually appealing, and devalue unsafe sex. With the growing accessibility of adult film to mainstream America, portrayals of condom use onscreen could increase condom use among viewers, thereby promoting public health.”
This is basically Weinstein’s line as well. [Note: that would be Johnathan Weinstein, who heads up the AHCF.] They want to empower the state to punish porn producers for not requiring condom use because they regard the depiction of sex without barrier protections as unhealthy viewing for the audience.
Unfortunately, in the service of that goal, they’re quite prepared to put at risk the performers they claim to be protecting.
[Emphasis added and Kerndt's passage isolated by me.]
Or, to put it another way, porn producers and consumers MUST be forced by government fiat to promote the “positive message” of mandatory condom usage as a means of selling the concept of “safer sex” and to promote “proper” sexual behavior in the general public. It is as if these officials are actually blaming condomless porn not only for the spread of STI’s in the general population, but for all kinds of supposedly “unhealthy” sexual practices….and that by forcing porn providers to either submit to their message or be forced out of business, they will somehow be able to change and modify mass sexual behavior to fit their personal ideology.
Yeah, right. Lots of luck on that rumor.
Never mind that condom usage has been widely promoted as a means of “safe sex” for the past 30 years since the original HIV/AIDS pandemic during the 80’s; never mind that “high-risk” sexual behavior continues to run amok mostly among those who are the most willing to impose austere restrictions on others while doing their best to ignore them themselves (Ted Haggard, Senators David Vitter and Larry Craig, and thrice divorced newly converted Catholic Newt Gingrich, anyone???); and never mind that the reason why condom usage is required in the gay male segment of the sexual media is because it is assumed there that HIV+ performers are still active…and that targeting them for legislation would run afoul of antidiscrimination statutes.
And then there is the basic fact that most condomless sex scenes are outside of the regulatory force of large Porn Valley studios to begin with. Unless Cal-OSHA is going to extend their jurisdiction to Florida or overseas, or to regulate every single adult pay website in the world, just how in the hell are they going to stop indpendent producers — or anyone loaded with a camcorder or IPhone or merely a webcam — from taping and releasing on their sites scenes of condom-free bareback sex?? Do they think that the many consumers who prefer their sex acts unwrapped will simply cave in and adjust to their agenda?? Really???
More than likely, the population of pirate P2P sites offering bareback depictions will simply swell overnight, and studios who do defy the Cal-OSHA standards of back-door censorship will simply move outside of LA or Cali and continue to rake in the profits as before. The only people who will be destroyed or converted by such mindless legislation will be the porn studio execs who will become the chief guniea pigs in the neoliberal equivalent of the typical fundie prosecutor power plays…and the performers who will basically be forced to choose between financial ruin and unemployment, submission to procedures that could very well expose them to even more dangerous activities and even worse infections due to the threat of condom abrasion and microtearing. The general public will probably not be affected AT ALL.
Now there may be one more group that may happen to profit from this jeremiad against the “porn industry”: certain auteurs of the “alt.porn”/”sex positive” variety which have always had, for their own personal reasons, their own vendettas and fee-fees against mainstream porn for a variety of supposed sins and offensives. Tony Comstock, independent producer and webmaster, and the founder of Comstock Films, is one of the loudest examples of this; one of his most vitriolic diatribes recently posted to his website basically calls out Sharon Mitchell as a fraud and an industry flack whose doctorate is based on a “diploma mill” called The Institute of Advanced Study of Human Sexuality based in San Francisco (never mind the fact that esteemed professionals like Carol Queen and Charles Glickman also graduated from that institution), and essentially warns of a dark, frightening epidemic rampaging the industry if condom usage is not immediately imposed mandatorily:
The high risk to performers of exposure to STDs in the manufacture of pornography is a simple fact, born out by AIM’s own data. Condoms, the single best way to reduce transmission, the method advocated by all sex educators for those who have sex with partners of unknown STD status is not a choice that is available to performers involved in the manufacture of straight pornography such as you or I would understand the meaning of the word “choice.”
But if that’s not reason enough for the “sex-positive community” to rethink its attitudes towards the “adult industry,” consider this.
In this latest incidence of HIV in the AIM talent pool, the individual in question went 37 days between tests. Due to the latency inherent in the testing, she may have been HIV positive for as long as 45 day or more before her infection was detected. If this infection had occurred in a male performer there almost certainly would have been secondary infection(s).
But more than that, sooner or later an HIV infection is going to cross from second generation to third generation, and instead of 3-5 on-set transmissions, there are going to be 20-30. This day is coming; it’s a statistical certainty.
Yeah….because 5 infections in five years, as compared to hundreds, if not thousands, in the general LA community alone is more than enough justification to raise the “epidemic” card and have the government swoop in with the magic cure of condoms.
In fact, let us do some comparison and contrast, shall we?? Again, Ernest gives us some facts as the antidote to bad medicine (taken from comments he made to Renegade Evolution’s home blog on this thread):
“The most recent figures from the L.A. County Health Department indicate that 869 new HIV cases were reported in Los Angeles County in July-Dec. 2008.”
HIV transmissions resulting from het porn shot in L.A. County during that same period: 0.
[from a comment further down the thread]
To put this in an even larger perspective, in the 30 year history of legal porn in America, there have been exactly 9 documented cases of HIV transmitted on porn sets.
Nine in 30 years of porn involving thousands of performers and literally millions of sex acts.
The current case is statisically very unlikely to have been transmitted at work, as the performer who got it was in the industry less than 60 days, shot a total of three scenes (one a BJ-only) and all of her previous on-camera partners test negative.
Which brings us back to those nine cases. Six of those were transmitted before regular PCR-DNA testing was instituted, largely as a result of those cases, a dozen years ago.
Since the advent of universal HIV testing in porn out here, there have been exactly three documented cases of HIV transmission resulting from porn.
In all nine cases, Patient Zero contracted HIV from off-camera sex with a civilian and then infected co-workers.
As to who poses a threat to whom, it would appear that the population at large poses a threat to the community of porn performers and not the reverse.
The level of hysteria generated around these cases, and particularly around the current case which is probably not industry-related, is entirely disproportionate and deliberately engineered for politcial reasons.
There are high-profile figures in the media calling for immediate, forcible inspections of porn sets by public health inspectors to impose the use of condoms, claiming that existing laws (stretched thinner than any latex) justify such action in the face of a public health emergency.
Nine cases in 30 years. While any case of HIV transmission is a dire event, nine in 30 years doesn’t seem to constitute the kind of emergency that justifies granting political appointees extra-constitutional powers.
We’ve seen how well that approach works in other areas of public policy in recent years. The evidence is not encouraging.
Oh….but the hypocrisy gets even better when you take into consideration Cal-OSHA’s behavior regarding a far more viral center of HIV+ activity: the gay male porn community. One more quote from Ernest, this time from a comment he made to his follow-up post at BPPA on the Cal-OSHA raid and comments by Michael Weinstein afterwards:
County Health has not, for instance, shut down bathhouses or sex clubs frequented primarily by gay men, even though the department admits that HIV infection rates among those establishments’ regular clientele hovers around 10%.
But of course, there are political reasons to go after porn instead of gay sex clubs. Weinstein, for one, knows where his contribution checks come from. He’s all over the media like swine flu on the porn thing, but quiet as a mouse on the sex club deal. How odd. What a coincidence.
Meanwhile, he congratulates Cal-OSHA for raiding a clinic not in any way implicated in the spread of any disease, but faults them for not going far enough. He demands that the entire industry be subject to random search and seizure because of a trumped up public health emergency that just happens to fit his political agenda.
Not to mention the aformentioned fact that going directly after gay bathhouses and gay porn shoots would leave them wide open to antidiscrimination charges and expensive litigation…probably not a good idea concerning Cali’s economic meltdown. But…going after mainstream porn studios under the cover of “protection” and promoting the holy grail of “safe sex” and condoms as the ultimate in protection, while getting the free support of rivals within the industry who would directly benefit from the onslaught on mainstream porn studios: well, that does the trick rather well.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t justifiable reasons to support condom usage across the board, or that the legitimate concerns about performers often being coerced indirectly to do non-condom scenes against their stated will shouldn’t be addressed. And there is the issue of the one-month length of time between testing being too lengthy to effectively catch infected performers…..Ernest himself has said that he would prefer bimonthly testing (that is, once every 15 days), if that could be economically feasible for the performers. (AIM charges the performers for testing…which I also don’e exactly like; I think that it should be the companies and the public health authorities sharing the cost with the performers.)
Audacia Ray of Waking Vixen does make a rather strong case for supporting mass condom usage here, and I can respect her beliefs because she has no political agenda and she has the best interests of sex workers and performers at heart….and because she has been an active performer and producer of porn herself, as well as being an activist. Just because I disagree with her ultimate solution on this issue does not diminish my respect for her work, or her right to her opinion. Nor will I disrespect any performer who happens to support condom usage or even support having performers exercise the right to choose whether they wish to perform condom free or condom only (or both, depending on the situation and/or particular sex act). I will always be for performer choice and safety.
This is NOT about whether condom use shouldn’t be promoted in the masses….it damn well should, for more than obvious reasons. Nor is this about whether porn studios should punish those who decide that they are more comfortable doing condom-only scenes with blacklists: they shouldn’t, and if ever such a “blacklist” ever be revealed, they should be called on the carpet vehemetly.
This is simply about whether the state should intervene and disrupt a procedure that has been — albeit with breaches that are nevertheless tragic for those few affected — for the most part, highly successful in containing the spread of STI’s within their profession….and whether or not an entire community should be decimated and ravaged for the sake of a few politicians and self-styled “experts” using them as stepping stones and guniea pigs for their personal and political agendas.
Or, to respond to the title of Tony Comstock’s essay: Accenuating the positive is fine, but try as you may, you will never totally eliminate the negative; the best we can do is to mitigate it to a minimum and contain the impacts so that as few people as possible are negatively affected. There is, ultimately, no such thing as 100% “safe” sex; and attempts by the state or by bureacrats to invent such a utopia and impose it on real life and real people will only result in failure….and a totalitarian society that is the exact opposite of what “sex positive” progressive is supposed to mean. The choice should not be between freedom and safety; it should be freedom WITH safety…and the choice of those who do the actual fucking.
I’ll just leave it to the Renegade God Emperor and Porn Rebel Henchwoman to conclude this with her unique insights as an independent porn consumer, producer, and performer:
In stuff I film, well, the level of barrier production is decided by those who will be doing it…and that is on top of the fact that why yes, tests please. Recent. In hand. Even with those, however, if someone wants to use condoms- then they are used. Makes no difference to me- visually as a viewer of and person who likes making porn, the aesthetic is not changed for me if the guy is wearing a condom. Hell, if whoever is filming for me wants gloves, goggles, gas masks, and rubbers…I will try and find a way to make it work. However, if they do not want those things and are good with test results- game on (except for the goggles, I have a thing for goggles…then again, I am the one who likes wearing them, so everyone else is off the hook).
When performing in stuff other people make, well, yeah, for vaginal and anal penetration I generally prefer to use condoms, even with tests, which yep, I demand to see. The director/producers word ain’t good enough for me, my own eyes must glimpse them- because I am paranoid and this is the wild west of amateur porn land. In fact, no tests, no me performing. That’s just the way I roll. However…oral? Guess what? I hate sucking dick if the dude has a condom on. I’ve done it when making porn that is intentionally supposed to have a safe sex message (which hey, I do that sometimes!) but eww, ick. I find my dislike of that worth the effort to send out a safe sex message…but I far prefer to do oral without. If you don’t buy that, suck on a condom, you might come around to believe what I am saying. I will go without if I am working with someone I know, I have worked with before, and I know has a history of clean testing. Then, for me, tests are good enough. But where I work and Cali are two different realms of porndom.
In fact, in the lowest budget porn movie ever, which I am still gonna make, if the performers want condoms, they will get condoms. No questions asked and no pressure from me. But if they want to just go with tests, also fine with me because yeah, hard crazy fucking can lead to road rash can lead to…unpleasant stuff that condoms only intensify.
But I tell you this…I would be safer fucking in the mainstream porn industry in Cali without condoms than I would be just casual normal people fucking perhaps even with here just up the road a few miles…where the HIV rate is the highest in the country and all the Government Health work in the world has not made much of a dent into the epidemic we have going on…
I wonder why no one is talking about that? How one is safer fucking in pornography than they are in the bed of private citizen X in Washington DC?
Interesting question, indeed.
—————————————————————————————
Update 6/21/09:
Oh, NICE. You’d think that certain antiporn “radicalfeminists” would actually wait a bit before crashing into the current brohaha….but noooooooz.
How interesting that folks who have as their ultimate goal the total and complete abolition and abolishment of adult sexual media as ultimately “degrading” to women — not just female performers, but ALL women — and who effectively see even token sexual acts popularly performed in porn and in real life as ultimately toxic and destructive, nevertheless all of a suddenn get a heart-on for “protecting” performers through mandatory condom usage. But, I guess that when you are raging against the evil Manchine and His erect penis as the source of all evil, rational thought goes out the window.
The UK clique of APRF’s recently did a reset of the events of the latest LA “outbreak” at one of their blogs, uncritically quoting all the usual faux-stats of the LA health officials (the 16 new cases of “HIV infections” within the industry between 2004 and today, the fact that none of them were with active performers in the industry, and the majority of the cases involved gay males nonwithstanding); and adding some new stats about the supposed pandemic of other STI’s such as chlamydia (over 2,300+ infections!!! according to the LA Times article cited), gonorrhea (13,00+ positive tests), and syphilis (15 cases). Of course, they fudge the fact that many of those might be false positives or cases of multiple infections deliberately miscounted to cook the books.
But that was only the stats, which the original post simply reposted. The ensuing comment thread, though, was where the action really started. First, there is the prerequsite attempt to debunk Ernest Greene’s rebuttal over at BPPA as just another unnamed “pornography director” who scapegoats gays to cover up the evil of “the industry”:
Apparantly it’s gay pornography actors who are the problem and working without condoms is actually protecting the women in heterosexual pornography. Who knew?
The writer – who goes on at great length I must forewarn, in an exceedingly dull fashion as is his norm – also takes great pains to criticise those who would push for increased accountability for the industry.
There are no limits to the propaganda that ernest and his brethern will pollute the blogosphere – and wider media – with in order to maintain their profiteering at the expense of women.
[Comment by "disillusioned" on 6/15/09]
Ahhhh, yes…but even that was just a prelude to the main course: as delivered by non other than one Samantha M. Berg — founder and chief diva of the Genderberg forums, leader of the GenderBorg Collective of Real Live Radical Womyn, and devoted enemy of all “bi-hot, sexee cumdumptster” women needing the assistance and guidance of radicalfeminism. Hence, thus spake Samucutus:
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[comment by "sam" on 6/17/09]
Oh, let me count the many ways of ultra-FAIL here.
First: “legal California prostitution”?!?! Of course, porn’s not quite prostitution to most folks, since there is a difference between paying to actually have sex with someone and paying to WATCH someone have sex with other people. Besides, I thought that the stated goal of all good GenderBorgians and antiporn feminists was to make all “pornstitution” totally illegal…at least, criminalize the men who produce and consume it??
Secondly…surely Samucutus must understand that most porn is made outside of California porn studios, and mostly outside of Cali, and even outside of LA (and I do remember that there was an attempt by the communities of Porn Valley to secede from the LA metro area around 5-10 years ago), so it would be in the very least a bit overreaching for LA to impose their jurisdiction on porn made outside their limits…or for Cal-OSHA to regulate porn made in, say, Florida, or the former Czech Republic or even in the back yard of someone using a simple camcorder and his/her Internet website. But, I guess that to Sammy, federalism and the US and California State Constitutions are such misogynistic and irrelevant issues when it comes to saving women from the Evil Male HIV-Infested Cock.
But it’s this threat of “AIDS-covered bullets” aimed at the heads of porn producers if they don’t go condom-only that really gets my attention. Gee, Sam…do you really think that forming the Womyn’s Minuteman Militia and threatening to put holes in the heads of porn producers who don’t cede to your demands really expresses the goals and principles of feminism?? How in the hell do you think that targeting male producers and performers who don’t wrap up for MURDER will enhance your cause of “protecting” women in porn??
And this side note: you do know that dead people have a lesser chance of infecting live people with HIV than living people do, right?? Unless, your plan also consists of infecting the health care officials, the paramedics, the doctors, and the people who would handle all the corpses resulting from your policy goals, ehhh?
And finally, we have this that somehow Samucutus has missed: is she also going to extend her death pool to female performers who don’t enforce the “condom-only” policy?? Oh, sure, someone like Nina Hartley can easily be dismissed as a porn-industry flack or merely a mindless slave who only thinks through her husband (who happens to be that “pornography director” so maligned by “diillusioned” earlier). But..what about women who actually run porn studios or who actually produce videos whom have actively criticized “condom-only policies as ineffective and counterproductive?? (And remember….Sharon Mitchell, last time I checked, was and still is a woman.) How about those women in porn who shoot mostly lesbian (girl/girl) sex scenes that are particularly gonzo based without a hint of condom or dental dam — you know, like Kylie Ireland’s Slutwerks Productions?? Will she be targeted with a silver bullet as well, Sammy??
And….how about those women who decide to protect themselves in a different way, by restricting the number of partners that they choose to perform sex with on screen, or limiting themselves to their SO’s and women, or to only produce content for their websites and avoid the LA scene altogether. Will you be sending a threat over to Vicky Vette’s place as well, then?? After all, she has unprotected sex with her husband on her website all the time….even if it is only oral sex.
Oh, please…I might as well be talking to a wall here. If Sam Berg wants to create an army of Scott Roeders and James von Brunns to target porn producers and everyone else who doesn’t meet her exacting standards of how people should show themselves having sex, then that’s her issue and not mine…but at least, Sammy, be honest about it and say that you are openly tapping and mirroring the far, far Right’s myopia.
Memo to Tony Comstock: Are these the allies that you seek to join with in order to save “sex positive” sex media from its excesses??
Oh….and addedum for you, TC: Smearing Sharon Mitchell with her testimony in the Heidl case to prove that AIM’s testing regime is bogus and tainted is not only the worst bit of reaching on your part….it is also irrelevant to the facts of the latest “outbreak”. If this be your definition of “sex positive”; then I’d rather join the GenderBorg. You FAIL, too.
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