STIs in Porn: Round 232

Well, this was unavoidable, so we might as well bring it.

I really do look forward to the day when I will never again have to rebut the same tired lies from the same wearisome liars and push back against the haters and fear-mongers posing as do-gooders who make their lives and their livings out of exploiting porn by opposing it, and opposing anyone who tries to do anything constructive regarding it, but by now I’ve come despair of seeing that day any time soon.

So, on we go to the burial of the latest load of crap to be dumped by the usual crowd of fertilizer spreaders.

The L.A. Times, which is rapidly become to local porn-bashers what Fox News is to tea-baggers, gave plenty of ink to the latest grandstanding performance by Michael Weinstein from Aids Healthcare Foundation and his new best pal, anti-porn evangelist Shelley Lubben, who can tell more lies in one minute than Karl Rove in a solid hour. Seems they’ve teamed up to “pressure” Cal-OSHA by filing complaints against a clutch of porn production companies for shooting non-condom sex scenes. This is hot on the heals of Weinstein’s outfit’s similar attempts to put “pressure” on the L.A. County Department of Health Services to do likewise.

I use the word “pressure” in quotes because all the parties involved in this circus are playing out their act together with the same objective – destroying the California-based porn industry altogether or at the very least, driving it out of the state. Any apparent discord among these groups and individuals is entirely staged for the benefit of the press and the public.

Take them all down? Yes I will. Prevent them from succeeding? That will not be up to me, but at least I can counter some of their more preposterous claims and call attention to the most obvious contradictions and inconsistencies in their words and deeds thus far.

Let’s get started.

First of all, let’s examine the odd alliance of the groups behind these efforts. Weinstein and the AHF have deep roots in the gay community’s battle against the spread of HIV and for greater popular support for funding for HIV prevention and treatment in that community. Shelley Lubben is a proud member of the religious right who believes homosexuality is an abomination, whose site links to “exodus” ministries that claim to be able to “heal” gay people through prayer into becoming heterosexual, who is anti-choice and whose Pink Cross Foundation (which earns her a better living than her brief stint in porn ever did) offers “post-abortion counseling” to help women recover from the traumatic sin of terminating pregnancies. Lubben also supports abstinence-only programs for young people and generally opposes the free distribution of condoms, except in the present instance, which concerns her number one priority: causing trouble for pornographers.

In short, the front groups and talking heads for this latest spot of nonsense are an alliance of anti-choice, anti-gay religious fundamentalists and pro-condom, gay-rights advocates.

Suspicious yet? You should be.

And it gets worse. Cal-OSHA’s spokesperson Dean Fryer, who was one of those responsible for circulating the later-retracted lie that there had been – take your pick – 12, 18 or 22 undisclosed cases of HIV in the het porn industry since 2004, not surprisingly pre-judges these uninvestigated complaints by telling The Times that “They have a valid point here," Fyer told the Associated Press. "The blood-borne pathogens standard is designed to protect workers where there is risk of transmission of diseases through bodily excretions that occur as part of adult film activity.”

Only what Fryer doesn’t say is that the blood-borne pathogens standard to which he refers was “designed” for the health care industry. There is NO Cal-OSHA standard specifically tailored to the adult entertainment industry. After five years of failed attempts to strong-arm the state legislature into passing enabling statutes that would allow Cal-OSHA to negotiate such an industry-specific standard with leaders of the industry to be regulated as state law requires, the small group of porn-hating fanatics concentrated in the bureaucracy there and at L.A. County Health have simply decided to apply a standard from another, utterly unrelated, industry to porn by administrative decree.

Since Cal-OSHA’s investigative process is primarily complaint-driven and there was a shortage of complainants, outsiders AHF and PC ginned up some complaints for the agency to go after. And how did they do this?

By buying some porn vids from companies whose products they claim to have picked at random out of the racks at local video stores and judging by viewing the condoms were not used in the production of said vids, thereby generating grounds for complaint. Of course, the fact that Hustler Video, a frequent Weinstein target and Vivid Video, the industry’s largest producer, were among those chosen was purely coincidental, just like the appearance of black clouds before a thunderstorm.

Anyone who still argues that this controversy is not about the content of porn or about free speech rights needs to examine the methodology in this filing and think again. Even County Health’s most ideologically driven clap-chaser, Dr. Peter Kerndt, has fervently argued in his PLoS monograph of last spring that it would be perfectly possible to use technical means to make condoms invisible in porn. Earth to Dr. Kerndt: those of us who do shoot with condoms already do that. We don’t use digital post-production effects as he suggests (knowing this would be ruinously expensive) but rather rely on lighting gels, pink latex and good camera work to make condoms less obvious to the viewer. In short, there is no way to tell with a certitude that would meet any standard of legal proof whether condoms were used or not in a given scene in a given video simply by looking at the resulting commercial DVD.

As this controversy unfolds, much the way I predicted in a previous post, it turns out to be not at all about performer safety and very much about what shows in the pictures. Try to keep that in mind as we wade into the thicket of disinformation spun around the efforts of our dauntless protectors of poor, endangered performers to conceal the real agenda at work here.

Kerndt made that agenda pretty clear to me when he told me to my face that “if we can get a couple of expensive fines to stick against a few of the major companies, the rest will have to fall in line.” Or else.

Meanwhile, in the background to all of this, Cal-OSHA continues to sue AIM for access to confidential patient records with the clear intent of establishing at least a tenuous causality between reported cases of STIs and work on specific porn sets. Though the information it seeks is protected by medical privacy laws, Cal-OSHA argues that an urgent workplace safety issue takes precedence over state and federal laws governing medical confidentiality. What they really want to do, of course, is see if they can tie the AIM clinic’s detection and treatment of STIs in certain individuals by timing to those individuals’ performances for certain companies with the intention of generating yet more complaints.

Meantime, absent any actual complaints from active performers, AHF and PC trotted out a short-time performer named Jan Meza, who worked in a few plumper vids, to file on the basis that she was infected with herpes and Chlamydia on porn sets during her one-year stint in the industry. That Meza, in her supporting statement, makes no specific reference to any scenes she claims to have done and names no companies for which she claims to have worked would seem to weaken her standing as a complainant, but I guess when you’re mainly looking for sensational headlines and political gains, and you know the long-term results of any real investigation of these claims will be buried in the back pages of any MSM outlet that even bothers to cover it, who cares whether they’re true or not?

While it’s certainly possible that Ms. Meza contracted these illnesses on porn sets, she could also, despite her insistence to the contrary, have been infected with them previously, or subsequent to her leaving porn altogether. At such a remove from the time of her actual performing career, it seems highly unlikely that her assertions are legally supportable. But then again, Cal-OSHA’s attempt to unilaterally impose an inappropriate safety standard on an industry with which it has had no direct contact and of which it has no knowledge or experience and over which no jurisdiction for it has been established is equally unsupportable. There are already plenty of lawyers involved in this game, and everybody around the table pretty much has the same set of facts. It’s the public that doesn’t, and it’s the public to whom this whole cabal of private and public sector crusaders is attempting to make its appeal.

It would seem, contrary to the oft-repeated assertions of a previous visitor here, that the issue of whether or not porn performers are even employees of producers and therefore fall under Cal-OSHA’s jurisdiction may turn out to be the deal-breaker that sends this rogue agency right out of the room. The judge currently supervising the case involving the Cal-OSHA’s subpoena attempt targeting AIM has raised that very issue with some pointed questioning from the bench, but with that case still being litigated, I’m not at liberty to say more.

The real purpose of this whole exercise is to inspire fear in the porn producing community and indignation in the uninformed public, and in that battle, I’d say the other side is doing pretty well. Using strident rhetoric, cooked statistics and unverifiable horror stories, they’re digging away at what the foundations of what they realize to be the main obstacle to their cherished goal of making porn so arduous and genuinely unsafe to make that it will just have to go away.

That obstacle is AIM, and the extraordinary success AIM has demonstrated in limiting (which is not the same thing as eliminating altogether) the STI risk in the het porn talent pool.

It is a fact that since 1993 there has not been a single clinical death from HIV-related causes in the het porn community, where we test for HIV using the PCR-DNA method every month. In gay porn, where condom-use has been all but universal but there has been no testing, there have been 166 HIV-related deaths. These stats come courtesy of RAME.net (http://www.rame.net/faq/deadporn) and have actual names and dates attached to them. Contrary to what Dr. Kerndt and Mr. Weinstein would have you believe, we don’t just make them up.

This would suggest that our existing system is working pretty well, which is the very reason that those seeking to abolish the porn industry need that system to fail, and are willing to go to any lengths, including bankrupting it with nuisance litigation and intimidating performers into not using it with calls to their homes and families claiming to be “investigating” STI cases, to destroy it.

Anyone doubting the primacy of this goal in the current disinformation campaign need only read Ms. Meza’s semi-literate statement to see just who is in the crosshairs. Two of the three pages of that statement are devoted to attacking AIM. Ms. Meza’s claims in that regard are risible at best. While admitting that, upon taking her first test, she was given both written and video-taped information about the risks involved in making porn, she complains that she was “never educated” about the industry or “the extreme risks I was about to put my body through,” because nobody sat her down and verbally explained these things to her.

Folks, we call it the adult entertainment industry for two reasons. One is that the consumers of its products are adults. The other is that those engaged in making it are adults. If information is, as Ms. Meza concedes, made available and performers choose not to read or view it, I hardly see how a further verbal explanation of the contents of that information would be of much value to them. We tell them to read the paperwork and watch the tape. We even provide time and a viewing area for them to do so on the spot. We do not put a gun to their heads and make them educate themselves. That would be a bit outside our mandate.

Ms. Meza also complains that AIM does not test for herpes. That test is available by request but not routinely required of performers because, essentially, there is no practical risk reduction strategy short of moon suits yet devised that is effective against its transmission. Since it’s transmitted skin to skin rather than by blood or serum, condoms are ineffective against it, thus the current debate about condoms is largely irrelevant to this topic. Both Type 1 (largely oral) and Type 2 (largely genital) strains are so widespread that 45 million adult Americans would test positive for it, according to the CDC.

When Ms. Meza and her friends claim that 65% of the talent pool in porn is infected with herpes (after angrily asserting that we don’t test for it, it seems a bit suspicious that she would lead off her denunciation with this unsourced claim), they leave out the fact that this statistic, which has never been established specifically re porn, would likely apply to a similar percentage of the entire population of this country over the age of 18 with both strains of the virus taken into account.

Chlamydia presents a similar problem. Though it is fluid-borne, it can be transmitted through a variety of bodily contacts outside the genital region, making condoms ineffectual in its prevention. L.A. County Health’s alarmist numbers about repeated cases of Chlamydia and Gonorrhea in numbers vastly higher than those found in the population at large fail to take into account the fact that when AIM detects and treats performers for these diseases, we recall them for testing after treatment, which will often turn up some residual evidence of infection, even though the performer is no longer contagious, thus requiring a third test for confirmation. Each test that comes up anything other than negative has to be reported separately to County, so what they’re really doing is counting the same cases two and three times when they spew their propaganda at the lay public. The actual unique incidence of these diseases is far lower than their numbers indicate.

She goes on to take AIM to task for not informing her of worker protections to which she now feels she was entitled under Cal-OSHA regulations, though as I’ve already said, those regulations have never been written for this industry and would not, in any case, fall under AIM’s mandate to clarify beyond any specifically related to medical issues.

Meza further dismisses AIM’s statement that it offers counseling with the assertion that she wasn’t counseled. Of course, she doesn’t bother to tell us whether or not she ever requested counseling from AIM. In fact, AIM has provided tens of thousands of hours of counseling to hundreds of performers on request. However, AIM enjoys no right, and wouldn’t seek such a right, to impose counseling on those who do not want it. It is not up to clinic staff to decide for themselves that this or that performer is a troubled soul who needs to be counseled, voluntarily or not. I’d say that would be more the jurisdiction of Ms. Lubben and her crew.

Meza is certainly right about one thing. When she says AIM can’t claim to regulate the health of all performers in the industry, she’s absolutely correct. In fact, if she’d bothered to read those papers she was given before her first test, or watched the Porn 101 tape that came with them, she would have known that AIM says and has always says exactly the opposite. AIM has no regulatory powers of any kind and doesn’t want them. Ultimately, staying healthy in any career, in any life, depends on responsible behavior by individuals.

Cry about it all you like. It’s a fact that cannot be altered by any act of legislation or administration. If people are careless and foolish, no matter what protections are put in place, they will get hurt and/or sick. This does not relieve those they work for of all responsibility for preventable medical misfortunes, but the reality of it is that primary responsibility, in practical terms, will always rest with those whose health and wellbeing is at stake.

Every single piece of literature, all AV materials and all counseling available through AIM makes this point repeatedly, yet we continue to get the blame for the actions of individuals over whom we have no control whatsoever.

But whenever I have demanded, as I invariably do when confronted by AIM’s loud-mouthed trashers as I so often am, what they would, realistically propose to replace the current system, they have no answers. Though some like to rant about mandatory condom use as the solution to all these problems, there is no evidence at all that such a system, which as I’ve explained before would likely result in the end universal testing in porn, would be safer.

Even so, if I really believed that those pushing this bullshit were well intentioned if misguided souls accidentally making the perfect the enemy of the good, I might be less vitriolic in my approach to them. But I don’t believe that for one minute.

It’s not AIM that doesn’t care about the health of performers. Those of us associated with the organization have worked endless hours for little or no pay and put up with every kind of abuse and harassment, official and otherwise, precisely because we do care.

It’s those who want to make the porn industry as dangerous as possible in order to create a justification for destroying it who care nothing about the health of performers.

Michael Weinstein and AHF sued Pfizer for selling Viagra because it allegedly encouraged unsafe sexual behavior. Shelly Lubben has made the rounds of every talk show and been interviewed on every religious right Web site in the Western Hemisphere. These are professional self-promoters whose main cause is getting money and attention for themselves and their organizations.

Cal-OSHA and L.A.D.O.H.S are bureaucracies currently dominated by a prohibitionist mentality that will never be content while porn can be made legally in their jurisdictions, and they’re willing to lie and break the law with hesitation toward that purpose.

Worst of all, these corrupt individuals and institutions have a pretty good chance of getting what they want. The porn industry has been very slow to respond to this political threat, being still preoccupied with the fading issues of content-based prosecution (though as I’ve already said, content is very much what this whole controversy is about, as our new batch of opponents regard our content as socially irresponsible). It has not mounted an aggressive campaign to counter the disinformation slung at it or taken seriously the impact of multiple fines and constant inspections and complaints through administrative processes on their ability to stay in business.

The people who can afford to wage this new fight better wake up, and fast. They need to open their eyes and their checkbooks and start paying for legal action and assertive public relations campaigns if they want to remain in existence, because they face a sophisticated new alliance of foes bent on using every means to deny them that right.

As a coda to this discussion, I’d like to make note of the fact that a stuntman named Anislav Varbanov was killed in an accident at Disney World last week. Deaths in mainstream entertainment are far from uncommon. I pressed Peter Kerndt hard to come up with a single clinical death attributable directly to het porn during the four decades since it became legal.

He couldn’t do it. But he did admit that there had been plenty in the gay porn community. You know, where they don’t do AIM testing but rely on condoms. While no doubt many of those infections happened off camera, we’ll never know because of the lack of testing.

Hardly a month goes by without AIM preventing an HIV+ aspiring performer from entering this industry by detecting his or her status on the initial test. We’ve saved countless lives this way.

Mr. Weinstein, Ms. Lubben, Dr. Kerndt, Dr. Fielding, Ms. Martin, Mr. Fryer, I have a question for you.

How many porn performer’s lives have you saved?