Stains on the carpet, stains on the memory

Speaking of porn, I'm sure you've all been following the HIV outbreak in the porn world. So far, only two performers have been diagnosed, but there could be more. As pedantic as this issue might seem to those who are not porn consumers, this will have wide-ranging repercussions, and I worry that this is just the fodder the current administration needs to fillibuster a whole bunch of overarching prohibition-style moralizing bills. Where the health and well-being of the performers is concerned, I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of some governmental regulation of the industry (though I'm uncertain how it could be done, seeing as it's currently illegal for a company to make a prospective employee submit to an HIV test), but there's no doubt in my mind that's not the direction we'd be heading in with Starsky and Ashcroft at the helm.

And there isn't really a law we could enact to protect naifs from being abused by the industry--see this interview with Lara Roxx, the second infected actor.

“When Daniel told me that Darren James was HIV positive, it totally freaked me out,” Roxx said. “It totally made me realize how I trusted this system that wasn’t to be trusted at all, because it obviously doesn’t work....We should think about these issues right now, to change stuff around to make this a safer fuckin’ business. It isn’t a safe business, and I thought it was, and I would have not did that scene with no condom with Darren James if it would have crossed my mind that those tests weren’t good and that I couldn’t trust him or the people he’s been with. I thought porn people were the cleanest people in the world, is what I thought.”

A lot of readers might scoff at the way in which she portrays herself as an innocent. She's a performer, right? She took her chances. But she's also very young and inexperienced, and she thought she could trust the professionals with whom she was working. Plus, it seems as though she was told "You can either do double anal, or you can go home penniless." And this tactic isn't unusual. There's so much competition out there, and if you're unknown and unwilling to perform the more extreme acts, you don't get booked. It's sad and disheartening that a 19-(or 20- or whatever-)year-old without health insurance had to learn the ropes this way, and it's a pathetic statement on the state of porn.

Because I wanna know: Is double anal really a turn-on for many people? The DA videos I've seen are absurdly staged, more acrobatic than erotic, and ultimately disappointing. I mean, if you're a straight guy who gets off on watching two oily beauhunks rubbing their cocks together inside someone's cornhole, maybe you're shopping in the wrong section of the porn store.