I have been kicking this post around for a long time. It troubles me as it will many of you, I hate to say it but I hate more NOT to say it. The truth is the truth and as an industry we really need to stop shoving our heads into the sand and deal with it honestly, we owe that to our fellow performers.
I have made much of several studies over the last few years and I have touched on HIV testing but this time I am going to spell it out, plain and simple.
Starting with the studies….They were scientific and peer reviewed, they were sanctioned by universities, the last two being UCLA, search this site for direct links to the studies.
The studies were pretty consistent, the found a rate of Chlamydia that is 64 times that of the same age group in the same demographic area. Let that sink in a minute…64 TIMES higher among porn performers in L.A. That means that if you had unprotected sex with a random person and unprotected sex with a porn performer you are 64 times more likely to be exposed to Chlamydia by the porn performer.
For Gonorrhea, it is 32 TIMES more likely.
I spoke to a LOT of performers for this piece and not one single performer told me that they had never gotten an STD on a porn set, most told me they had gotten many.
In fact several mentioned going to Tijuana where they can get antibiotics with no prescription, particularly Azythromycin in a dose called a “Z-Pack”. They will “load up” and resell them to fellow performers so that they can take them prior to their regular STD tests and be assured that they will pass. One well known A List performer told me “People in porn take Z Packs like they are Ibuprofen.”
One STD we don’t test for is Herpes. If performers who have Herpes were barred from performing an estimated 80% of performers would be out of a job overnight. That 80% number comes from the performers themselves, a prolific performer told me “I have it, everyone has it (Herpes), it’s everywhere in porn.”
And that brings us to the Granddaddy of STDs and the one that the most misleading information exists on…HIV. HIV is very hard to contract, and that is a good thing for porn because if it were easy LOTS performers would have died off years ago.
The test we use, as many of you remarked last time is a DNA test, It is called a viral load test.
If you have HIV your doctor will tell you right off the bat that your treatment goal is to reduce your viral load to undetectable levels. Think of all the people you know who have had HIV for any length of time…They all have undetectable viral loads. What that means is that with treatment the viral load can go below the level that the DNA technology can detect it. You can and will pass the industry test, even though you have HIV. There is no single instance foolproof test for HIV and testing, while certainly prudent is giving performers a false sense of security. The good news is HIV is difficult to contract and the lower the viral load the more difficult it is.
All that said HIV is really not what should concern the industry, The extraordinary high rate of others STDs IS what should concern the industry and that is where a performers union as well as any other organization that claims to support performers HAS to focus their efforts. That is where CalOSHA and the Ballot initiative could really bite us HARD.
We have a window of opportunity here to do something proactive. As bad as I hate to say it I predict that heads will remain in the sand and as I have said many times before….when we fail to regulate ourselves, the government will do it for us, and we are NOT going to like it. Hell it is already happening, yet we are not changing anything, claiming that what we are doing works, when CLEARLY it doesn’t. Will anyone step up?
19 Responses
As long as escorting makes considerably more money then porn shoots (with less drama no less) girls will continue to escort and many will do barebacks (if the client pays extra). With that going on you will NEVER clean up the social diseases in porn.
Everyone on both sides of the camera is doing everything they can to cheat the system (like Z-packs) so that it does not come out how high the social disease rate actually is in porn. If it ever came out to the general public how bad the problem is the govt. would try and ban porn shoots..
Obviously, the high rate of exposure to STD’s is troubling. But your article made me think of an even bigger elephant in the room: the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, and the impact that will have on their effectiveness.
As you may know, antibiotics are used to treat bacterial infections, not viruses. By self-diagnosing and buying antibiotics from TJ without a prescription, performers are risking the use of these drugs in inappropriate circumstances. Or what if performer stops using the antibiotics prematurely because they feel better, and they don’t complete the full cycle?
That misuse will render them ineffective over the long term. Then what? What do we do when the antibiotics no longer work at all?
It seems like a ticking time bomb…
I agree that the overuse of Z-Packs to pass VD testing is asinine.
However, the reason that the VD rate is higher in porn than in the general population is that porn attracts people that have lots of sex in general, both inside and outside the industry. A member of the general public either is in a committed relationship or only has 2-3 sexual partners in a year. Many of these performers would be having VD at an alarming rate whether they were porn performers or not. If we want to make porn we must accept the current VD rates within it, testing reduces the cases of VD greatly but there isn’t a reasonable manner of further reducing or eliminating VD in porn short of not producing it at all (I do not support a porn ban). Condoms don’t work in the industry as they break routinely (they are fine for civilian sex where the whole act only lasts ten minutes compared to the two hours that porn sex lasts) and the “condom rash” makes it almost academic that if the condom breaks and the guy has VD the girl is going to get it whereas if no condom is used there is only a chance of the girl getting his VD due to the lack of “condom rash”.
@mharris I’m gonna have to respectfully disagree with you on this one, and big time, so bare with me for a moment.
The current rate of infection is what should not be acceptable. The high infection rate (and of course this can be debated all day) but the fact of the matter is when you have sex with one person, you are sharing your fluids and all the things that come with it, with pretty much every person they’ve had sex with. Have porn sex, escort sex, shoot five days a week, with 20 dudes? If every single person who had sex was clear of an infection, EVERY SINGLE ONE, then that means 0 people contract an infection.
If 5/20 had an infection, your pretty much fucked. Biology wise, you are extra fucked if every single one of them had some type of infection, again you are spreading fluids and everything that comes with that fluid whether it is bacterial or viral. There’s some biological mixing.
While it’s true that some studies show that increased sex with multiple partners can increase a body’s immune system, it DOES NOT make you super man or super woman. The body is not invincible. For every infection that a body fights off…well you get the idea. The science is there. How cult-ish is it to believe that all this infection sex with multiple persons is good for a body?
The other problem, is the gender assumptions that come with sex. Why is a woman’s pussy dirty if she has an infection, but not a man’s penis? Why is a woman a whore if she has an infection, but not a man? (Generally speaking. We all know they call each other whores all day)
Porn sex SHOULD be safer than non porn sex, because of the testing. But it’s not because as everyone has acknowledged in this post, everyone is trying to beat the system. The only one’s who are not, are the ones who are new to the biz and they just don’t know it yet. They are the most vulnerable population, and should the porn union agree with me, special protections should be in place to ensure they have that CHOICE on what happens to their body. Because clearly right now, they have no choice. The irresponsibility of other performers makes that choice for them.
Education and science will save the industry. I’m not saying anybody needs to take college courses, but basic science will do a lot of public good, and cut down on bad decision making, because people will have facts, not some bullshit someone is peddling. It allows people to think critically, for themselves, on what is right for their body.
When you say that porn should accept current VD rates, you are saying their bodies are worthless commodities, that they are worth less than an average citizen of the USA legally has. A citizen and resident here, by the nature of this being a first world country, is guaranteed to have better health care, better wages, and better protection of civil liberties. Just by being here. Let that sink ok? Just by being here in America, porn does not have the right to treat their performers like third world hookers. Performers are not disposable. They are people. Shame on those criminals who take advantage of people’s naivete and tell them every thing will be ok. It will definitely not be.
It’s not a surprise that herpes would be rampant in the industry. Herpes is an extremely common virus among the general public to begin with and really isn’t much of a big deal. Many people never have a breakout, or if they do, they are bumps so small that they aren’t even assumed to be herpes. The only time society began to see it as a problem was when a drug company created the first suppressant medication for herpes. They created the medication but realized they had no market for it because people didn’t think herpes was a big deal. They were sores that came and went every now and again and as time passed the breakouts are less frequent anyway. So the drug company ran ads talking about how “embarrassing” the breakouts are and how unattractive they would appear to potential partners. Then they made sales.
Anyway, aside from all that, the part about this that is the most horrifying is the Z pack thing… It’s well known within the medical community that treating chlamydia and gonorrhea has become increasingly difficult due to antibiotic resistance. The adult industry may very well be planting the seeds for an epidemic stemming from southern California, unless all performers refrain from having sexual contact with anyone outside of the industry… Yeah right.
I’m overall disgusted with the industry as a whole now, as quite obviously the health and well being of the performer AND viewers means little to NOTHING. As long as they get enough views on the tube sites, who cares, right? If my purchasing or viewing any adult material contributes to an industry so rife with abuse and neglect towards human beings, I can say with confidence that I’d rather rely on imagination and memory retrieval from now on. Good riddance. I can see right through all the glitz and glamour Xbiz and AVN publish. It’s lost it’s appeal and that’s very sad.
Hopefully things will change someday…
I know this doesn’t have anything to do with the original post but just throwing this out there… AVN published an article promoting work by James Deen again… That on top of the neglect towards human health in general has led me to a feeling of complete and utter disgust. I can’t consider myself a fan of this type business anymore. There will be one less person attending the AEE next year…
“when we fail to regulate ourselves, the government will do it for us, and we are NOT going to like it. ”
If going underground were a viable industry solution then why are profitable stakeholders pushing that talking point transitioning their business practices to a closer alignment with the failed OSHA negotiations?
Condom only producers?
Directing talent to obtain stakeholder paid testing (prior to the shoot) at the time of booking?
Some have invested a lot of money to fight regulation while getting their ducks in a row to stay above ground ….count on them to respond to calls for bail with ‘gee wish I could but all my cash is tied up keeping me & mine out of the same boat you’re in’ ‘aww damn wish you called yesterday just wiped my cash account paying the studio bills …fucking testing is killing me’ They aren’t assholes, they’re smart business people.
Some will say ‘sure I’ll be there as soon as I can draft up an agreement to cover your bail and bankroll your defense too ….for x% of your business…or whatever you have that they’ll accept as a reasonable ROI (return on investment)
….gee no cash but if you have any shoots lined up we can do them for xxxx and deposit something into your commissary account.
If the industry had negotiated with instead of stonewalling OSHA they would have had regs with civil consequences to wave in front of voters and drag into court as a solid defense against the ballot initiative with criminal consequences. 5193.1 keeps proving itself as a game changer.
When you get a virus of some kind they take blood cultures and see what grows. Then they give you the appropriate antibiotic that is best to get rid of the infection. When you take antibiotics over and over the bacteria build up an immunity to that antibiotic and it no longer works effectively.
Right now there are already viruses or bacteria that are immune to antibiotics. The most well known one is MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Scientists had to create a new type of antibiotic to work on the MRSA bacteria and it is very expensive ($7000 for 14 pills when I had it). Talent that uses these Z-packs are playing Russian Roulette with their future and most probably don’t even realize it.
@Normal
Prophylactic use of antibiotics/meds to treat suspected infections and/or kill anything that might mess with industry testing isn’t new. Resistant strains of GC are already out there, the ticking time bomb isn’t performer health consequences either…it’s when the studies hidden in PhD thesis, CDC and public health files makes its way to the front pages of mainstream media. Damn AHF might really be the big bad wolf FSC claims them to be…without a doubt AHF has data about any role drug resistance or drug resistant STI pose as a risk factor to HIV transmission.
I usually dont chime in here because I have already said my 2 cents but I am with you guys this is just unacceptable and for the life of me I cant understand why, as an industry, we can’t seem to do anything to even try to fix it. Self medicating with antibiotics is insane but it appears to be even beyond rampant in porn circles…but I kind get it I mean performers will do anything to keep working and that means they have to have a clean test…20 bucks and they pretty much more tham halve the chance that they will test positive….and while I agree that prostitution adds to the problem but what really makes that worse is that these performers have been conditioned to believe that it is safe to have unprotected sex with anyone who has a two week old test…as an industry we have to own that shit too…Its just insane….One A list performer told me that her porn days are done, all she does now is escort and she is adamant about condoms only, and since doing so she has made way more money and not had a single STD, her first month in porn she got 3….I believe that an industry the size of ours CAN do better, maybe I am naive…
I have a piece coming up on this but it is not going to appear until after and article in a major magazine comes out..I made a promise and will keep it but there’s some really dirty shit going on with AVN and James Deen
Exactky I had MRSA…got it in a hospital when I was taking care of my mom who had shoulder surgery..3 weeks later I had what I thought was a cyst or something on my knee..it was the size of half a baseball, doctor sent my ass directly to the hospital where I spent 4 hrs getting IV antibiotics she said I was lucky cuz it was very close to being in my bloodstream….6 months later a small one appeared again near my shouolder…that time i knew and went straight to the dr who put me on the antibiotics and gave me all kinds of prescription stuff to wash my fingernails with 3 times a day the idea was to clear it out of my system…must have worked cuz its been over 6 years with no more problems…knock on wood.
@XXX That is clearly an oversimplification of herpes. Did you know that a 2002 meta-analysis2 of nine studies that documented HSV-2 infection before HIV acquisition found that having herpes doubled the risk of subsequently catching HIV. Genital herpes may cause painful genital ulcers that can be severe and persistent in persons with suppressed immune systems. There can be can be considerable embarrassment, shame, and stigma associated with a herpes diagnosis that can substantially interfere with a person’s relationships.
Herpes not a big deal, my ass!
@mikesouth
“One A list performer told me that her porn days are done, all she does now is escort and she is adamant about condoms only, and since doing so she has made way more money and not had a single STD,”
For comparison purposes let’s make a bunch of assumptions here. She is spending $300 a month on the industry test protocol and willing to do condom only shoots to promote her escort business….she has no reason or incentive to take meds to beat the test.
She is an IC who earns enough to cover her business and living expenses. Let’s also assume she has enough experience and confidence to tell a client GFY unless you’re suiting up with this condom as agreed.
Even if she was willing to do a bareback film to market/promote her escort brand her prostitution isn’t adding to the problem, nor would she have a reason to take meds to beat a film stakeholder paid test.
Compare her to a new performer with her ID to prove she’s 18 years and four days old, excited burning up her phone minutes bragging she got an agent who put her up in a model house and she’s gonna be a star!
She does her first scene for $1000, owes $150 agent fee, $155 test, $180 rent, $50 driver, $200 pics and $250 the nice agent advanced her cuz the producer pays ten days out. Six days in she’s down to 20 minutes on her phone, leaving irate messages for agent she wants the $600 he owes her and where are all these booking he promised?
Agent calls back WTF I don’t owe you $600 details the expenses and says if you leave house today I’ll give the $35 when the production check gets here. Reality sets in she’s bawling, can’t get a film but he can set her up with an escort client. She tells agent okay mandatory condom, she gets there client tells her his card was charged for a bareback GFE and agent isn’t returning either of their calls.
Six days later she has $40 cash owes rent, can’t afford her test and loves her her nice agent cuz he booked a scene and is gonna front her test money….her housemate tells her the guy at the party has cooties for $20 she can fix it before her test, or test dirty pay to retest after paying for an office visit at the other clinic to get the script for the same meds big pharma makes the pharmacy charge $100 and the driver isn’t free either.
Her body…her choice? Is beside the point of reasoned incentive TO spend her last cash on valtrex, antibiotics and a nice douche to flush out the brewing BV that isn’t the herpes her housemate said happens to everybody in porn.
Now assume the client took pity on her used a condom and the party with cooties guy was hosted by producer who might book her if he meets her…and did book her as long as she shows up clean on the FSC-PASS database.
The industry testing scheme is set up to incentivize prophylactic med use. As long as performers are paying for their tests they have every reason and incentive to circumvent the test instead of modifying their off screen risks.
This dynamic isn’t exclusive to porn. Produce farms think it’s good to let pickers shit in the field…cheaper than buying and spreading fertilizer 😉
Our youngest is allergic to sulfa & penicillin…that leaves erythromiacin. Branded as Biaxin, and z-packs.
The overuse risk isn’t limited to something they do get its an invitation to get the things docs use it to avoid. Because Kati used erythromiacin exclusively for all the usual ear infections & colds kids get the docs used IV vancomycin instead of the usual much lower dosage antibiotic for outpatient surgery, five years later they used something even stronger when she had a c-section out of concern she’d begun developing the resistance docs warned us about when she was a baby and the increased risk of inpatient hospital acquired crud.
if a performer is using antibiotics casually and goes for a boob job or any other invasive procedure they’ll want to tell their surgeon….the antibiotics they’ve been using might still work against CT or GC but it’s not smart to risk a nasty surgical infection.
@nvm
Herpetic meningitis isn’t real nice either ….even when they catch it in time to avoid post-Mortim diagnosis.
@nvm I personally don’t believe herpes is no big deal. My comment stated that when the first suppressant drug was manufactured, sales were lack luster due to the the general public’s apathy on the subject. The point of my comment was that it isn’t a surprise that industry performers have herpes, many without realizing it, because it is already so common among the general population that most docs won’t order a test for it without special request to do so. They assume you have it anyway, and it isn’t always easy to detect because of viral loads, as Mr. South mentioned with HIV. As for the social stigma against people with herpes, it may have existed to a certain extent to begin with, but as I previously stated this stigma was popularized by drug companies to up the sales of their medications.
@mharris
Wade through the linked plan outlining USA five year plan to help the global need to address drug resistance…then let us know if you still stand by “If we want to make porn we must accept the current VD rates within it, testing reduces the cases of VD greatly but there isn’t a reasonable manner of further reducing or eliminating VD in porn short of not producing it at all”
Pay close attention to ecoli, salmonella & shigella …look at the numbers compared to NGC aka gonorrhea. Whoa! WTF clusters of 100 Norovirus are front page news, fifty e-coli spread over eight states make headlines with each new case and salmonella ice cream shuttered the plants …maybe for good.
American people eat more than they fuck which explains our astronomical obesity, diabetes & heart disease rates…can you explain why all reportable food-borne disease combined from any source is less than segregated reportable STD?
Cattle ranchers, shippers, slaughter houses etc know all about ‘reasonable’ compromise between mad cow disease and consumer demands. There was no decade of stalling criminal consequences or civil suits with ugly punitive damages.
Limiting condom rash to asking if prior BV was ruled out …sometimes industry arguments make me wish for a fetish site with rigged water troughs to strap down anyone spouting condom rash before ramming cattle prods up asses while whipping them till they utter the safe word. 😉 not picking on you mharris just too annoyed with …we like porn so it’s okay to jeopardize performer health now, tomorrow or forever crap.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/national_action_plan_for_combating_antibotic-resistant_bacteria.pdf
Side note: UC Irvine got five million from initiative to push ahead on rapid testing process for bloodstream bacteria.
I think there’s something else going on in porn that is just as bad for the overall health of performers – or falls into that “we eat our young and spit them out” category – which is the increasing roughness and violence around scenes. I think its analogous to what’s happening in pro football as the level of physical violence and intensity ratchets up – careers are shorter for positions like running back, linebacker and wide receiver, who are on the receiving ends of that physicality, and the post-career impacts on health are greater.
As a fan, this has been on my mind for some time. I like facials, I like watching anal, not a big fan of DP, but do enjoy the right DP scene. If you think about the Golden Age, they did all of those things, but a typical sex scene was 5 to 7 minutes long once people got naked, the foreplay started and the pop shot ended (about how long it took a raincoater to jack off in a dark theater). There was a lot of build up to sex, so the amount of pile driving, jack hammering sex was limited – especially in anal.
Now, think about a gonzo scene – typical is 15 to 30 minutes of hard sex. Let’s face it – I don’t care how many positions you’re in – watching the same cock go into the same mouth, pussy or ass for 20 minutes gets pretty old. So, we have all that slapping, spitting, gaping, and verbal abuse. Personally, it turns me off but I realize there’s a hard core fan base for it.
But, it has another impact, and that’s what I got thinking about the other day after reading an interview with Ryan Conner about her comeback. I loved watching her back in the day. The scenes she’s doing now have been just too harsh for my taste. In the interview, she was asked what’s different about before and now, and she talked about how hard the scenes are and the wear and tear they were taking on her.
This really is a First Amendment issue – directors and producers can direct and produce what they want within a few pretty broad limits and far be it from me to tell them what to do. Moreover, I guess if your fan base wants to see prolaxed rectums, double anal, and girls who look like hell after the scene – and you’ve got any number of actresses willing to subject themselves to that abuse for a paycheck – God bless. But it’s going to shorten the careers of the women who provide us enjoyment. Women are not sexual athletes – you can’t lift weights or do aerobic training to strengthen your vagina and anus. They’re only going to take so much wear and tear.