Sacramento, CA- A tax levy on the adult industry to the tune of 25% of all gross receipts was brought in front of the fiscal committee by a turkey-jowled Charles Calderon yesterday. His concerns were that the adult industry, contributing 4 billion annually to the CA economy, was not pulling its weight. His real concerns were that the CA budget deficit is extraordinary, state employed union members might be laid off, and some vague floating morality that he has never quite been able to grasp with any conviction may or may not have been violated.
Here is why the adult industry is not pulling its weight:
“The in-state production of adult entertainment and adult entertainment merchandise has numerous negative secondary effects on the people of this state. Specifically, the production:
i) increases crime at or near production locations
ii) adversely impacts the mental health of, and leads to increased alcohol and substance abuse by, those involved in the production;
iii) increases the performers’ chance of contracting a sexually transmitted disease;
iv) encourages unsafe sex by consumers; and
v) often encourages sexually aggressive behavior towards women. ”
-from the summary of the bill AB2914 authored by Charles Calderon.
He goes on to claim that as performers, we leave the industry “uneducated, unskilled, unemployed, addicted to drugs and on welfare”.
The Rebuttal (this one should automatically get bonus points because its backed by empirical evidence):
i) No published or peer-reviewed studies have shown that adult entertainment venues have higher than average police calls or crime rates in surrounding vicinities. I don’t even know what else would need to be added to this argument. It’s just not true.
ii) No studies have even been done on the increased use of drugs and alcohol in the adult industry. Furthermore, having worked in both strip clubs and on adult video sets, I can tell you that drugs are not tolerated. No director is going to hand meth to a girl and expect a good scene, as Shelly Lubben claims (we’ll get to her). The adult industry is a business and drugs slow business production.
iii) Our rates of sexually transmitted disease are lower than the general population. We are tested every 30 days. AIM finds an infection rate of 1.8 percent every month for gonorrhea and chlamydia. There have been exactly 17 cases of HIV in over ten years (and Calderon, who did his research by watching HBO, says that 5,000 new girls enter the industry every year. Do the math). When we enter the industry we are also tested for syphilis and given paps. There are vaccines for HPV and certain types of hepatitis. I have been tested regularly for a year and a half now. I have never had a dirty test and I’ve had all of the vaccines. I would be more than willing to post my test history. As far as herpes go, our rate of infection is exactly equal to that of the general population. But really that is not the point. The cost of our STDS to the state is exactly zero. We pay AIM to take care of this. We don’t wait three weeks to be approved by the state for free STD treatment. That would be three weeks out of work when we could buy some chlamydia antibiotics for twenty dollars from AIM.
iii) No studies have been done concerning whether porn increases promiscuity or not, and even if it did, so what. It is not the state’s job to regulate our sex habits or tax us for not abstaining from the evil temptations of lust. And please Mr. Calderon, define “unsafe”. Do you mean out of wedlock?
iv) Porn does not cause rapists. Sex crimes have only been declining and porn has been going more mainstream. Half of all internet searches are sex-related. That would be an awful lot of violence against womenfolk don’tcha think? And again, there are no peer reviewed and published studies to support this notion. But for argument’s sake, let’s say there are people out there who only feel it is right to beat on women after they see a pretty girl screw on film. To be consistent, we should find a scapegoat to tax every time someone is shot. But are we taxing the company that made the gun or are we taxing Grand Theft Auto… I can’t make up my mind.
Porn addiction was also brought up as a ghastly secondary effect of this industry. Porn addiction does not exist. Sex addiction does exist and existed before the industry and will continue to exist even if the industry is run out of CA. But again, if we start taxing the objects of addiction then it needs to be consistent. I got up in the middle of this blog to go on a Starbucks run. Who is drafting legislation against that?
Onto education, skills, employment, welfare…. and the oft repeated drug addiction.
If we were to show the education trends of workers in this industry on a scatter plot, it would look like a polka dot dress. Yes, there are girls who did not graduate high school. There are girls with PHDs. There are girls who come in with degrees and girls who continue with school while they are in the industry and there are girls who make a lot of money now and then leave the industry for school. There are girls who will misspell their own names until the day they die and others who will become business tycoons and probably employ the very assholes who assigned them some kind of value judgment based on their line of work. Why does it seem like something is missing though…. oh yeah, because the girls in front of the camera are not the only people in this industry. Admittedly, I’m only making an assumption, but the directors and photographers and editors and writers and graphic artists and make up artists and boom guys and lighting guys and web designers and business owners and vague entrepreneurs all have either an education or skills. Anyone with a sustaining career in this industry by definition would have something worthwhile to contribute to it. Suitcase pimps don’t count though.
If we leave the industry unemployed that may be due to the fact that we are now, uh… retired? Brilliant! One builds an entire career in an industry, puts away money, gets old, and stops working. Novel. Once again, Calderon is focusing only on the 2 girls in front of the camera and ignoring the 25 people on set behind the camera. They do not stay in for five years and then become a burden to the state as Calderon so eloquently stated. But, since the focus is on those fuck up girls, i will turn back to them. Reasons some girls leave unemployed: They went back to school. They got married and are now housewives. They really did put away enough money that they won’t have to work again. Or, and this is entirely possible, they left unemployed and will remain unemployed during their job search. I personally have been unemployed before this industry. I’d had it with the job I was at and I quit. And I was unemployed for ten days while I interviewed for a new job. It was a huge burden on the state but I guess thats why I pay taxes.
On welfare. Please. What newly retired porn star with her brand new Mercedes, tax statements showing a six figure income, and still-perfect body due to the fact that she’s never had a kid is going to pull up to the local welfare office and qualify. Spare me.
Drug addiction. I’m getting back to it. More reasons why industry workers can’t be drug addicted:
i) Most industry workers are not actually performers and they have deadlines and obligations and probably families and normal lives. This is not conducive to drug addiction.
ii) Drug addicts are ugly. Porn favors pretty. If two girls fit the mold for a look you are trying to work into a scene will you go for the one with rotting teeth, scabs, and vacant eyes or will you go for the one who just looks like a normal girl? Or, lets say the drug addict looks normal. In that case will you go for the girl who is reliable and can remember her lines or the one who may or may not show up and can’t even read her lines because they are threatening to stab her and floating off the page whenever she looks at it? Drug addicts will be weeded out. There are too many girls willing to take their place.
iii) This industry already has so many people breathing down our necks. Are we really going to shoot a girl up with heroin on set or at a strip club (as Daphne Khoury claims- yes i’ll get to her as well) knowing that the religious right is looking for any reason to shut us down and also knowing how replaceable she is with someone who is absolutely fine with being naked and sober simultaneously?
iv) Porn does not cause drug addiction anyway. Correlation is not causation. Many girls who propel the myth are girls who were already addicted before the industry and then turned to it to try to make a quick buck to feed their addictions. They don’t last long. As I’m defending this industry please note that i’m defending the mainstream part of it. No one can control for the fringe dwellers and we don’t legitimize them.
iv) Let’s get to the real reason why this is such a bothersome statement though. The underlying assumption is that recreational sex and sex as a commodity is so evil and dirty and wrong that the psyche cannot handle it without resorting to substance abuse. This is coming from the very group of people who should be counseled on sex because they have managed to distort it into something larger than life. They see it everywhere and feel victimized by it. They worry so much about it that they have stripped their lives of it entirely, but that is not enough, because other people obviously don’t see the danger in sex and so they must strip other people’s lives of it as well. For their own good of course.
50 million Americans were patrons of the adult industry last year. People who like and enjoy sex and have positive views of it are not unhealthy or unstable. People who fear it and would take away your rights to it are. This bill is not about about making the adult industry “carry its own weight”. This bill is a poorly veiled attempt at censorship. If you don’t believe me, then lets go back ten years in time to another bill that had the exact same goal but failed. The first time this bill was introduced it was introduced for moral reasons rather than budgeting reasons. Calderon is relentless. If passed, the adult industry would effectively be forced out of CA. The 25 percent tax would be taxed at every level. This means it could be applied as many as 5 times to the same product. We cannot take 125% hit. When Calderon was asked about this, his response was, and I quote “The adult industry cannot leave California. This is the only state in the US where shooting porn is not called outright prostitution or pandering. They will be forced to pay it.” He’s wrong. The video industry can and will leave CA if this bill is passed. We already do shoot outside of CA but if we had to it’s not as if a scene has never been shot in Budapest if the remaining US is off limits. From what I hear the girls are damn hot over there. Not only would the adult industry being forced out be a grave moment in the history of a nation based on democracy and freedom, but it would be a huge economic hit to CA. 4 billion is made every year in CA from this industry and it provides 40,000 jobs. Calderon would be willing to take all of this from Californians if it meant he could get his agenda through. In a memorable quote that I’d like so sum up this paragraph with, Calderon said, when addressing his committee, “We are the California Government. We can pass whatever law we want.”
To really drive his point home about what fuck ups the girls are, Calderon brought in two extreme fuck ups to testify. Shelly Lubben and Daphne Khoury, ex-pornstar and ex-stripper, respectively, showed up in church-appropriate attire and fake eyelashes as shining examples. Shelly Lubben was in the adult industry for a total of 7 years, two of which she spent making adult films, most of which she hooked, and all of which she spent addicted to meth. While hooking and drugs are not prerequisites for this industry they obviously were in her case, as they came before the videos. Yet she claims she is/was screwed up because of the industry and didn’t know how to get out. Like any other job I can tell you that simply quitting should do the trick. But Shelly isn’t content with quitting. She won’t be happy until everyone does. She testified to Calderon’s committee that she was fucked with scissors on set, given drugs, caught genital herpes, and “couldn’t understand why it was legal for guys to get bodily fluids on her skin” (not kidding). She thinks that girls in this industry are lost and it is her job to find them. She claims that we have higher than normal suicide rates and that since she started her Pink Cross foundation (as I understand it there are only about 5 members) she has managed to “save” about ten girls a year and deal with one suicide attempt a year. These statistics of course should be applied to the 5,000 new girls entering every year that were previously mentioned.
Daphne Khoury, who appeared to be the more put together of the two, was quick to change my opinion of her once she opened up the water works in her testimony (Shelly did the quivering voice thing). Not that either of them would care to hold the development of law to reason rather than emotion though. Daphne claimed that she thought stripping was harmless at first, then she got addicted to heroin that was provided by the club owners. At the press conference earlier in the day I had wondered why she kept complaining about STDs as a stripper. Then i realized the problem. She should have been complaining about STDs as a hooker. You don’t catch herpes from lap dances. You catch herpes from riding a john’s dick. So as the story goes she was hooking and addicted to heroin and after numerous suicide attempts finally got help and quit the strip club. Arguably I think anyone with a herion habit and severe depression and a side job as a prostitute would probably quit their day job. I’ve known a lot of strippers in my lifetime. This is not a normal story. She ended her testimony with the admission that she is still getting help and battling depression and now she’s scared because her life was threatened if she spoke out and she supports AB 2914.
I know I brought this up earlier but correlation is not causation. I would suggest that Shelly and Daphne would have been fuck ups without the industry. Obviously there is no way to prove this. I don’t really care though whether Shelly and Daphne have problems because of the industry or independent of it though. It’s irrelevent because either way they represent an extreme minority. What is relevant is the underlying ideology behind these two “reformed women”.
Both Daphne and Shelly went into this industry on their own accord. No one held a gun to their heads. (But did i mention that Daphne claimed to have been forced into prostitution- was this by her drug habit?). While in the industry they had all the same options available that the rest of us industry workers/”victims” still have today. They had the option of not doing drugs. They had the option of not being prostitutes. They had the option of leaving at any time or making something of themselves in the industry. They could have gone to school or invested the money or developed a skill that would have been useful for their entire lives. They could have bought a house or somehow planned for their futures in some way. This industry can be the greatest springboard for our futures if we only take advantage of it. But they chose not to take those options. Instead they chose to be weak and follow the path of least resistance. Now, eight years later, rather than regrouping and coming to terms with their mistakes and moving on, they are attacking the industry. They are using extreme cases and making them appear to be the norm. They are citing opinion as fact, and in most cases I believe they are outright lying but how does one prove a negative? The ideological and moral flaw is even deeper than this though. They are actively trying to take away my right to succeed in this industry, and the rights of every other person involved in it, and the rights of every past, present and potential consumer. These girls, who couldn’t even manage a career in one of the easiest industries on the planet, think they are smarter than you or me and know better than us what is good for us and what legal rights we should have as a result. They are so steadfastly convinced of this that they will lie to a committee, take time out of their lives, support a bill that doesn’t even directly state what it is trying to accomplish (because if it were written honestly it would not have even been heard), and emotionally attempt to manipulate the legal system to get their way. That will always be more morally disgusting than a happy and willing pornstar spreading her legs for the camera or a self sufficient stripper transferring her tips from her g-string to her college fund.
Regardless of an extremely dishonest attempt at using government as a tool against the adult industry though, it looks as if Calderon might have failed. Among 150 people who showed to stop this bill in its tracks were Larry Kaplan from ACE of California, “Mr. Kinsey” as Calderon childishly called him, a group of over 100 dancers, club owners and managers, bouncers, porn stars and general supporters, myself, and my personal hero now, lobbyist Matt Gray. Mr. Gray’s closing argument was so cutting that Calderon could do nothing but stand by and huff and roll his eyes like a teenage girl being given a curfew on prom night. Calderon chose not to vote on the issue that day.
