There’s nothing unexpected about the AIDs outbreak currently ending careers in the San Fernando valley. When the greed of the biggest porn producers pressed against a short-lived condoms-only policy, cowardice won, the condoms came off, and a countdown to today’s disaster began.

The traditional arguments for condom-free porn no longer fly. No-one under 40 has lived in a world where unprotected sex was normal. We don’t wilt at the thought of a condom, or hark back to a halcyon past of spontaneous rutting. The idea male talent can’t perform reliably wearing condoms seems laughable in the face of a gay porn industry which requires them and the idea that testing removes the need for barrier protection has been proven false so many times I dare anyone to defend its efficacy.

So porn’s businessmen follow their own logic, making what sells and listening to customers over critics. Until porn consumers choose to reject condom-free material, it will remain the bulk or their production. Even as their profits dwindle, Darwinian marketing rules.

When the illness comes the industry turns to AIM, Adult Industry Medical, the clinic responsible for providing performers with clean test results and for notifying the industry when an unlucky individual falls through the massive holes in their net. AIM’s policy favors the business interests of the producers, most obviously because they are funded almost entirely thanks to their largesse. They once publicized every infected performer and sought the maximum attention. Today they respect the privacy HIV+ sex workers at the potential expense of their partners. The system is broken in ways perfectly suited to supporting the ongoing production of condom-free porn in the face of overwhelming evidence it costs lives. Porn’s newest intake were born into a world where AIDs is a problem you live with, not a death sentance. To a teenage starlet all this commotion can seem a little overblown. AIM doesn’t share it records with Los Angeles public health community, like the companies who fund it, they are comfortable interpreting everything but praise as attack.

It will get worse.

Female performers have careers so short they leave before they stop to think. Those who earn the power to protect themselves choose not to lobby for standards when doing so labels them as “difficult”. The independence and wealth the web can provide now bypasses those who appear on MySpace on their 18th birthday and sign contracts the following week. Agents and directors are powerful again. The future changed and it looks like 1990 now.

Male performers, at much lower risk of infection condom or no, compensate for comparatively low scene fees with volume. As advancing age makes chasing wood a problem, condoms, are more a threat to their car payments than a cause for good.

The owners are watch their sales decline and worry about piracy to the exclusion of all other thought. If sex doesn’t sell like it used to, how to sell safety? Scared to act alone, the few who worry stay silent.

Customers spend less and surf more. They don’t know where the clips come from or how they’re made. Retirement and death are invisible online. Traci Lords is still 19 and Jenna’s still a star. The hipsters who were going to change everything didn’t. Reluctant to look beyond a performers name to the system they work in, they haven’t realized the wave of independent production houses launched in the mid noughties has been subsumed by the establishment. They buy tattoos, youth and packaging in place of change.

Bullshit. Our recipe for disaster. Serves everyone. Bon appetit.

Charlotte Rampling in “The Night Porter”

Stoya’s decision to let Brian “Marilyn Manson” Warner carve a swastika – or as I’d like to think, ancient symbol of Janism – into her pubes couldn’t have been more poorly timed. “Nazi’s were badass and wore Hugo Boss” cretinism is harder to ignore in the shadow of this week’s Holocaust Museum shooting.

Rumors are flying about her future. It was a dumb move (made real following a confession to Gram Ponante), which won’t endear her to porn’s large and influential Jewish community, or right-thinking people anywhere. I predict it’ll appear to blow over but keep a thumb on the windpipe of her success. Racism’s part of the porn business but antisemitism remains taboo.

I’ve not met Stoya but always pegged her as smart and cool, if I’m right, I hope she lets me know what she’s thinking now. I have met Brian Warner and can confirm he’s pretty much exactly who you’d think. That said, the attention seeking efforts of an Alice Cooper impressionist are easier to understand than Stoya’s purely self-destructive dalliance with hate. It’s possible Brian engineered this stunt, in Germany where Holocaust denail and Nazi imagery are illegal, on purpose. It’s telling that he chose Stoya, not his actress girlfriend, as the victim. I’d bet there are photos somewhere too.

On a practical level, Stoya should apologize fast, keep her head down, and move on. Manson should return to wanking over his copy of “The Night Porter” and making records no-one’s interested in. This is proof, if any were needed, there is such a thing as bad publicity.

All the recent talk of North Korea seems to skirt the state of their jizz bizz. Many would assume there’s as much porn in North Korea as food (i.e. not much) but they’d be wrong.

“Porno became prevalent in late 1990s, first among party officials and it leaked out to the public. Nude or bikini-worn women dance in North Korean porno with music.

Such indigenous videos disappear as foreign-made porno being imported. The first consumers, and the largest now, are high-ranking officials of the party and army.

It costs 2000 North Korea won (approx. USD 1 =3,200 North Korean Wown) to rent a porno CD for an hour in North Korea. Even middle school students collect money to rent one.”

North Korean readers – I’ll accept this stuff C.O. D.

I’ve written about the porn industries obsession with exaggerated genital statistics in the past pointing out that, though possible, a 13 inch member is as common as a man who stands 8′10″ in socks.

The industry has always known this, and used to go out of its way to deceive us into thinking it’s stars were bigger than they were. John Holme’s iconic portrait shows four pairs of hands covering a member we’re supposed to believe takes root just below his navel. The legend of the playground in my day, “King Dong”, was a truly impressive 18″ prosthetic supported by a healthy dose of racist stereotyping.

Today we’re being given “Rico the Destroyer” who we’re told is 13″ inches of black, blah, blah, blah. Where’s the respect? In photos of this one-man moon rocket he’s about half obscured by a single hand. If he’s 13″, that means her hand must be about 6″ wide. Pick up a ruler and measure the width of your fist. I’ve got hands thicker than a bankers wallet and mine only measure 4″. Assuming these women aren’t 6′3″, their hands are probably 3.5″ max. So doubling that and adding a bit gets us to 7.5″ or 8″.

I really don’t care but it bothers me they’re not even proffering the respect of an attempt at deception, and why are blogs like Fleshbot not calling porn flacks on this garbage?

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Now Jenna Jameson’s no longer pretending to be in the adult industry the media’s having to decide on a new face for porn. Tera Patrick has always wanted to be as big as Jenna, but the zeitgeist is so far from massive implants and guitar based Rock ‘n’ Roll that she seems quaintly out-of-touch. The story now is slight, pale, body-mod free women who can claim to be everything the last generation weren’t. Ironically they’ve come full circle. No longer independent and business focussed, they work for other people and tell themselves that doing what the public demands is proof of their freedom, not a failure to set the agenda.

Enter Sasha Grey.

Cast in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience she’s enjoying a very intense 15 minutes. She’s a pretty, 21 year old, proud autodidact starring in a film people can admit to being interested in without shame. The LA Times, Backstage, Tyra Banks and others are all dusting off their favorite porn fable. Someone’s escaped the pen, Sasha Grey’s going mainstream, porn’s no longer in the closet.

The problem of course is that porn’s not been in the closet for over a decade. Everyone under 30 experienced an unlimited, porn-fueled, puberty. Their experience and attitudes to sex are so radically different to those even five years senior that it’s hard to communicate across the gap. They’ve seen everything and are looking for ways to process what they know, experience what they’re attracted to, and stand apart from the past. For the first time in America it’s possible that people claiming no sexual shame are telling the truth. More likely they’re just ashamed of what they haven’t done.

Sasha’s a prime example. Her real name’s all over the web. She’s too young, and too libertine, to guard her non-porn future the way performers did back in 2005. She makes her money in other people’s movies and is becoming famous for being visible, where her predecessors became famous for the money they made becoming visible, then walked away rich and anonymous.

Is she cracking the mainstream? It’s easy to measure. Crossing over means being seen as a talent outside the field you came to prominence in without being boxed in by your past. When a comedian like Jaime Foxx appears in an all-black comedy movie he’s just a comedian who got an acting gig. When he plays a boxing trainer in a serious drama he’s crossed over. Casting a pornster to play a prostitute is not breaking the mainstream. If Sasha goes on to play roles with her clothes on, in which she isn’t being used as a sexual lure, then she might have made the jump. Sadly for her, while no-one cares if Jaime Foxx does the odd stand-up tour, until the first internet generation of American adults is in charge, it’s doubtful the public will welcome a working actress who makes the occasional scud-flick.

No one sane would want to, but in case this is it Sasha will have to pretend that working as an autonomous body-part is as rewarding as the art, music and acting she’s allowed to dabble in.

I thought that sticking your dick in a vacuum cleaner was an urban myth. Probably because I have a Dyson that’d rip it clean off. This gent has turned a love of double insertion, a graduate degree in electronics, soda bottles and old vacuum cleaner motors into the future.

Wii Do It. I see it now.

A fantastically sweet clip from the best newspaper on Earth New York Times, detailing the $1M a year sexware manufacturing business of two Pakistani brothers.

Link

You can follow me, on Twitter, here @SugarBank. (47)

Don’t panic – I was using Twitter before Oprah was. (52)

I don’t really understand the appeal. (38)

As someone who never got into IM, super-public IM seems like a step back. (74)

As a micro-blog Twitter makes more sense, but I find it hard to say hello in less than 140 characters which is awkward. (120)

Most of all I find the volume of shite problematic. (52)

I open Twitter, it vomits tweets all over me, I close Twitter and wonder why I’m involved. Most of it’s not that interesting. (125)

All that said – I do post occasionally and I’m sure it’d be more frequent if I new more, better, people. (105)

See you in 140 (it’s a fad). (28)

The utterly predictable stunt of mixing nudity and pop videos still works if you’re smart enough to make it interesting. Make The Girl Dance took three women, sans clothes, and had them walk through the center of Paris miming along to a cutsie boombox.

It’s all done in one take but most people will be too focused on the nudity to notice the artistry. For some reason they flopped the images too, I un-flopped the still above because French written backwards seems foreign to me.

In London the crowd behind them by the end of the street would number hundreds and be turning violent. In America they’d have been arrested. In Paris – as any Francophile knows – people smile, glance and get on with their day.

Compared to porn’s take on exhibitionism you can’t but wonder where all the style, taste and fun has gone. (The only kink they understand at Kink.com is BDSM. Why can’t they produce anything that’s not a BDSM scenario at heart).

One day, I’m gonna live, in Paris. I promise. I’m on it.