EDMONTON — Edmonton sex stores are game with regulating the adult sex toy industry to keep harmful chemicals — found in the plastics used in some toys — out of the bedroom.

Toronto Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett sent a letter last week to the federal health minister, claiming chemicals used in most sex toys pose a potential health risk for women.

Bennett, a medical doctor, claims chemicals such as bisphenol A and phthalates, which are used to make plastic soft and flexible, may cause hormonal complications at certain levels of exposure.

Federal regulations already prevent bisophenol A from being used in baby bottles and phthalates can’t be used in toys for children’s mouths, but so far there aren’t any rules preventing its usage in sex toys.

When news broke last year that the chemicals used in plastics were linked to potential health complications, Sandy Keeler, owner of Alluring Intimates in Edmonton, immediately headed to her collection of sex toys on the shelves of her store.

She found about 15% of the products she carrried contained the chemicals, which were mostly found in jelly-substance toys.

She said she wasted no time returning the products to the distributor.

Now she says about 95% of the sex toys she receives indicate on the package they are phthalates free, but it still hasn’t seemed to satisfy all customers concerns.

“More and more people are getting into these toys,” said Keller. “You want to make sure it’s as healthy for you as it possibly can be.”

Edith Johnson, assistant manager at Hush Adult Megastore, said the health and cleanliness of the store’s toys is always the No. 1 priority.

Any product that would put customers at risk of health complications should have a hard time making its way onto store shelves, added Johnson, who is also in favour of taking steps to regular the adult sex toy industry.

“We want to make sure the health of the customer comes first,” she said.

Other sex toy stores in Edmonton have also opted to carry phthalate-free toys, but declined to provide further comment.

Taken from edmontonsun.com

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COPENHAGEN—Despite the fact that prostitution is legal and regulated in Denmark, Ritt Bjerregaard, the Lord Mayor of Copenhagen, has sent postcards to 160 hotels in the city requesting that delegates to this week’s United Nations climate summit refrain from purchasing sex. The response by the country’s sex worker association was immediate: produce a postcard, prove you’re a delegate, and you can have sex with our beautiful prostitutes for free.

“All delegates who come to Copenhagen for the world climate summit will be able to use the postcards for payment after making a request on our website,” Susanne Moeller, a spokesperson for the Danish association for the defense of sex workers, said. “We do not expect many delegates (to make use of the offer), but we want to protest what we consider discrimination.” Moeller added that the offer is good for the duration of the climate talks.

The city also sent letters to hotel managers asking them to take measures to prevent prostitutes from meeting clients in the establishments. The postcards, which are to be distributed to hotel guests, read “Be sustainable: Don’t buy sex.”

One wonders precisely what is unsustainable about purchased sex, and also how the city, in light of why the delegates are there in the first place, justifies sacrificing all of those trees cut down to make the postcards. Also, since sex is the original life-sustaining activity, shouldn’t the city encourage the practice rather than the opposite? And if the country went to the trouble of legalizing prostitution, for whom did they legalize it if not visitors to the city?

Lastly, if the delegates to the summit are there to literally save the world from extinction, don’t we all want them to be as physically satisfied as possible, and thus able to fully focus on the work at hand? Why is it that the city doesn’t get that but the sex workers do?

Taken from avn.com

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Darren James once led a busy life as a porn star.

“Sometimes it’d be 10 women in an orgy scene — nonstop,” he said, talking about his career at its busiest. “And you work from eight in the morning to maybe eight at night. And that’s one scene. All these women. Nonstop.”

It was part of a job James did successfully for nearly eight years. Until he got the call all porn performers dread.

“I get that call,” he said, shaking his head. “Everything stops. I had the virus. I’m like, whoa, what happened? This can’t be happening to me. … I thought I did everything right. And my whole world just crashed.”

James learned he was HIV-positive in 2004. And he doesn’t know, he said, how he got infected.

“I don’t. There was just so many women pressed up in that short period of time,” he said.

James passed the virus to co-workers, although “not knowingly,” he said.

“I’d known three girls I’d infected and I knew them,” James said. “They’re nice people and I felt bad.”

James’ HIV infection shut down Southern California’s porn industry for a month. When his identity as the original infection was made public, he says the isolation that followed drove him to attempt suicide.

“I know porn ain’t the best business in the world, but it’s all I had,” he said. “At that point I wanted to end it because I know I couldn’t recover.”

James is now campaigning to make condom use mandatory in adult films. He predicted years ago that his infection would not be the last the industry would see. In June of this year he was proven right when another performer was diagnosed with HIV.

Sharon Mitchell runs the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation, or AIM, a clinic set up by the adult industry to serve performers.

What sexually transmitted disease does she see most among the performers?

“Chlamydia,” she said. “Chlamydia sticks to everything.”

“We’re not the condom police and we’re not the set police,” Mitchell said. “We do make it possible for everyone to exchange clean bills of health.”

The recent HIV infection of an adult performer was detected at Mitchell’s facility. Unlike in James’ case, Mitchell says this time the contamination was contained and no other performers were infected.

“The patient zero only had one prior test, it wasn’t like this performer had been working for six months and had, you know, a whole history of testing, and so we were really able to take a good look at the people that this performer had worked with,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell believes that the latest patient zero contracted HIV outside of the industry but within the 30-day testing period that is now industry standard.

“Yes, most definitely,” Mitchell said. “We are really able to tell almost to the day.”

Taken from abcnews.go.com

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Jenna is now retired from the industry and is a stay-at-home mom to 7-month-old boys, Jesse and Journey. The world’s most famous porn star says she struggled with infertility for years, and now that she has children, she faces a new struggle. How is she planning to explain her pornographic past to her sons?

“The moment you become a porn star, you will always be a porn star for the rest of your life,” says Jenna. “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say to my sons, but I do know that I want them to understand that their mother loves them. I don’t worry about what people think. I worry about what my sons think.”

As a young starlet in the adult film industry, Jenna says she had a specific vision throughout her career. “I wanted to be the number one porn star in the world, and I wanted to do it with dignity,” she says. “I wanted to change things because this industry was run by men.”

Looking back on her life, Jenna says she has few regrets, though sometimes wonders what life would have been like if she’d never become an adult film actress. “I wonder whether or not I made the right decisions by getting into the industry, because I know how incredibly capable I am,” she says. “I knew I had a lot of options, but this was something that I excelled at, and I knew that I was going to make a lot of money.”

Jenna says she’s proud of her success and the person she’s become. “I feel like I made it happen,” she says. “I love who I am. I love that I can look back and say, ‘I did it my way.’”

What do you think is the best way for Jenna to handle this subject with her boys?

Taken from celebritybabyscoop.com

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According to business information analyst IBISWorld, the sex industry has apparently shrunk by 6 percent in Australia in the last financial year.

And experts are of the opinion that the reason behind it is the surge in online dating sites, which has made casual sex more accessible.

Edward Butler, a senior analyst at IBISWorld, used industry surveys and Australian Bureau of Statistics data to reach the conclusion.

“It’s not the most precise science compared to other industries,” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted him as saying.

He added: “We’ve had to be more intuitive, but we’re pretty confident of the results.

“The rapid growth in online services means it has never been easier for like-minded individuals to organize casual liaisons for little or no cost.”

The Adult Business Association of NSW’s spokesman, Chris Seage, further revealed that the brothels have been hit hard the most.

He said: “Brothels aren’t the goldmine they used to be 10 or 20 years ago. The regular punters aren’t coming as often.

“Rather than weekly, they’re coming fortnightly or monthly and they’re also cutting down on time, opting for the half-hour instead of the full hour.

“But I believe it is having an effect on trading. It’s a lot cheaper to hook on a matchmaker site, pay a much smaller fee and engage in casual sex that way. It’s an emerging issue for the industry.”

FlingFinder, adultmatchmaker.com.au and benaughty.com are some of the sites that promise relationships.

Taken from medindia.net

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OTTOWA, Canada—The Canadian government will introduce legislation Tuesday that will strengthen the country’s laws with respect to images of child sexual abuse. Coming on the heels of a report that found “child pornography” on dozens of servers located in Canada, the law will require internet service providers (ISP) to report to the government websites suspected of containing contraband child sexual abuse images.

“The bill will strengthen our ability to protect children from sexual predators,” a senior government official told Sun Media. “It will help police rescue these young victims and help prosecute the criminals responsible.”

The new bill—”An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service”—is considered complementary to two other bills—C-46 and C-47—both of which were introduced in June and are still at the committee stage, reports the Vancouver Sun.

Bill C-46 —the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act— provides police with additional tools to obtain information from internet providers related to any criminal investigation. The tools include preservation orders to freeze data for up to 21 days, production orders compelling a company to provide a customer’s e-mail or IP address, and tracking orders to require a cellphone company to use its network to assist police in finding a particular cellphone or BlackBerry user.

Bill C-4 —the Technical Assistance for Law Enforcement in the 21st Century Act—allows police to obtain information about clients from internet providers and forces those companies to have the technical ability to allow police to intercept information.

The new law, if passed, would reportedly would impose fines of up to $95,000 on corporate Internet service providers or up to $9,500 and six months in jail for sole proprietors who fail to report child pornography. It would also require ISPs to safeguard evidence if they believe an offence involving images of child sexual abuse has been committed using a server they provide, and would make it mandatory that any tip received by ISPs about potential “child porn” sites be reported to a designated agency.

Taken from avn.com

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