SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Kink.com founder Peter Acworth vowed late Friday to fight $78,000 in fines levied by the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA) after an agency investigation of the adult fetish studio claimed to find workplace safety violations.
According to the Cal/OSHA report, the fine covered safety-related building code violations revolving around the ongoing restoration of the company’s 100-year-old Armory facility, but the bulk of the penalty — $50,000 — was assessed for what the agency termed “failure to protect employees from blood-borne pathogens.”
Acworth called the entire investigation “politically motivated” and the fines “excessive.”
“These complaints [that initiated the Cal/OSHA investigation] were not made by employees, but by AIDS Heathcare Foundation, the same organization behind the various bills in Sacramento which would aim to legally mandate condoms in adult productions,” Acworth noted in a Jan. 31 post to his blog.
“The fines levied against Kink.com are not isolated. In the past few years, there have been increasing number of citations handed down to adult companies, often from inspections prompted by outside groups,” he added. “I cannot help but suspect an agenda to criminalize adult production is at play.”
The screed expresses frustration not uncommon in California’s adult entertainment industry. AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a charitable organization supposedly devoted to providing medical care and support for those stricken with HIV/AIDS, has spent millions of dollars and untold man-hours promoting a “mandatory condoms in porn” agenda that reaches from the streets of Los Angeles’s Porn Valley to the state house in Sacramento. AHF drafted and funded the passage of a Los Angeles County ordinance that requires performers to wear so-called barrier protection in all sexually explicit scenes and establishes an onerous, expensive permitting and inspection procedure for all adult film sets. The law, partially set aside by a judge late last year and currently on appeal in a U.S. District Court, served as the pattern for three statewide bills proposed by State Assembly Member Isadore Hall III. The most recent of the bills awaits hearing in the state legislature.
AHF, in fact, did seek a Cal/OSHA investigation in August 2013 after two performers employed by Kink.com tested positive for HIV. Though industry-wide testing of all active performers turned up no evidence of on-set disease transmission — indicating the infected performers, who were in an off-screen relationship, probably acquired the disease during pursuits not related to their employment by Kink — AHF remained adamant the adult industry was to blame because the industry resists the mandatory imposition of condoms. Kink, for example, allows performers to use condoms at their discretion but does not require anyone to be “covered.”
“There are various reasons I believe condoms should be optional for performers,” Acworth noted. “The primary reason is that this is the opinion of the majority of performers. Many cite issues such as discomfort, and that in the context of hardcore sex lasting several hours, condoms can lead to abrasions and tears that in some instances can make sex less safe.”
Acworth also worries that by pursuing adult producers as the root of what AHF has called “a public health crisis,” Cal/OSHA appears to be persecuting a class of people who are behaving legally and responsibly. Instead, he indicates, the state agency should consider other behaviors that may be at play in the exposure scenario.
“…Cal-OSHA’s stance appears to avoid the basic facts,” Acworth wrote. “Since 2004, when current [adult industry-designed] testing protocols were put in place, there has not been a single case of HIV transmission on an adult film set in the US. This is known for sure, since in the rare cases a potential performer tests positive for HIV, we can halt production and retest all the partners with whom the positive performer worked. In every case since 2004, the conclusion has been that HIV was contracted by the performer in their personal lives. This is obviously something the industry cannot control, and not something any Cal-OSHA regulation will address.”
Ideally, he observed, everyone’s best interests — performers’, the state’s, taxpayers’ and certainly healthcare charities’ — might be better served if everyone worked together to find a more appropriate solution than attempting to regulate a problem that doesn’t exist.
“It would be wonderful if we could all come together productively — AIDS organizations, Cal-OSHA, the adult entertainment industry and performers themselves — with the common goal of protecting performer interests and maximizing safety.”
