By Isawindow Corredor
Special to YNOT
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – As you are all aware, there’s an ongoing controversy in my home state of California over the question of whether performers in pornographic films should be required to wear condoms during filming.
While I once fully backed this requirement, I’m now convinced it doesn’t go nearly far enough. To protect the public, to ensure the health of these performers and to absolutely assure I have nothing to worry about after certain private meetings with certain highly-passionate constituents who work in the entertainment industry, I have proposed a new bill called the Adult Performer Peril Mitigation Act of 2015, or APPMA.
While the bill has many elements and calls for numerous changes to California law and public policy, the most important facet of APPMA is the requirement that all adult performers have permanent prophylactics surgically affixed to, or implanted within, their bodies.
Equipping each and every adult performer with permanent in-body barrier protection provides many advantages over the current requirements delineated in the Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act, including assuring no performer will ever be faced with a choice between working and protecting his or her health.
With permanent barrier protection firmly in place, no sleazy porn producer can ever again wag his fat, hairy-knuckled, gaudy-ring-adorned finger in the face of a concerned performer and tell her “No bareback, no check.”
Critics of APPMA say it’s not right to force people to have surgery, or unfair to tell adult performers they can’t work unless they agree to have foreign objects irrevocably embedded in an orifice. Tell me, though: Would these same critics rather have their elected representatives contract STDs every time we have “off-site meetings” with certain unnamed “consultants” who advise us on regulatory policy pertaining to the entertainment industry?
It’s also unfair to say APPMA would rob porn stars of choice. They’d still have the choice of not being porn stars, after all — or they can move to Prague or Budapest or some Godforsaken, non-California place right here in America where real estate is super cheap and nobody gives a single legislative shit about how porn is made, like Detroit.
I’m sure there will be some objections from the legal community, as well, particularly the portion of the legal community that can still utter the phrase “adult industry attorney” with a straight face.
No doubt one or more of these smutty shysters will pen a column in which they decry my proposal as “Draconian,” or “unconstitutional” or “a total dick move,” but aside from the clients whose phone calls they never return, who gives a shit what some necktie-wearing douchebag with a law degree says?
After all, outside of the one performer who lost her freaking mind and married one of them, a porn star will only touch an adult industry attorney if the funding of her right of publicity lawsuit against Adult Companion Locator depends on it — and even then, all the lawyer will get is a hand-job. Even I have to admit that’s pretty low-risk from a disease-transmission perspective.
We all know the real reason the adult industry opposes the use of condoms in their movies is an unfounded concern fans won’t buy porn in which condoms are used. Since nobody buys porn anymore to begin with, this complaint doesn’t get far with me.
I mean, who cares whether the free online porn to which college kids masturbate is precisely to their liking? They’re still going to find something to stroke to, because the only other alternative is trying to find another person with whom to have real sex — and to do that, they might have to put down their phones.
At the moment, APPMA is still in committee, where my highly-respected colleague Karen Baxter, who represents the highly-respected shithole of Conchord, Calif., keeps trying to attach a rider that would require Californians to register throwing darts as “dangerous projectile weapons.”
I’m confident we’ll soon arrive at verbiage on which we can all agree, because I don’t think it will take more than a few thousand carefully laundered bucks and an (empty) promise to endorse her during the next election cycle to get Ms. Baxter to shut the fuck up about darts long enough to get the bill on the main floor for a vote.
The bottom line is, California urgently needs APPMA, friends — and you can help make it happen.
Even if you don’t live in California, it’s pretty easy to pretend you do in an email to an assemblyperson here. Just don’t get too specific about your neighborhood or any of the issues facing our state, because if you accidentally slip in a complaint about how long it takes for you to get to work in Manhattan from Weehawken using the Lincoln Tunnel, even my intellectually challenged colleagues in the Assembly are liable to put two and two together. (They’ll come up with seven, of course, but the tunnel reference still might raise suspicion.)
You’re also encouraged to donate financially to the APPMA cause, an effort that, despite receiving several million dollars from certain generous, anonymous and not provably Mormon donors in Utah, still hasn’t raised enough money for me to renovate my living room without anybody noticing the missing funds.
Some of you probably think the effort to force porn stars to be safer at work, at home and at Pornstar Karaoke is a misguided waste of time, effort and money — not to mention a waste of condoms. Even if you think this, though, you can still make a difference with your votes, your feedback and your financial support.
After all, just as Stoya’s vaginal walls will never spontaneously develop a protective latex barrier of their own accord, the new HD entertainment center on which I have my eye isn’t going to pay for itself.
Isawindow Corredor is the California assemblyman representing California’s 81st District, a barren patch of tumbleweeds located between El Centro and Bonds Corner.
Image © 2008, Jeremiah Ro.
