The price of fantasy

The Sunday L.A. Times magazine of 12 Jan 03 has a very interesting article on the health risks taken by performers in Southern California's porn industry. Curiously, the article seems to think the problem is that "the industry is unregulated." I think the problem has more to do with supply and demand on the one hand and the lack of unions on the other. There is an endless supply of young talent for porn, youths between 18 and 30 who have a sense of invulnerability that's typical for young people; as long as there are more of them than there are roles, they'll remain disposable.

What they need to do is unionize, but:

Deborah Sanchez, supervising attorney for the Los Angeles City Attorney's special enforcement unit, is sympathetic to the plight of porn performers but sees little support from the public. "This reminds me of all the other types of businesses that have traditionally been oppressors--the garment industry, for example," Sanchez says. "The difference is, there are unions for garment workers" these days.

Mainstream Hollywood actors have a union that oversees wages, health insurance, retirement benefits and residual payments. Screen Actors Guild officials say they would never allow their members to work on an adult set.

Some adult-film actors know that they are entitled to employee protections such as workers' compensation and overtime, but they see no way performers could organize. "You would have to get every actor and actress in adult to sign up at the same minute," says an actress who goes by the stage name Wendy Divine and has worked on Vivid and K-Beech productions for several years. "Even if that happened, the studios could easily find replacements. They control everything."

Oh, come on, you guys. If the farmworkers and the garment workers could do it, you can do it.

Now, a note on the following entry. It's fucked up in the way that only Blogger can fuck things up. From time to time entries get concatenated, and it's happened again. I was trying to post something entirely different.