, has added me to his blogging goodness. Blogging goodness!?!? Hee. Yeah, so no, I'm still not over the whole getting excited when someone links me thing.
Especially when it allows me to segue into a topic I've not yet covered over here. In this case? The HIV scare in the porn industry.
Anyone who's read mikey knows that he has a normal, healthy affinity for porn -- no more or less than the average dude, as far as I can tell -- as well as quite a few pornstar friends. In fact, I probably got the 411 on the whole thing from him or someone I traveled to from him, but anyway ... so I read about the whole thing, thought it sucked, whatever. Then I saw the whole thing about Jenna Jameson and her husband putting together the telethon or however they want to raise the funds for their colleagues in porn and ... thought nothing of it, really. I mean, you know, cool, good for them, whatever.
So then tonight, I cruised on over to another linky friend of mine,
Kim, and saw what she had to
say about it. And now? I'm ... kind of on the fence.
I do agree with Kim ... to a point. Why these people haven't used condoms (especially the female kind, which can be inserted prior to doin' it and, I imagine, hidden by good camera-ing if you don't want to kill the illusion) is pure stupidity. Yeah, I know they subject themselves to testing every month; yeah, I know they say they're careful; but no, there's no excuse that's going to satisfy me on that. Condoms don't even protect you from everything, anyway -- and I know of what I speak -- but it is 100 times better than catching HIV. So in that respect, if you're not going to take responsibility for your actions, weeeeeeeeeeellll ... you own that and what comes with it.
That being said, no one deserves to die, either, which will likely happen if anyone gets sick and doesn't have a health plan to help cover the thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars it's going to take each month to buy the medicine that keeps the viral load down --
IF it does at all, because seriously? Most people cannot tolerate most HIV protocols, so they'll be spending money that they don't have and aren't going to be able to make. Therefore, if Jenna and Co. are wanting to help in that respect, I think that's cool; really, how much different is it than people walking for MS or breast cancer? Or bowling for diabetes? (Of course, I'm not sure they're even thinking that far ahead based on what I've read, so to that I say, if they need to get a job at Wal-Mart in the interim, we all do what we gotta.)
Many of my friends are outraged at the whole porn/lad mag/stripper industry, and I'm not. I don't think it's a good choice of careers, and certainly wouldn't want my daughter hanging off the pole, but I can't stop other people from doing it, just as you can't stop a person from working in a building full of asbestos. I guess that's the risk you take.
[Full disclosure: No, I'm not HIV positive, but I had the great fortune of seeing Jim Thode of the NWI Aliveness Project give a talk about HIV/AIDS a couple years ago, and I've never forgotten much of what he said.]
Oh, whatEVER. 
