Miss Calico, a BDSM porn performer and sex worker advocate, points to a adult film director Ernest Greene’s reponse to the coverage of a reported HIV case among US porn performers. When it comes to porn, notions of privacy, confidentiality, and rights get secondary play over outdated and just flat wrong figures on how hugely profitable porn is (isn’t), and fearmongering over porn actors “infecting” the “general public.”

Among the concerns from the industry named by Calico and Greene that aren’t making it to the press: pressuring AIM, the professional clinic that tests performers, to release names of the HIV+ performers is a breach of their rights; relying on current OSHA standards to regulate the porn business without tailoring them to porn industry could result in more danger for performers; and I’ll add one more from indie porn director Tony Comstock: what’s with printing these major studio directors’ assertions that the “right” not to use a condom is something performers actually would privlege over their own health without asking performers themselves? (Update: Thomas Roche on what’s really contagious in Pornlandia: “bullshit.”)