From the book Hot Sex: Over 200 Things You Can Try Tonight!

I’m having a realization these days about what I think about mainstream porn. It’s not that I don’t get why people enjoy mainstream erotica, or that I don’t approve of people making it, or watching it. I do get it and I approve of this message. Heck, I’ve worked for Candida Royalle and I made my own stuff , and even the work I did isn’t the kind of porn I watch. That’s because I don’t watch most porn. I realize most porn, the more mainstream sex stuff, it doesn’t do much for me. That, of course, doesn’t mean you can’t have hot sex as a result of watching porn, or as a result of reading it. You can, and lots of people do. Honestly, with the exception of a few videos, and a handful of pictures, porn isn’t what gets me going. Kissing is.

That being said, I love when CNN actually does a useful article on getting tested for sexually transmitted infections by talking about getting tested for STD’s (I prefer the term STI’s) in porn. I do believe that in porn, on the spot STI testing should be an option, and that’s the one thing that’s always bugged me about the standard 30 day testing “rule” in porn. This sort of scenario. What happens if Porn Star 1, let’s call him Hot Rod, after being tested on day one, Hot Rod heads out on a drunken sexfest and, over the course of the next 29 days, has interactions with 43 orifices. Hot Rod waits until he has to be tested again to find out he has not one, but two, STI’s that’s he’s contracted over the course of the last 29 days of sexing and festing. He didn’t have to figure this out for 29 days and he now has possibly passed his STI’s on to 43 other orifices. There’s no guarantee that this sort of thing won’t, or doesn’t, happen.

It has to happen.

I think most porn stars would call it an occupational hazard.

On the positive Pollyanna side (Pollyanna, a name by the way, that was given to me in college for a stoner game that my friends and I used to play), the porn community, and I’m talking the LA porn community, is not as large as one might think, and therefore news of a regular STI maker would definitely raise eyebrows.

So, if we look at that actors in porn get tested more often than people not in porn, then we can say, in porn they encourage, and act, on STI testing. Even if they are having more sex than your average frat boy, and not all of them are, there are lots of people out there not using condoms and not getting tested who don’t get paid to have sex. Of course porn testing should be mandatory, but so should testing of sexually active, non-monogamous regular “civilians” (a term used in porn to describe anyone not in porn) too. And let this serve as a reminder that we all need to be tested and on top of our sexual health.

And yes, porn valley is just one type of porn, and like I said, not the type that does it for me. Of course there are other alternatives, or as I prefer to refer to these types of erotica as, broader options.