California's porn tax / Violet Blue has serious concerns when lawmakers get in bed with fundamentalists for a 'money shot'

If California lawmakers are going to levy a draconian vice tax on porn, it seems only fair that consumers get to decide what kind of porn should be taxed. For instance, only really bad porn should cost extra at the checkout counter. Is it from the 1980s? Tax that ass. Starlets with breasts that look like face-hugging aliens about to explode and kill viewers? Check. Does it feature performers who emit noises that prompt my neighbors to call Animal Care and Control out of concern? That will cost you extra, pal. Scary fingernails, racial stereotypes, formulaic Cirque du Soleil sex positions, using the same five guys that seem to be in every straight porn film? Definitely charge extra to anyone who masturbates to that.

I could really get behind this porn tax thing if it meant seeing less of Evan Stone on my desktop. But what Assembly member Charles Calderon, D-Montebello, wants to do to shore up California's pasta strainer of a budget by pushing a bill to tax porn makes about as much sense as taxing films like "Das Bootie," "Spray It Forward" or "Blowjob Impossible" to create a slush fund.

Calderon says his bill could raise as much as $665 million in tax revenue each year off the $4 billion-a-year porn industry (though a reliable source for this dollar figure has yet to be produced in any media quote). This cherry pie-in-the-sky figure would go into creating and fueling an "Adult Entertainment Impact Fund." Calderon's titty-tax is morally motivated: He would use the tax revenue to mitigate the cost to taxpayers of "secondary effects" generated by the industry, such as "law enforcement at adult venues, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases and other social services." Tom White, Calderon's chief of staff, is widely quoted as saying, "There is a high rate of drug and alcohol abuse in the industry, STDs, mental health problems and pregnancies. The industry is such that oftentimes people get burned through and come out with nothing, no job skills or education, so they need job training or state services."

Yes, Calderon — and his fundie cronies — want to tax your lube to save our schools. Calderon's AB 2914 is sort of the anti-porn, anti-masturbation superhero: The 25 percent tax would be levied on strip club fees, pornographic movies, pay-per-view films, sex toys and more. A close read of the bill shows that the tax would be applied to anything that falls under federal record-keeping requirements under the (repeatedly struck down and continually challenged) 2257 Section 18 laws. This means any item, including but not limited to a book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, digital image or digitally or computer-manipulated image that includes "sexually explicit conduct." According to AB 2914, sexually explicit conduct is defined as "sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; masturbation; sadistic or masochistic abuse; lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person."

Taxing porn because it's categorically bad is a slam-dunk for wining support: Manufactured outrage always gets the job done in politics when it comes to gay marriage, wars, sexual predators and porn. Calderon's been press-touring the bill with former porn stars who've loudly found God and — like the bill itself — take for granted that everyone's just going to buy 30-year-old anti-porn myths: porn's alleged "secondary effects." And here we just thought that porn's negative secondary effects were those tough-to-remove stains on the couch, a little RSI after a viewing of "On Golden Blonde," or a sticky mouse.

But according to Calderon's bill, sex toys, pay-per-view cable porn and my weary copy of "Buffy the Vampire Layer" increase crime at or near production locations, adversely impact mental health and lead to increased alcohol and substance abuse by those involved, increase the performers' chances of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, encourage unsafe sex by consumers, often encourage sexually aggressive behavior toward women, and increase the medical costs of the participants in the production of adult entertainment and adult entertainment merchandise.

I'll agree with the safer sex bit — porn makes some really awful choices when it comes to modeling safer sex practices. But along with increasing crime, the alleged "secondary effects" of "Boobarella" also seem to make the whole entire world a dangerous place. "The Internet provides the children of this state with easy access to sexual content, which may negatively influence their developing attitudes toward sexuality and relationships. Adult entertainment venues adversely impact the character of local neighborhoods by, among other things, reducing local property values, curtailing development, and engendering many types of criminal activities. Adult entertainment venues endanger the health, safety and welfare of citizens in their vicinity. These negative secondary effects, in turn, drain public resources dedicated to public social service programs, and place a significant strain on the courts of this state."

Calderon apparently knows all of this is true because Los Angeles has crime near its adult entertainment venues. And like his chief of staff, everybody just knows that adult access to porn or even a single Ron Jeremy Jelly SuperSoaker Dong causes children to have bad sex when they grow up and reduces your property values. And safety in neighborhoods where they make the vile stuff? Maybe we should ask everyone around Mission and 14th streets how they feel about having an abandoned landmark restored, open for family oriented community events and the lights maintained and kept on at night — all because the Porn Palace (Kink.com) moved into the San Francisco Armory.

Until Calderon can produce proof to back his exact statements about secondary effects, it's a bill made of crazy talk. He has yet to produce any proof, let alone objective and verifiable studies or data to back his claims about porn making us all alcoholics (unless you count the nights I spent trying to drink away the pain of being leg humped by a gay-for-pay porn star at the last GayVNs I attended). And never mind that the porn industry already has its own industry-funded medical clinics (the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation) that provide medical testing, job and mental health counseling, substance abuse programs and job transitioning programs for any and all performers. Public resources not needed, thanks. And if you know anything about HIV tests, let me just say that porn stars get the good, expensive ones, compared to us community clinic civilians.

But Calderon's office doesn't need data when they have the lord on their side. After her very brief career as a porn performer 15 years ago, anti-porn fundamentalist Christian preacher Shelley Lubben and her Pink Cross Foundationhave backed the bill from the beginning, and she's been speaking and appearing with Calderon in support and to lend her expertise about the evils of pornography. Lubben states, "A tax is justified because of the ill effects porn has on performers and consumers. Everything from addiction to drugs or sex itself, assault, disease, rape and prostitution can be counted as side effects of the industry."

Interestingly, a year ago I was invited to Google's Mountain View headquarters to give a Google Tech Talk about sexual privacy. I was supposed to speak about a week after Lubben was to give a talk appealing to Google to help save the world — and women and children and marriages — from porn. During my talk, I took a minute to disprove her claims, but I was told by the audience that Lubben, in fact, had backed out of her appearance — once employees offered to help her gather data to back up her statements about pornography.

Calderon is calling his AB 2914 a "sin tax," akin to alcohol and tobacco taxes. Except that smoking actually causes cancer and will kill you, and porn causes ... masturbation. Which, incidentally, is recommended to men for prostate health maintenance, so one could even say that masturbation — nay, using porn — prevents cancer.

It's OK — I don't think we'll need to dress like pirates, raid a container ship and dump bales of "Breast In Show" into the Bay anytime soon. The bill is unconstitutional.

Now, if they said that the money went toward saving the kittens, I think they'd be completely justified.

Violet Blue is a Forbes "Web Celeb", notorious blogger (Laughing Squid), high-profile tech personality and one of Wired's "Faces of Innovation." She writes for outlets ranging from Forbes.com to O, The Oprah Magazine. She is regarded as the foremost expert in the field of sex and technology, a sex-positive pundit in mainstream media ( CNN, The Oprah Winfrey Show) and is interviewed, quoted and featured prominently by major media outlets. Violet has many award-winning, best-selling books, a famous podcast, is fun to follow on Twitter, and is a San Francisco native.

Blue headlines at conferences ranging from ETech, The Forbes Internet Leadership Conference, LeWeb and SXSW: Interactive, to Google Tech Talks at Google, Inc. Her tech site is Techyum; her audio and e-books are at Digita Publications.

For more information and links to Web sites discussed in Open Source Sex, go to Violet Blue's Web site, tinynibbles.com.