https://radaronline.com/celebrity-news/august-ames-depressed-death-tragic-last-texts/


I'll summarize. Saw this on google news yesterday morning and bothered me a bit. Ames posted on twitter warning whichever actress replaced her for a scene would be working with male talent that had previously done homosexual porn. She was immediately accused of being homophobic by a lot of people and even after attempting to explain her reasoning was continuously harassed. Ended it by tweeting "F (sic) y'all)." She hanged herself later on. Not sure of the exact timetable, but it was shortly after.

After her death was announced several of the harassers said they didn't care or were even happy about it. Some were a bit worse than that.

Anyway, her reasoning for not working with a male who had done gay porn was that they aren't subject to the same level of testing as heterosexual talent and as such there's apparently a greater risk of STD/I. But that's completely ignoring that a woman chooses who she sleeps with and it's her damn body. You can't force her to sleep with anyone. Even for a job. What the hell? It's really maddening for this to happen at the same time Time chose silence breakers for their person(s) of the year.

Just trying to make more people aware of this. I wasn't a fan of hers, I don't have anything against pornography, but I think the industry is terrifying and abusive. It's just sick that a 23 year old committed suicide and people are celebrating.

Sickening... and feth those bullies.

R.I.P. Ames.

It's unfortunate that she's dead, as most deaths are, but let's not pretend that it wasn't homophobic. Repeating myths about gay men being a disease threat is not ok.

But that's completely ignoring that a woman chooses who she sleeps with and it's her damn body. You can't force her to sleep with anyone. Even for a job. What the hell?

You can't (morally) force her to have sex with anyone, even for a job. But that doesn't mean that you can't criticize her statements about the subject. Consider for a second someone who is a racist, and says "I won't sleep with those {racial slur}s, they aren't even human". Yes, they have a right to control of their body and it would obviously be wrong to force them to have sex with a person of their hated race, but are we supposed to refrain from calling them a racist because it has to do with sex? Of course not.

 Peregrine wrote:
It's unfortunate that she's dead, as most deaths are, but let's not pretend that it wasn't homophobic. Repeating myths about gay men being a disease threat is not ok.

But that's completely ignoring that a woman chooses who she sleeps with and it's her damn body. You can't force her to sleep with anyone. Even for a job. What the hell?

You can't (morally) force her to have sex with anyone, even for a job. But that doesn't mean that you can't criticize her statements about the subject. Consider for a second someone who is a racist, and says "I won't sleep with those {racial slur}s, they aren't even human". Yes, they have a right to control of their body and it would obviously be wrong to force them to have sex with a person of their hated race, but are we supposed to refrain from calling them a racist because it has to do with sex? Of course not.

What I've read (and this is coming from people in the industry) is that there is no actual testing in gay porn and they only wear condoms. By comparison there is testing for heterosexual shoots. Pretty clear this poses a problem.

 trexmeyer wrote:
What I've read (and this is coming from people in the industry) is that there is no actual testing in gay porn and they only wear condoms. By comparison there is testing for heterosexual shoots. Pretty clear this poses a problem.

Aside from the inaccuracy of the claim (testing in gay porn is a thing, even if it isn't as common as it should be), it doesn't matter what the testing policy there is because a man having sex with a woman would be involved in a heterosexual shoot and subject to that company's testing policy. If a male actor clears the tests then they aren't a risk just because they had sex with another man at some point in the past.

*** removed post as I misunderstood Peregrine ***

 whembly wrote:
Those weren't constructive criticisms... those were malicious bullying.

O.o Dude... really?

Last I checked, there’s a word for when a woman is threatened and bullied into sex with someone she feels uncomfortable with, for any reason whatsoever...

Lemme provide a hint... a four letter word that starts with a letter "R".

Hint: there is a difference between "that's a homophobic thing to say" and "you must have sex with this man". Please pay attention to which of them I did and did not say, and did and did not endorse, before making accusations like that.

Internet lets people to be sickening to other human beings free of charge. We are a long way from protecting people from cyber harassment as we do from real life harrassement.
Mix this to the porn industry, that is basically hollywood but without euphemisms, a industry that destroys people, young people, and its surprising theres not even more things like this.
Did you know, theres a wiki out there of porn actors and actress, but just with their real life information? Phone numver, name, names of parents and friends, direction of their family, Sexual diseases, etc... And this wiki is not made by fans. Is made by people that hate porn at a hateful level. All that information has been stolen by illegal means, so people can go an destroy those peoples lives.

 Peregrine wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Those weren't constructive criticisms... those were malicious bullying.

O.o Dude... really?

Last I checked, there’s a word for when a woman is threatened and bullied into sex with someone she feels uncomfortable with, for any reason whatsoever...

Lemme provide a hint... a four letter word that starts with a letter "R".

Hint: there is a difference between "that's a homophobic thing to say" and "you must have sex with this man". Please pay attention to which of them I did and did not say, and did and did not endorse, before making accusations like that.

Yes, you made that distinction.

Seems like a bit victim blaming there when you started the ..."but let's not pretend that it wasn't homophobic. Repeating myths about gay men being a disease threat is not ok. " speil.

If folks wanted to education her on *why* that's a misconception, have a constructive conversation.

Instead, she was shamed and relentlessly terrorized until she decided to hang herself.

Over a god damned tweet.

Stop dishonestly misrepresenting what I did and did not say. Nowhere in there did I endorse bullying or celebrate the fact that she is dead.

*** removed post as I misunderstood Peregrine ***

Shameful display. Whether she was being a bigot or not is irrelevant. You don’t drive someone to suicide and then be proud of it. Bigots are still people and you don’t pat yourself on the back because someone you don’t like is dead. Disgusting.

*** removed post as I misunderstood Peregrine ***

 Peregrine wrote:
It's unfortunate that she's dead, as most deaths are, but let's not pretend that it wasn't homophobic. Repeating myths about gay men being a disease threat is not ok.

But that's completely ignoring that a woman chooses who she sleeps with and it's her damn body. You can't force her to sleep with anyone. Even for a job. What the hell?

You can't (morally) force her to have sex with anyone, even for a job. But that doesn't mean that you can't criticize her statements about the subject. Consider for a second someone who is a racist, and says "I won't sleep with those {racial slur}s, they aren't even human". Yes, they have a right to control of their body and it would obviously be wrong to force them to have sex with a person of their hated race, but are we supposed to refrain from calling them a racist because it has to do with sex? Of course not.

There is a massive difference between saying I won't sleep with "racial slur here" and "Hey, girl, heads up that your cohort did gay porn." One is a deliberate attack upon a person due to the color of their skin, the other is simply stating a fact. HIV/Syphilis/Herpes has been spread many times in the porn industry from what I understand over the decades, and even with modern government regulations, which you can get around, [see example of the documentary I mention later in the post]. So, given that she worked in the industry, wouldn't she likely have a lot more knowledge as to if it is true or not? Or how much caution one should exercise? I mean I've never done straight or gay porn, or porn of any kind for that matter, and I for one would want to be aware of such issues if I did. If that makes me homophobic, then so be it. People do have a right to be informed as to who they're working with, nowhere more so than the pornographic film industry. If you've never seen "Hot Girls Wanted" it's on Netflix and it will open your eyes to just how shady and untrustworthy a huge, and I mean huge segment of the Adult Film industry is.

What you have here is just another case of the PC police getting very upset because someone else has a different view counter to theirs, and in their normal fashion, they take to harassing her to the point that she commits suicide. The actions of this smaller group within the larger group also only serves to hurt their ideology as a whole. It's the same thing as when one of those White Supremacist nut jobs goes on a car or shooting rampage. Weak. Minded. People. It's very, very sad.

It's getting to the point where I actively dislike anyone who calls themselves Conservative or Liberal these days. More often than not, they've been shown to be disingenuous, weak-minded individuals with far too much time on their hands resulting in their need to play social engineer.

 Peregrine wrote:
It's unfortunate that she's dead, as most deaths are, but let's not pretend that it wasn't homophobic. Repeating myths about gay men being a disease threat is not ok.

But that's completely ignoring that a woman chooses who she sleeps with and it's her damn body. You can't force her to sleep with anyone. Even for a job. What the hell?

You can't (morally) force her to have sex with anyone, even for a job. But that doesn't mean that you can't criticize her statements about the subject. Consider for a second someone who is a racist, and says "I won't sleep with those {racial slur}s, they aren't even human". Yes, they have a right to control of their body and it would obviously be wrong to force them to have sex with a person of their hated race, but are we supposed to refrain from calling them a racist because it has to do with sex? Of course not.

Except she didn't do it in anyway for hateful reasons. She listed very clear and concise reasons as to why performing with folks who are a part of the gay porn industry can be dangerous (and news flash, it can be). Being a highly involved member of the industry, she's very well positioned to understand the risks involved.

Seriously, this is victim blaming Peregrine. She made a business decision, to take measures to secure her own health. Trying to equate it to a racist is bullcrap. The people who attacked her so viciously that she felt suicide was preferable is bullcrap. No one. I repeat NO ONE, deserves that treatment, and trying to justify it like you are is disgusting.

 whembly wrote:
Sickening... and feth those bullies.

R.I.P. Ames.

Nah dude, these are the situations that make bullies cool! Trust me, I learned it from here!

JFC, is it really that hard to read what I actually wrote and not dishonestly misrepresent it? There is a huge difference between "what she said was wrong" and "therefore it was ok to bully her into suicide". Nowhere in there did I say anything approving of the people who harassed her to the point that she felt that death was a better option, so I would really appreciate it if people would stop pretending that I did.

 Peregrine wrote:
JFC, is it really that hard to read what I actually wrote and not dishonestly misrepresent it? There is a huge difference between "what she said was wrong" and "therefore it was ok to bully her into suicide". Nowhere in there did I say anything approving of the people who harassed her to the point that she felt that death was a better option, so I would really appreciate it if people would stop pretending that I did.

I have to cautiously disagree with your statement that what she said was "wrong". You called the increased risk of HIV infections during intercourse with men who have sex with men a "myth", when, unfortunately, it can't be called a myth. Coming from the medical field and having had some contact with infectiology departments taking care of long-term HIV patients, official governmental guidelines simply show that this group in the general population DOES have an increased risk of being infected with HIV.

For example, in Germany there are roughly 70,000 HIV-positive patients, and 65% of these are homosexual men (or men having sex with men more generally). Drug users and people coming from high risk countries make up just 5% and 12% respectively in this statistic. These numbers come from an official guideline for medical doctors I linked below.

So, simply stating that this group in the population DOES have an increased risk of carrying HIV can neither be called wrong or a myth, it is an unfortunate fact that medical professionals are working on rectifying. As such, telling a colleague to be aware of this fact seems reasonable to an extent for me - maybe having done that in private would've been the more tactful choice, yes, but wrong and myth? No.




(https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Merkblaetter/Ratgeber_HIV_AIDS.html;jsessionid=0AD951AA634A760646C66966D6E5330F.2_cid390#doc2374480bodyText3)

 Peregrine wrote:
JFC, is it really that hard to read what I actually wrote and not dishonestly misrepresent it? There is a huge difference between "what she said was wrong" and "therefore it was ok to bully her into suicide". Nowhere in there did I say anything approving of the people who harassed her to the point that she felt that death was a better option, so I would really appreciate it if people would stop pretending that I did.

There's a degree of irony in you agreeing with the harassers when this gal did lesbian scenes.

Also, can you even be homophobic for refusing to have sex with a guy who is gay/has done gay scenes? Excluding her reasoning. Why does tolerance require you have to be willing to sleep with that person?

That strikes me as being slightly insane.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Witzkatz wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
JFC, is it really that hard to read what I actually wrote and not dishonestly misrepresent it? There is a huge difference between "what she said was wrong" and "therefore it was ok to bully her into suicide". Nowhere in there did I say anything approving of the people who harassed her to the point that she felt that death was a better option, so I would really appreciate it if people would stop pretending that I did.

For example, in Germany there are roughly 70,000 HIV-positive patients, and 65% of these are homosexual men (or men having sex with men more generally). Drug users and people coming from high risk countries make up just 5% and 12% respectively in this statistic. These numbers come from an official guideline for medical doctors I linked below.

(https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Merkblaetter/Ratgeber_HIV_AIDS.html;jsessionid=0AD951AA634A760646C66966D6E5330F.2_cid390#doc2374480bodyText3)

And I've seen a similar number in that 70% of new HIV cases are homosexual males.

Hmmm...

This is a tricky one.
However given thr nature of thr job and the nature of level of contact involved then her bring slightly picky who she works with is not beyond reasons.

Its sensible to be careful. A infection could badly harm her health, kill, and destroy any career. She balenced her risks, and chose a path. When the odds are so, then some choices must be considered carefully.

Maybe her reasons where inaccurate and maybe wrong, or not.

This is just OTT.
Just let people choose and I'm sure there's plenty of others who would film. That scene in her place.

HIV/Aids is indeed a problem in the gay community. Simply making people aware of that fact is not homophobic at all, I feel. Never do gay stuff with anyone unless they can prove they are disease-free. That is very sound advice. I know someone who didn't heed it and he has HIV now.
The fact that some people would bully someone over simply giving a good and very important warning is just really sad on multiple levels.

I've got to agree with the point Peregrine made above; any performer who's going to be in heterosexual movies would presumably be just as thoroughly screened as everyone else, so what's the big deal?

I guess the "presumably" part is something that August Ames would probably have known a lot about in regards to her current employers, and maybe she wasn't putting a lot of faith in their protocols for theses cases. In the end, we don't know a lot of details here, I guess. Also it's very possible that Ames was not intimately knowledgeable about sensitivity and specificity of HIV detecting tests and arrays and might've been worried regardless - maybe irrationally, maybe not.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
I've got to agree with the point Peregrine made above; any performer who's going to be in heterosexual movies would presumably be just as thoroughly screened as everyone else, so what's the big deal?

Yeah, because the porn industry is well known as a decent, upstanding and trustworthy industry.

I read through the tweets Ames made and they don't look particularly homophobic to me. At worse maybe misguided, but then I'm not in the porn industry so I'm not going to make comments on whether they are or are not.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Peregrine wrote:
JFC, is it really that hard to read what I actually wrote and not dishonestly misrepresent it? There is a huge difference between "what she said was wrong" and "therefore it was ok to bully her into suicide". Nowhere in there did I say anything approving of the people who harassed her to the point that she felt that death was a better option, so I would really appreciate it if people would stop pretending that I did.

If you don't want to be accused of victim blaming it's best not to start a post with...

 Peregrine wrote:
It's unfortunate that she's dead, as most deaths are, but let's not pretend....

It's up there with "He was innocent and got shot by the police but he shouldn't have....", or "They got stabbed by thugs but they shouldn't have been walking through...." or "She got raped and that's unfortunate but she shouldn't have been acting like..."

I'm more disturbed by the idea of a 23 year old killing themselves because people were mean on the Internet.

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
I'm more disturbed by the idea of a 23 year old killing themselves because people were mean on the Internet.

I guess you've never had much experience of depression then.

I think it'd be extremely easy for a person who's prone to even mild depression to get pushed close to or beyond suicide by people being mean to them on the internet when they might have been totally fine otherwise.

 Witzkatz wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
JFC, is it really that hard to read what I actually wrote and not dishonestly misrepresent it? There is a huge difference between "what she said was wrong" and "therefore it was ok to bully her into suicide". Nowhere in there did I say anything approving of the people who harassed her to the point that she felt that death was a better option, so I would really appreciate it if people would stop pretending that I did.

I have to cautiously disagree with your statement that what she said was "wrong". You called the increased risk of HIV infections during intercourse with men who have sex with men a "myth", when, unfortunately, it can't be called a myth. Coming from the medical field and having had some contact with infectiology departments taking care of long-term HIV patients, official governmental guidelines simply show that this group in the general population DOES have an increased risk of being infected with HIV.

For example, in Germany there are roughly 70,000 HIV-positive patients, and 65% of these are homosexual men (or men having sex with men more generally). Drug users and people coming from high risk countries make up just 5% and 12% respectively in this statistic. These numbers come from an official guideline for medical doctors I linked below.

So, simply stating that this group in the population DOES have an increased risk of carrying HIV can neither be called wrong or a myth, it is an unfortunate fact that medical professionals are working on rectifying. As such, telling a colleague to be aware of this fact seems reasonable to an extent for me - maybe having done that in private would've been the more tactful choice, yes, but wrong and myth? No.




(https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Merkblaetter/Ratgeber_HIV_AIDS.html;jsessionid=0AD951AA634A760646C66966D6E5330F.2_cid390#doc2374480bodyText3)

It's no different in the US. The vast majority of new cases each year for HIV is among the gay male community. 70% per the CDC, as of 2014. There is no shortage of stories of male gay actors being diagnosed with HIV, as well as male gay actors unknowingly transmitting the disease to multiple people, even after being tested.

There is no myth about gay males being a higher risk for giving you HIV. It's cold hard fact. Anyone who spends 20 seconds looking at CDC statistics will understand that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
I've got to agree with the point Peregrine made above; any performer who's going to be in heterosexual movies would presumably be just as thoroughly screened as everyone else, so what's the big deal?

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6505a3.htm?s_cid=mm6505a3_e

Male gay actor who tested negative gave the disease to 4 people within 2 weeks of the test. Testing is not a catch all, by any stretch of the imagination.

 djones520 wrote:

 Witzkatz wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
JFC, is it really that hard to read what I actually wrote and not dishonestly misrepresent it? There is a huge difference between "what she said was wrong" and "therefore it was ok to bully her into suicide". Nowhere in there did I say anything approving of the people who harassed her to the point that she felt that death was a better option, so I would really appreciate it if people would stop pretending that I did.

I have to cautiously disagree with your statement that what she said was "wrong". You called the increased risk of HIV infections during intercourse with men who have sex with men a "myth", when, unfortunately, it can't be called a myth. Coming from the medical field and having had some contact with infectiology departments taking care of long-term HIV patients, official governmental guidelines simply show that this group in the general population DOES have an increased risk of being infected with HIV.

For example, in Germany there are roughly 70,000 HIV-positive patients, and 65% of these are homosexual men (or men having sex with men more generally). Drug users and people coming from high risk countries make up just 5% and 12% respectively in this statistic. These numbers come from an official guideline for medical doctors I linked below.

So, simply stating that this group in the population DOES have an increased risk of carrying HIV can neither be called wrong or a myth, it is an unfortunate fact that medical professionals are working on rectifying. As such, telling a colleague to be aware of this fact seems reasonable to an extent for me - maybe having done that in private would've been the more tactful choice, yes, but wrong and myth? No.




(https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Merkblaetter/Ratgeber_HIV_AIDS.html;jsessionid=0AD951AA634A760646C66966D6E5330F.2_cid390#doc2374480bodyText3)

It's no different in the US. The vast majority of new cases each year for HIV is among the gay male community. 70% per the CDC, as of 2014. There is no shortage of stories of male gay actors being diagnosed with HIV, as well as male gay actors unknowingly transmitting the disease to multiple people, even after being tested.

There is no myth about gay males being a higher risk for giving you HIV. It's cold hard fact. Anyone who spends 20 seconds looking at CDC statistics will understand that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
I've got to agree with the point Peregrine made above; any performer who's going to be in heterosexual movies would presumably be just as thoroughly screened as everyone else, so what's the big deal?

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6505a3.htm?s_cid=mm6505a3_e

Male gay actor who tested negative gave the disease to 4 people within 2 weeks of the test. Testing is not a catch all, by any stretch of the imagination.

HOW DARE YOU ASSAULT US WITH FACTS YOU HOMOPHOBIC BASTARD!

(Please don't kill yourself now.)

 djones520 wrote:

 Witzkatz wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
JFC, is it really that hard to read what I actually wrote and not dishonestly misrepresent it? There is a huge difference between "what she said was wrong" and "therefore it was ok to bully her into suicide". Nowhere in there did I say anything approving of the people who harassed her to the point that she felt that death was a better option, so I would really appreciate it if people would stop pretending that I did.

I have to cautiously disagree with your statement that what she said was "wrong". You called the increased risk of HIV infections during intercourse with men who have sex with men a "myth", when, unfortunately, it can't be called a myth. Coming from the medical field and having had some contact with infectiology departments taking care of long-term HIV patients, official governmental guidelines simply show that this group in the general population DOES have an increased risk of being infected with HIV.

For example, in Germany there are roughly 70,000 HIV-positive patients, and 65% of these are homosexual men (or men having sex with men more generally). Drug users and people coming from high risk countries make up just 5% and 12% respectively in this statistic. These numbers come from an official guideline for medical doctors I linked below.

So, simply stating that this group in the population DOES have an increased risk of carrying HIV can neither be called wrong or a myth, it is an unfortunate fact that medical professionals are working on rectifying. As such, telling a colleague to be aware of this fact seems reasonable to an extent for me - maybe having done that in private would've been the more tactful choice, yes, but wrong and myth? No.




(https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/Infekt/EpidBull/Merkblaetter/Ratgeber_HIV_AIDS.html;jsessionid=0AD951AA634A760646C66966D6E5330F.2_cid390#doc2374480bodyText3)

It's no different in the US. The vast majority of new cases each year for HIV is among the gay male community. 70% per the CDC, as of 2014. There is no shortage of stories of male gay actors being diagnosed with HIV, as well as male gay actors unknowingly transmitting the disease to multiple people, even after being tested.

There is no myth about gay males being a higher risk for giving you HIV. It's cold hard fact. Anyone who spends 20 seconds looking at CDC statistics will understand that.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
I've got to agree with the point Peregrine made above; any performer who's going to be in heterosexual movies would presumably be just as thoroughly screened as everyone else, so what's the big deal?

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/65/wr/mm6505a3.htm?s_cid=mm6505a3_e

Male gay actor who tested negative gave the disease to 4 people within 2 weeks of the test. Testing is not a catch all, by any stretch of the imagination.

This.

The whole story is sad.

It is interesting to watch the societal shift as formerly downtrodden groups become accepted and the same shaming, hateful tactics once used against them are employed by them or on their behalf by others.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
I'm more disturbed by the idea of a 23 year old killing themselves because people were mean on the Internet.

I guess you've never had much experience of depression then.

I think it'd be extremely easy for a person who's prone to even mild depression to get pushed close to or beyond suicide by people being mean to them on the internet when they might have been totally fine otherwise.

I think it came out the woman in question had a hard child hood etx. She was not without past trauma and such.

She my not have been in the best place to begin with and this just played off older, deeper injuries.

 Bromsy wrote:


This.

The whole story is sad.

It is interesting to watch the societal shift as formerly downtrodden groups become accepted and the same shaming, hateful tactics once used against them are employed by them or on their behalf by others.

And then have Peregrine tell us that they were right.

The LGBTQ community is starting to trample all over women's rights. This is just a taste. It's going to be an interesting culture clash.

Edit: Apparently one gay performer told August to apologize or take a cyanide pill. Threatened another woman in a private conversation as well.

This thread looks promising.

I hate to be "that Guy" in this conversation, but this reminds me of a factoid that came up a while back in another discussion.

A while back there was talk of getting rid of the ban on gay men donating blood as the ban was "homophobic". Another group of people banned from donating blood is prostitutes. Oddly enough, according to government stats, hookers are less likely to have HIV than the gay male population, and I don't see anyone standing up for hooker rights.

 trexmeyer wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:


This.

The whole story is sad.

It is interesting to watch the societal shift as formerly downtrodden groups become accepted and the same shaming, hateful tactics once used against them are employed by them or on their behalf by others.

And then have Peregrine tell us that they were right.

The LGBTQ community is starting to trample all over women's rights. This is just a taste. It's going to be an interesting culture clash.

Edit: Apparently one gay performer told August to apologize or take a cyanide pill. Threatened another woman in a private conversation as well.

I think there is answer here ans one that not get me a OT ban.

It does not matter what community, religion or culture. There always will be people who are nasty people.

Don t matter how much a minority, corner, or oppressed group. Thetes always that person. You always have the odd bad egg.

Its just life.

It's just the Greater Internet Fethwad Theory in action. There will always be trolls and other poor examples of humanity that will delight in the pain and suffering of others, regardless of the excuse they use to cause it.

Sociopaths. They are sociopaths, and don’t sugarcoat that. Sociopathy can be traced to nearly every issue this world faces.

This is going to delve towards politics but I think it has to be said. There was a very good article, from the New York Times I think see if I can find it, that came out just a few hours after SCOTUS ruled on United States v. Windsor.

The article basically compared problems in the gay community (lots of anonymous sex, lack of protection used, and drugs) to problems in urban black communities (lots of anonymous sex, lack of protection used, and drugs... yeah) and how these problems were ignored and down played by advocates of equal rights because it was already a uphill battle getting equality without the community being smeared by elitist uptight dicks who jumped at every opportunity to present any failing of group as a massive indictment and justification to discriminate. They deserved equal rights and always have, but now that DOMA was struck down the author wanted people to start being more open about the problems in the community itself and start addressing them rather than continuing to downplay them to achieve political goals.

There is a problem in the gay community with anonymous sex, lack of protection, and drugs. There's a reason why HIV spread so much more rapidly among homosexual men than other demographics and we're at the point now where we really shouldn't be ignoring that this is a real problem. It's gotten much better since the 80s and 90s. Awareness has spread. More men have realized that just because you can't get another guy pregnant doesn't mean you shouldn't follow the rules of safe sex. The problem however persists, particularly in the party and club scene that is dedicated to the gay community were drug use is a bit higher than the norm and thus people aren't in full use of their faculties.

These things aren't bigoted to say, because these problems are real and denying them doesn't make them go away anymore than trying to deny the rights of gay men and women. People shouldn't have to fight for their rights as hard as they seem to have to in this country. It's pathetic and disgraceful how far Americans will go to treat other Americans like garbage (this thread seems a fitting testament), but if it becomes bigoted to say "this is a real problem" then we've reached a much worse point than casual dismissal of basic human decency. At that point we're just pandering. If you care about people you fight for them, and that includes telling them things they might not want to hear.

I don't know if August Aimes was a bigot. I do know she didn't deserve to be treated that way because no one should be treated that way. Sure as hell no one should be applauding her death as some kind of victory.

I attended multiple seminars and courses held by a professor of virology who focuses a lot on HIV in his research, but still sees patients day to day in the clinic. He's very happy that the therapy regimes get better, with less pills and less side effects, but he's also a bit worried - because he's noticed that with better therapy, the specter of HIV gets a little less frightening, and he had a few first cases of people who started to see HIV as "not a big thing" anymore, leading to less safe sex practices again.
Furthermore, therapy has gotten so good and some patients are basically living without any side effects, that he sometimes had to diplomatically remind them that they are still suffering from a life-threating disease that is just kept under check with medication, not eradicated. And while it's true that a low virus copy count in the blood reduces the risk of infecting somebody else, it's not a bulletproof situation, safety is still highly recommended, but might not always be used, especially if a patient feels completely healthy. "Single pill" therapy regimes can make it feel not very different from a high blood pressure therapy where patients sometimes actually forget they have a medical condition, I guess.

These are things true of HIV in general, but they seem relevant to this thread, because I sat in on that professor's HIV ambulance day and there was literally not a single woman as a patient and the vast majority of his long-term patients were gay men. Like LordofHats said, there's not point in denying it, otherwise the issue won't be solved.

 LordofHats wrote:
This is going to delve towards politics but I think it has to be said. There was a very good article, from the New York Times I think see if I can find it, that came out just a few hours after SCOTUS ruled on United States v. Windsor.

The article basically compared problems in the gay community (lots of anonymous sex, lack of protection used, and drugs) to problems in urban black communities (lots of anonymous sex, lack of protection used, and drugs... yeah) and how these problems were ignored and down played by advocates of equal rights because it was already a uphill battle getting equality without the community being smeared by elitist uptight dicks who jumped at every opportunity to present any failing of group as a massive indictment and justification to discriminate. They deserved equal rights and always have, but now that DOMA was struck down the author wanted people to start being more open about the problems in the community itself and start addressing them rather than continuing to downplay them to achieve political goals.

There is a problem in the gay community with anonymous sex, lack of protection, and drugs. There's a reason why HIV spread so much more rapidly among homosexual men than other demographics and we're at the point now where we really shouldn't be ignoring that this is a real problem. It's gotten much better since the 80s and 90s. Awareness has spread. More men have realized that just because you can't get another guy pregnant doesn't mean you shouldn't follow the rules of safe sex. The problem however persists, particularly in the party and club scene that is dedicated to the gay community were drug use is a bit higher than the norm and thus people aren't in full use of their faculties.

These things aren't bigoted to say, because these problems are real and denying them doesn't make them go away anymore than trying to deny the rights of gay men and women. People shouldn't have to fight for their rights as hard as they seem to have to in this country. It's pathetic and disgraceful how far Americans will go to treat other Americans like garbage (this thread seems a fitting testament), but if it becomes bigoted to say "this is a real problem" then we've reached a much worse point than casual dismissal of basic human decency. At that point we're just pandering. If you care about people you fight for them, and that includes telling them things they might not want to hear.

I don't know if August Aimes was a bigot. I do know she didn't deserve to be treated that way because no one should be treated that way. Sure as hell no one should be applauding her death as some kind of victory.

I read a blog post a number of years ago, written by an HIV positive gay man, and it scared the hell out of me, because it was a perfect encapsulation of how high the threat is for the homosexual community. To paraphrase it, he was talking about despite knowing he was HIV positive, he'd frequently visit bathhouses, and participate in unprotected gay sex with men, without telling them that he was HIV positive. He did it because he'd know that if he did tell them, they'd never agree to have sex with him. The physical pleasure was more important to him then someone else's life. When we see that 2% of our population accounts for 70% of new cases every year, it kind of struck me that this person wasn't an odd-man out type of situation.

It is a sad situation, but on the plus side, it seems that the number of transmissions is going down. So while the demographics haven't been changing that much, the number of new cases have been seeing a significant drop, so hopefully more are taking the threat seriously.

Yeah those kinds of suck feths exist out there. Did we just have a major court trial recently about a man who knowingly infected numerous women?

 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah those kinds of suck feths exist out there. Did we just have a major court trial recently about a man who knowingly infected numerous women?

Yeah, a couple of years ago I think.

 djones520 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah those kinds of suck feths exist out there. Did we just have a major court trial recently about a man who knowingly infected numerous women?

Yeah, a couple of years ago I think.

I could swear I heard about something more recent, and I did but it was in Italy. The American case I think I'm thinking of is Nushawn Williams who was up for parole for his crimes in 2010 after being convicted in 1998.

 LordofHats wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah those kinds of suck feths exist out there. Did we just have a major court trial recently about a man who knowingly infected numerous women?

Yeah, a couple of years ago I think.

I could swear I heard about something more recent, and I did but it was in Italy. The American case I think I'm thinking of is Nushawn Williams who was up for parole for his crimes in 2010 after being convicted in 1998.

24 years is not long enough for inflicting life long torture on other human beings.

Holy crap... California just pass a law no longer making the knowing transmission of HIV a felony. That is just...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/10/09/knowingly-infecting-others-with-hiv-is-no-longer-a-felony-in-california-advocates-say-it-targeted-sex-workers/?utm_term=.ff7b797d6828

I agree. Unfortunately some judges and lawyers have noted that our laws don't exactly cover this kind of thing well making it iffy to prosecute. The Army actually dragged up an old anti-gay law (crimes against nature) when a soldier who was ordered to inform any partners of his being HiV positive ignored the order, had sex with a high school kid, and passed the disease to him. The only other charge was "assault with a deadly weapon" which carried a light sentence but throwing in "crimes against nature" (an archaic law against anal sex) allowed the court to send him to a military prison for 40 years. So yeah. He's probably doing just dandy. It was a huge scandal the last year I was at Bragg. Everyone was talking about it, which really sucked cause this guy was married with kids.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 djones520 wrote:
Holy crap... California just pass a law no longer making the knowing transmission of HIV a felony. That is just...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/10/09/knowingly-infecting-others-with-hiv-is-no-longer-a-felony-in-california-advocates-say-it-targeted-sex-workers/?utm_term=.ff7b797d6828

To be fair DJ, there is a valid point there. The knowing transmission of a lot of potentially deadly diseases isn't treated as a felony and some of those are even more immediately deadly than HIV (a point mentioned in the article linked). I think that's a valid point, especially since California can still charge offenders with assault, which in the state of California includes knowingly passing diseases/toxins to others.

I agree, but the answer in this case isn't "Well, the laws don't equally cover all things, so we're just going to get rid of the ones we have."

There were fair points in how the law was used to unfairly target those who didn't even know they had the disease, so change the law to ensure it doesn't do that, don't just get rid of it, like they effectively did.

What a waste...
Porn takes a heavy toll on the girls, and they tend to age a lot faster than they should.
So... Yeah.

 djones520 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
This is going to delve towards politics but I think it has to be said. There was a very good article, from the New York Times I think see if I can find it, that came out just a few hours after SCOTUS ruled on United States v. Windsor.

The article basically compared problems in the gay community (lots of anonymous sex, lack of protection used, and drugs) to problems in urban black communities (lots of anonymous sex, lack of protection used, and drugs... yeah) and how these problems were ignored and down played by advocates of equal rights because it was already a uphill battle getting equality without the community being smeared by elitist uptight dicks who jumped at every opportunity to present any failing of group as a massive indictment and justification to discriminate. They deserved equal rights and always have, but now that DOMA was struck down the author wanted people to start being more open about the problems in the community itself and start addressing them rather than continuing to downplay them to achieve political goals.

There is a problem in the gay community with anonymous sex, lack of protection, and drugs. There's a reason why HIV spread so much more rapidly among homosexual men than other demographics and we're at the point now where we really shouldn't be ignoring that this is a real problem. It's gotten much better since the 80s and 90s. Awareness has spread. More men have realized that just because you can't get another guy pregnant doesn't mean you shouldn't follow the rules of safe sex. The problem however persists, particularly in the party and club scene that is dedicated to the gay community were drug use is a bit higher than the norm and thus people aren't in full use of their faculties.

These things aren't bigoted to say, because these problems are real and denying them doesn't make them go away anymore than trying to deny the rights of gay men and women. People shouldn't have to fight for their rights as hard as they seem to have to in this country. It's pathetic and disgraceful how far Americans will go to treat other Americans like garbage (this thread seems a fitting testament), but if it becomes bigoted to say "this is a real problem" then we've reached a much worse point than casual dismissal of basic human decency. At that point we're just pandering. If you care about people you fight for them, and that includes telling them things they might not want to hear.

I don't know if August Aimes was a bigot. I do know she didn't deserve to be treated that way because no one should be treated that way. Sure as hell no one should be applauding her death as some kind of victory.

I read a blog post a number of years ago, written by an HIV positive gay man, and it scared the hell out of me, because it was a perfect encapsulation of how high the threat is for the homosexual community. To paraphrase it, he was talking about despite knowing he was HIV positive, he'd frequently visit bathhouses, and participate in unprotected gay sex with men, without telling them that he was HIV positive. He did it because he'd know that if he did tell them, they'd never agree to have sex with him. The physical pleasure was more important to him then someone else's life. When we see that 2% of our population accounts for 70% of new cases every year, it kind of struck me that this person wasn't an odd-man out type of situation.

It is a sad situation, but on the plus side, it seems that the number of transmissions is going down. So while the demographics haven't been changing that much, the number of new cases have been seeing a significant drop, so hopefully more are taking the threat seriously.

I saw a documentary on PBS a few years back about AIDS and in one of the segments, gay people spoke of having hundreds of partners in bathhouses in the space of months and having to deal with multiple diseases as well as worrying about AIDS in that time span.
In another documentary, Stephan Fry was astonished when he learned of gay men who intentionally contracted AIDS and shared it with others who wanted to be infected. Their term for it was, "the gift".

From Stephan Fry's documentary:


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kl-kDJ2Qh4

Reading through some of this. Don't you love the internet?

These asshats that harassed her need hanged. In a public, and preferably live streamed manner, so the rest of the internet's donkey-caves get the idea.

People complain about guns, but this gak has killed a lot of people, and no one says gak.

I'm not a huge fan of the porno industry despite having watched some of it before (including at least one video with August Ames), but what happened to this lady is absolutely horrendous. No one should be bullied to the point of killing themselves. The bullies should all be charged with conspiracy to murder, or accessories to the crime, or something. This should happen with any and all bullying that leads to suicide, no matter the circumstances. No one should get pushed over the edge like that. While I do find suicide to be a cowardly act (I'd be far more likely to take out my bullies with me at least if it came to that, heaven forbid it ever does), there should be consequences for people who cause it or influence someone to make that choice.

R.I.P. August Ames, and my condolences to her family and friends in this difficult time. Truly a tragedy for someone to die so young.

She was also apparently sexually molested by her grandfather as a child and her father didn't believe her. Sounds like she went straight from childhood abuse to pornography. It's not an uncommon story.

Sadly someone in that situation is most likely not going to get any meaningful help.

This incident is a microcosm of the current state of our culture and political discourse. In today's climate, the only things that matter are identity and ascribed intent. Not facts, context, methods or outcomes. If you are part of (or claim to speak for) identity group x, claiming grievance y against identity group z, anything is justified on behalf of your indignation and catharsis. The outcome doesn't matter. The methods you use don't matter. Only your righteousness and status as some kind of victim or victims' advocate matters. And I am not singling out the left here, because the right does it too. Pedophilia is justified as long as you're taking the establishment elite to task on behalf of the "forgotten man", just as bullying, threats, de-platforming, harassment and actual violence are justified if you're acting on the grievances of identity group x. It's all the same game.

Play that game long enough, and there will be blowback. The #MeToo movement, for example, is in danger of repeating the same kind of mistakes that Title IX enforcement has been making on college campuses. When you create a world where the only thing that matters is some kind of arbitrary identity, and everyone who is not of that identity is automatically subject to punitive measures as well as personal attack, professional ruin and loss of access to public resources, eventually people realize that whatever actual oppression was happening before has now just shifted into another type of oppressive environment. Civil rights movements are very important and they have shaped our history for the better, but instances like this only serve to undo the progress they have made by wreaking havoc in their names.

I don't think this climate can last forever. Something's got to give at some point. The question is, what will things look like when we pass to the other side? Things like this can very easily start the pendulum swinging in the other direction, in which case we're back where we started. I can only hope, though not with much conviction, that we all choose not to violate each others' rights, not because we're from identity group x or y, but because we're all human beings.

Waitwaitwait...who said Pedophelia is justified???

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
Waitwaitwait...who said Pedophelia is justified???

Well no one is outright saying it but I trust you'll know the person to whom I refer.

 Luciferian wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
Waitwaitwait...who said Pedophelia is justified???

Well no one is outright saying it but I trust you'll know the person to whom I refer.

Perhaps you are unaware feigned obtuseness is a popular debate tactic in the OT?

I'm not really sure what you mean.

 Luciferian wrote:
I don't think this climate can last forever. Something's got to give at some point. The question is, what will things look like when we pass to the other side? Things like this can very easily start the pendulum swinging in the other direction, in which case we're back where we started. I can only hope, though not with much conviction, that we all choose not to violate each others' rights, not because we're from identity group x or y, but because we're all human beings.

Humans are a tribal species, we have been for thousands of years. I think the only thing that's different now is our ability to find tribes and communicate about it. Religion, geography, place of birth, skin color, sexual orientation...doesn't matter. I really think anyone who thinks this is a political movement or new really is just ignoring history...often for political purposes. Personally, I've heard a few Trumpette idiots citing it as reason for their horrible voting behaviors. And, frankly, we've done far worse things in the name of tribalism than having people be part of the "me, too" movement.

TBH, I think it's good. The more numerous and specific groups there are, the more people are forced to interact with each other's participation in those groups - over-generalization gets punished. And when you're in that situation, each one starts to matter incrementally less in the long run.

 Luciferian wrote:

 SlaveToDorkness wrote:
Waitwaitwait...who said Pedophelia is justified???

Well no one is outright saying it but I trust you'll know the person to whom I refer.

I don't believe there's any poster here who thinks that.

Relapse wrote:


I don't believe there's any poster here who thinks that.

I also doubt the person to whom I refer posts on Dakka Dakka.

Anyway, forget it. You'll either know what I'm talking about or you won't, and I can't delve too far into it according to the forum rules. My point is that injustice begets injustice, no matter what cause it is done for.

 Luciferian wrote:
I'm not really sure what you mean.

What I mean is I think nearly everyone here knows exactly what you mean. It's a sure way to a locked thread, and not really on-topic, though.

On topic, it's pretty depressing that someone be harassed over who they choose to have, or not have, sex with. What a lousy thing to do.

 Ouze wrote:

 Luciferian wrote:
I'm not really sure what you mean.

What I mean is I think nearly everyone here knows exactly what you mean. It's a sure way to a locked thread, and not really on-topic, though.

On topic, it's pretty depressing that someone be harassed over who they choose to have, or not have, sex with. What a lousy thing to do.

It's extremely ironic in this current climate of sexual predators being brought to book.

 Witzkatz wrote:
I guess the "presumably" part is something that August Ames would probably have known a lot about in regards to her current employers, and maybe she wasn't putting a lot of faith in their protocols for theses cases. In the end, we don't know a lot of details here, I guess. Also it's very possible that Ames was not intimately knowledgeable about sensitivity and specificity of HIV detecting tests and arrays and might've been worried regardless - maybe irrationally, maybe not.

If she isn't confident in the testing protocols for heterosexual porn then why does him having done gay porn, with apparently laxer testing, matter? If the heterosexual porn testing works, then he won't get to participate if he comes out positive. If it doesn't work, then she is already potentially being exposed to every STD out there, whether they did gay porn or not.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Witzkatz wrote:
I guess the "presumably" part is something that August Ames would probably have known a lot about in regards to her current employers, and maybe she wasn't putting a lot of faith in their protocols for theses cases. In the end, we don't know a lot of details here, I guess. Also it's very possible that Ames was not intimately knowledgeable about sensitivity and specificity of HIV detecting tests and arrays and might've been worried regardless - maybe irrationally, maybe not.

If she isn't confident in the testing protocols for heterosexual porn then why does him having done gay porn, with apparently laxer testing, matter? If the heterosexual porn testing works, then he won't get to participate if he comes out positive. If it doesn't work, then she is already potentially being exposed to every STD out there, whether they did gay porn or not.

This Stephan Fry documentary talks about testing at about the 11 minute mark and how it isn't 100% At the time it was made, it seems gay men in Britain had harder times getting home loans due to AIDS fears.
I'm sure there is nowadays equal danger between gay and straight sex, but the ideas from the early 80's when it was primarily confined to gay people and drug users linger. This is actually quite dangerous if straight people are walking around thinking their orientation is protection enough.
All that being said, it was her concern for her personal health that led her to not want to work with this particular person. She voiced her concern and was bullied to suicide.

From the documentary:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u6H1Q19OQck

the ideas from the early 80's when it was primarily confined to gay people and drug users linger.

It was never primarily confined to either group. The virus strains all originated in Africa jumping ship from monkeys to humans likely through consumption of raw meat/under cooked meat. HIV's genetic ancestor is a relatively weak virus that has been on the continent for centuries and mutated sometime after WWII into HIV. It spread rapidly among drug users and gay men for different reasons* and so rapidly it gained a lot of press and media attention. The early cases in the west were from these groups but by the time western doctors were diagnosing the bizarre break outs of several rare diseases most people fight off naturally HIV and AIDs were already rapidly spreading in Africa mostly through prostitutes in major urban centers (the oldest identified cases are from the Congo in the early 60s). In the west it was already spreading among both gay and straight populations. Exactly why the gay community drew so much attention likely has more to do with the innate biases of the time than anything. It's always politically correct to bash addicts, and was in the 80s still politically correct to bash homosexuals especially since the identification of HIV/AIDs coincided with a resurgence of LGBT political activism.

The stigma to be fair was produced by as much by the prejudice of the time as on ground realities and the hysteria produced a number of counter productive behaviors among the gay community that took a long time to repair (not even mention that there still exists a myth that being gay is what causes the disease among certain groups and that proper straight people can't contract it).

*(needle sharing among drug users being a prime example, and a lack of safe sex precautions foremost among gay men)

Are gay porn actors subjected to the same standard of testing as heterosexual porn actors?

If the answer is no, then this is not homophobia.
If the answer is yes, then its still not homophobia, its simply ignorance.

Being ignorant and mistakenly believing in a myth does not make a person homophobic. Worrying about your own safety and the risk of STI's is a valid concern. Trying to paint this person as homophobic (who then went on to commit suicide) is victim blaming. Anyone who believes this was homophobia should be ashamed of themselves.

Yeah, to be honest I have seen a ton of aggressiveness name-calling in this recent years when in many cases is just people being ignorant.
I'm more in the school of teaching people why what they say is wrong (If it is), before calling them names. And even if they double down in what they believe, I won't call them names. Thats disrespectfull, and you win nothing with that.

 LordofHats wrote:

the ideas from the early 80's when it was primarily confined to gay people and drug users linger.

It was never primarily confined to either group. The virus strains all originated in Africa jumping ship from monkeys to humans likely through consumption of raw meat/under cooked meat. HIV's genetic ancestor is a relatively weak virus that has been on the continent for centuries and mutated sometime after WWII into HIV. It spread rapidly among drug users and gay men for different reasons* and so rapidly it gained a lot of press and media attention. The early cases in the west were from these groups but by the time western doctors were diagnosing the bizarre break outs of several rare diseases most people fight off naturally HIV and AIDs were already rapidly spreading in Africa mostly through prostitutes in major urban centers (the oldest identified cases are from the Congo in the early 60s). In the west it was already spreading among both gay and straight populations. Exactly why the gay community drew so much attention likely has more to do with the innate biases of the time than anything. It's always politically correct to bash addicts, and was in the 80s still politically correct to bash homosexuals especially since the identification of HIV/AIDs coincided with a resurgence of LGBT political activism.

The stigma to be fair was produced by as much by the prejudice of the time as on ground realities and the hysteria produced a number of counter productive behaviors among the gay community that took a long time to repair (not even mention that there still exists a myth that being gay is what causes the disease among certain groups and that proper straight people can't contract it).

*(needle sharing among drug users being a prime example, and a lack of safe sex precautions foremost among gay men)

Check out the Stephan Fry documentary I posted. It was made in the 2010s and he even states during the 80s it was primarily gays and addicts that were the victims. This is also true of other documentaries I have seen that were made after the 80s.
I also knew doctors specializing in infectious diseases saying this was the case.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Are gay porn actors subjected to the same standard of testing as heterosexual porn actors?

If the answer is no, then this is not homophobia.
If the answer is yes, then its still not homophobia, its simply ignorance.

Being ignorant and mistakenly believing in a myth does not make a person homophobic. Worrying about your own safety and the risk of STI's is a valid concern. Trying to paint this person as homophobic (who then went on to commit suicide) is victim blaming. Anyone who believes this was homophobia should be ashamed of themselves.

Regardless of the standard of testing, it's still a matter of trust. Between getting tested yesterday and getting the results today to start filming a scene, an actor could still go off and get infected in that timeframe.
Adult film actors have to trust each other, and Ms. Ames didn't have that trust, and it's not. Her. Fault.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
Are gay porn actors subjected to the same standard of testing as heterosexual porn actors?

If the answer is no, then this is not homophobia.
If the answer is yes, then its still not homophobia, its simply ignorance.

Being ignorant and mistakenly believing in a myth does not make a person homophobic. Worrying about your own safety and the risk of STI's is a valid concern. Trying to paint this person as homophobic (who then went on to commit suicide) is victim blaming. Anyone who believes this was homophobia should be ashamed of themselves.

Regardless of the standard of testing, it's still a matter of trust. Between getting tested yesterday and getting the results today to start filming a scene, an actor could still go off and get infected in that timeframe.
Adult film actors have to trust each other, and Ms. Ames didn't have that trust, and it's not. Her. Fault.

Agreeing with you here.
The amount of virus copies in a patient's blood also depends highly on the timeline since infection. It's also possible to be infected already and the tests being done too early to show anything, but being infectious a week later. Theoretically that also means somebody infected the day before might not necessarily infectious yet. Virology is complex overall, and HIV makes no difference here. All in all there's enough things that could go 'wrong' that, while staying objective and open-minded, a certain dose of caution is warranted.

One would hope that any woman always has the final say in choosing who's penis would or wouldn't be allowed inside of her, regardless of her reasons it's exclusively her decision to make and nobody else should feel they have a say in it. It doesn't matter if she's bigoted/ignorant/racist/homophobic, etc end of the line is that she still has ultimate authority to say No and refuse anyone she wants because it's her body.

Two things I want to comment on about this.

#1 - Porn stars have thick skin - they wouldn't be able to do what they do if they didn't. I find it exceptionally odd that she killed herself over something some trolls were saying on the internet. I wouldn't be surprised if after some investigation they find foul play was involved.

#2 - It's really scary how progressive ideas have created this environment where you are labeled a bigot/racist even if you are just quoting facts or making intelligent observations.

#1 No, they do not have thick skin. In fact, many get in to the business due to underlying mental health issues, which can cause them to do very irrational things such as this.

#2 Every group, no matter how good the intentions are, is going to have that one gak who doesn't really understand what he is saying or doing.

Edit: had notoriously in there for no reason, because why not

Hmm. Well, it's sad that a young woman took her life for any reason.

I guess this means words can actually hurt, and maybe there should be some limits to free speech.

Relapse wrote:
]Check out the Stephan Fry documentary I posted. It was made in the 2010s and he even states during the 80s it was primarily gays and addicts that were the victims. This is also true of other documentaries I have seen that were made after the 80s.
I also knew doctors specializing in infectious diseases saying this was the case.

The claim is simply preposterous. Stephen Fry is a comedian. Not a researcher, and any doctor in infectious disease should know the viruses origins which instantly invalidates the claim.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Hmm. Well, it's sad that a young woman took her life for any reason.

I guess this means words can actually hurt, and maybe there should be some limits to free speech.

There already are. Don't try to score cheap political points out of this.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Hmm. Well, it's sad that a young woman took her life for any reason.

I guess this means words can actually hurt, and maybe there should be some limits to free speech.

There already are. Don't try to score cheap political points out of this.

To be honest in Europe we have much bigger limitations for Free Speech than in USA. I don't believe it is a problem. Of course people will always try to use those limitations to push their agendas, just like people in USA will try to use the free they have to push their agendas.
So at the end of the day, is not that one is better than the other, they have both their pros and cons, and they both have people that will use them to their own interests.

But as others have nothed, online harasshment is a big problem. If in real life someone yells at you at the street, or a bar, etc... is not like anything is gonna happen. But if that same person starts sending you letters to your house, leaving you messages in your door about wanting to do bad things to you, one day, and another, and another, and starts following you, appearing where you are, etc... then the police will do something about it. But not on the internet. I obviously totally understand the GIANT difference between one kind of harassment and another.
But the fact that the internet one is much more easy to do without consequences doesn't mean we should just say "Well, we can't do anything about it, whatever"

I think that social media sites bear some blame. They presume to not support cyber bulling and harassment and have rules against it but you have to push pretty hard before the people running the place actually do anything about your behavior. There's more that social media managers can do to curtail these things than they're doing.

 LordofHats wrote:

the ideas from the early 80's when it was primarily confined to gay people and drug users linger.

It was never primarily confined to either group. The virus strains all originated in Africa jumping ship from monkeys to humans likely through consumption of raw meat/under cooked meat. HIV's genetic ancestor is a relatively weak virus that has been on the continent for centuries and mutated sometime after WWII into HIV. It spread rapidly among drug users and gay men for different reasons* and so rapidly it gained a lot of press and media attention. The early cases in the west were from these groups but by the time western doctors were diagnosing the bizarre break outs of several rare diseases most people fight off naturally HIV and AIDs were already rapidly spreading in Africa mostly through prostitutes in major urban centers (the oldest identified cases are from the Congo in the early 60s). In the west it was already spreading among both gay and straight populations. Exactly why the gay community drew so much attention likely has more to do with the innate biases of the time than anything. It's always politically correct to bash addicts, and was in the 80s still politically correct to bash homosexuals especially since the identification of HIV/AIDs coincided with a resurgence of LGBT political activism.

The stigma to be fair was produced by as much by the prejudice of the time as on ground realities and the hysteria produced a number of counter productive behaviors among the gay community that took a long time to repair (not even mention that there still exists a myth that being gay is what causes the disease among certain groups and that proper straight people can't contract it).

*(needle sharing among drug users being a prime example, and a lack of safe sex precautions foremost among gay men)

Only SOME in the homosexual community have worked hard to combat those prejudices and myths. Many more in the homosexual community actually revel in it. One only has to go to a Pride event in a heavily gay-friendly city (like San Francisco). It's like a encyclopedia of homosexual stereotypes (and people who have legitimately embraced those supposedly "stereotypical" lifestyles) on parade, along with risky sexual behaviors and other forms of degeneracy going on in public. And a lot of times, in front of kids. You would think the city in question was being invaded by aliens from outer space during the event.

Then you have the fact that some sick individuals who have incorporated HIV into a subsets of gay "culture" (i.e. so-called "bug chasers"), putting gays who would prefer to avoid HIV infection at risk in the long term (i.e. those that don't engage in "high camp" for some sort of questionable BS notions of "taking back" stereotypes and anti-gay slurs).

Make no mistake. It isn't all due to prejudices and myths among heterosexuals, conservative-leaning individuals, and fundamentalist religious types. The gay community, as a whole, does jack to combat bigotry. Instead, many of them contribute to the problem in a desire to flaunt it in the face of the "breeders", just because they can. And those who desire for legitimate acceptance in society have another weight chained to their necks in their uphill battle, performing legit activism. Such nonsense just reinforces the idea that all homosexuals are hedonistic, sick, disease ridden freaks, when in fact, that is an unfair broad brush painted across the group as a whole.

As for the thread topic itself, the porn industry is a shady business, where the majority on performers are either on drugs or have emotional/mental issues. The rest are either exhibitionists, attention whores, or in it for the easy money (Porn is a multi-billion dollar a year industry, where women tend to be better paid than their male counterparts, and performers who learn the biz can easily climb up the corporate porn ladder. Examples: Sunset Thomas, Ron Jeremy, Peter North, Jenna Jameson, etc). August Ames was a fairly new performer just getting recognition in the industry, and probably one of those women in porn that has a grab-bag of personal issues affecting her. She really didn't do anything wrong except one thing: She used social media that is populated by trolls, wannabe "activists", and internet social justice warriors. In today's social climate, it is prudent to take a more private route to pass on such information. Information that knee-jerk morons, special snowflakes, and malicious seekers of "the lulz" will jump on in a heartbeat, and try to screw with your head or (even worse) your very livelyhood/personal life (and in a supposedly "free" society, at that).

It's a tragedy that Ms. Ames took her own life. But it's also a tragedy that we've come to the point that public expression of (at least in the minds of the sane and rational) non-offensive/helpful information, can lead to such horse without censure or action taken against the perps in question.

There are laws against Malicious Communication. Social Media sites have Terms of Service rules that forbid abusive behaviour.

There are already restrictions on "Free Speech", they just aren't enforced adequately.

 LordofHats wrote:

Relapse wrote:
]Check out the Stephan Fry documentary I posted. It was made in the 2010s and he even states during the 80s it was primarily gays and addicts that were the victims. This is also true of other documentaries I have seen that were made after the 80s.
I also knew doctors specializing in infectious diseases saying this was the case.

The claim is simply preposterous. Stephen Fry is a comedian. Not a researcher, and any doctor in infectious disease should know the viruses origins which instantly invalidates the claim.

You really should watch the show and see that he gets his information from some of the top specialists who also appear in the broadcast as well as personal experience in watching friends die on an almost weekly basis.n

Some CDC statistics on AIDS:

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/msm/index.html

From the link:

"In 2014, gay and bisexual men made up an estimated 2% of the U.S. population, but accounted for 70% of new HIV infections. Approximately 492,000 sexually active gay and bisexual men are at high risk for HIV; however, we have more tools to prevent HIV than ever before."

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
There are laws against Malicious Communication. Social Media sites have Terms of Service rules that forbid abusive behaviour.

There are already restrictions on "Free Speech", they just aren't enforced adequately.

While I totally agree with you, those Terms of Service rules are worth jack gak in a case like this. There should be criminal penalties for bullying that leads to a suicide. At the very least, some sort of thing like being an accessory to murder. Maybe when some of these people end up behind bars for a while people will take notice.

 Shadow Captain Edithae wrote:
There are laws against Malicious Communication. Social Media sites have Terms of Service rules that forbid abusive behaviour.

There are already restrictions on "Free Speech", they just aren't enforced adequately.

Laws that are usually unenforced, and can't be unless there is a report made to the right authorities. And social media ToS are either selectively enforced. Or not enforced unless it's something that could bring down heat on the social media companies (i.e. something criminal).


Political speech is protected in the United States, and should be. However, little is done regarding outright harassment. And nobody in the FCC or FBI has either the time or inclination to deal with harassment claims unless they are criminal in nature (death threats, witness intimidation, terrorism related, etc.), because of the headaches involved in sorting through the BS claims (of which there would be many) to get to the legitimate complaints.

Relapse wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:

Relapse wrote:
]Check out the Stephan Fry documentary I posted. It was made in the 2010s and he even states during the 80s it was primarily gays and addicts that were the victims. This is also true of other documentaries I have seen that were made after the 80s.
I also knew doctors specializing in infectious diseases saying this was the case.

The claim is simply preposterous. Stephen Fry is a comedian. Not a researcher, and any doctor in infectious disease should know the viruses origins which instantly invalidates the claim.

You really should watch the show and see that he gets his information from some of the top specialists who also appear in the broadcast as well as personal experience in watching friends die on an almost weekly basis.n

Some CDC statistics on AIDS:

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/msm/index.html

From the link:

"In 2014, gay and bisexual men made up an estimated 2% of the U.S. population, but accounted for 70% of new HIV infections. Approximately 492,000 sexually active gay and bisexual men are at high risk for HIV; however, we have more tools to prevent HIV than ever before."

I’m not disagreeing that homosexual men led the chart for infection and I think still do. I only object to the idea that HIV is ‘confined’ to them at all, primarily or otherwise. HIV is not confined and I think when discussing everyone has to be careful not to slip into the kind of behavior that leads to people wanting to downplay the plight (which is not specifically you Relapse). HIV effects everyone. The only way to be safe from it is to never have sex ever, never have a blood transfusion, or eat any undercooked meat in Africa. That last one is probably pretty easy but that’s part of why STDs suck so much. Sex is incredibly awkward especially if you’ve never had it before or are with someone new. It sucks that people have to worry about it. I don’t think Ms Ams meant any harm by her comment truthfully but it does play into the sterwotypes and biases we have about HIV and gay men in particular.

Hats, I think you're just getting hung up on a slightly poor use of language that had relatively clear intent. "Confined" on it's own is an all or nothing term, either something is confined or it's not. Relapse used the phrase"primarily confined", which clearly means not entirely confined but simply more prevalent.

Because it is more prevalent among gay men, a woman is more likely to get HIV off a gay man than a straight one by simple statistics. If Ames had reason to believe STD testing in the porn industry is fallible then a natural way to mitigate the risk is to stick to straight men, and mitigating the risk to her female friends by letting them know that an actor has a history of gay porn (though perhaps a mistake on her behalf doing so on twitter, maybe she didn't have the phone number of that person to contact them directly).

Obviously risk can't be completely eliminated, in any professional field we always talk about minimising risk.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Hats, I think you're just getting hung up on a slightly poor use of language that had relatively clear intent. "Confined" on it's own is an all or nothing term, either something is confined or it's not. Relapse used the phrase"primarily confined", which clearly means not entirely confined but simply more prevalent.

I'm getting hung up on poor word choice because it's important to use good word choice when talking about sensitive subjects.

HIV is not restricted to gay men, and talking about it like it's a concern less relevant to the rest of us betrays a basic reality that should be obvious; anyone can have HIV. People, straight and gay, have exhibited a rare pathology in which they purposefully spread the disease and anyone can spread it without realizing they are infected. That's why I'm being a stickler about it because how we say things matters and if HIV is a concern for someone (and really STDs should be a concern for everyone) then only being concerned about it when a gay guy shows up is kind of silly especially since the disease certainly didn't start there and has never been isolated there. I mentioned a case at Ft. Bragg just a page back where a soldier knowingly infected a teenager and was himself married to a woman with children, as well as mentioning two separate cases of men purposefully infecting women. I did this to avoid the thread stumbling into the narrative of HIV as the "gay disease" which seems to be the pitfall that Ames herself ran afoul of when a bunch of raging internet trolls decided to start brutalizing her on social media.

This thing is not confined in any way. We shouldn't treat it like it is. HIV can effect anyone. That doesn't mean ignoring that it's especially endemic in the gay community, but it also doesn't mean we selectively only become concerned about it or talk about it within the context of gay men. The hysteria of the early years of the disease were like that, and it led to a lot of men in Western countries dismissing HIV/AIDs as a hoax or scare tactic with regrettable effects, and there are still men and women in the world who think you can only contract it if you're gay.

If Ames had reason to believe STD testing in the porn industry is fallible then a natural way to mitigate the risk is to stick to straight men, and mitigating the risk to her female friends by letting them know that an actor has a history of gay porn.

If the guy is in a straight shoot he's presumably been through the same scrutiny as any other man taking part in a straight shoot, and if HIV is a concern (and it should be) only bringing it up in reference to a man who has had sex with other men is unfortunately selective (EDIT: Especially since unlike straight porn gay porn has more proactively embraced the use of condoms in shoots as a basic precaution). The fact people in this thread fail to accept this despite it being brought up numerous times in the past three pages is kind of a testament to how ignorant people can be about HIV transmission, or just how weakly people think things through before speaking.

Certainly it should remind us all how easy it is to innocently say somethings without meaning any harm by it, and that jumping so harshly down their throat that they end up croaking isn't something to be proud of.

Obviously risk can't be completely eliminated, in any professional field we always talk about minimising risk.

I'd actually wager the porn industry (either straight or gay) is probably safer than your local dive bar. In its bid to avoid being regulated by the state professional porn has been very adamant in policing itself. Sure there are failures but that's hardly unique. Hospitals have missed HIV in blood for transfusions before as well and lots of people infect others before realizing they themselves are infected. If there were a concern I would direct it at the blooming "amateur porn" industry because anyone with a camera and an internet connection can make a prono these days and distribute it. I doubt they're nearly as self-conscious as the professional industry is.

 LordofHats wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Hats, I think you're just getting hung up on a slightly poor use of language that had relatively clear intent. "Confined" on it's own is an all or nothing term, either something is confined or it's not. Relapse used the phrase"primarily confined", which clearly means not entirely confined but simply more prevalent.

I'm getting hung up on poor word choice because it's important to use good word choice when talking about sensitive subjects.

Yeah sure, but this is an internet forum where you can't expect people to get wording right every time and the intent of the message was clear even if the wording was perhaps a bit clunky.

If the guy is in a straight shoot he's presumably been through the same scrutiny as any other man taking part in a straight shoot, and if HIV is a concern (and it should be) only bringing it up in reference to a man who has had sex with other men is unfortunately selective

Just because it's been subject to the same scrutiny doesn't mean it's equally as safe.

(EDIT: Especially since unlike straight porn gay porn has more proactively embraced the use of condoms in shoots as a basic precaution).

It has? I wasn't aware of that, without having to watch a whole heap of porn and keep a tally of who's wearing a rubber do you have any evidence of that?

The fact people in this thread fail to accept this despite it being brought up numerous times in the past three pages is kind of a testament to how ignorant people can be about HIV transmission, or just how weakly people think things through before speaking.

Sorry your points are getting a bit mixed up here, are you talking about the use of condoms or a lack of acknowledgement that people are held to the same level of scrutiny?

If it's the former, I don't think that has been brought up in this thread, if it has I missed it.

If it's the latter, no one is ignorant that in a straight shoot people are going to be held to the same level of scrutiny, you can jump off your high horse for a moment, what people are saying is maybe that level of scrutiny isn't infallible, and if it's not infallible then it's still a risk and if it's still a risk actors and actresses can perhaps be a little bit proactive about mitigating the risk themselves.


I'm not going to pretend I'm intimately familiar with the rate of STD's in the porn industry, but in the absence of data to the contrary I'm willing to give Ames the benefit of the doubt as being someone who is probably better informed about the happenings of the porn industry than anyone posting on Dakka.

Obviously risk can't be completely eliminated, in any professional field we always talk about minimising risk.

I'd actually wager the porn industry (either straight or gay) is probably safer than your local dive bar.

Probably, but then I also wouldn't recommend people having unprotected sex with someone they picked up in a dive bar either.

Saying something is safer than something else that itself isn't entirely safe doesn't mean the former is perfectly safe and thus that risks can't be further mitigated. Just because flying is safer than driving doesn't mean we've reached a point where we are no longer concerned about improving the safety of flying.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Yeah sure, but this is an internet forum where you can't expect people to get wording right every time and the intent of the message was clear even if the wording was perhaps a bit clunky.

Yes which is why I’m working to be nonjudgmental about it. This is something I think everyone needs to work on in general not just on this issue but a lot of issues. Once things sink and become misheard the point becomes lost.

It has? I wasn't aware of that, without having to watch a whole heap of porn and keep a tally of who's wearing a rubber do you have any evidence of that?

It’s noticeably more common. I’m just gonna leave it at that because that in itself probably says more about me than I really want to share.

As to the next matter I refer to the selective way Ames hose to be concerned about HIV. I don’t think she meant any harm by it but HIV break outs have occurred in straight porn as well. In general I think people conflate the prevalence of HIV among gay men with not needing to be concerned if they are not in that group. It’s a little offensive by more than a little and it’s just foolish on a personal security level.

 LordofHats wrote:
I’m not disagreeing that homosexual men led the chart for infection and I think still do. I only object to the idea that HIV is ‘confined’ to them at all, primarily or otherwise. HIV is not confined and I think when discussing everyone has to be careful not to slip into the kind of behavior that leads to people wanting to downplay the plight (which is not specifically you Relapse). HIV effects everyone. The only way to be safe from it is to never have sex ever, never have a blood transfusion, or eat any undercooked meat in Africa. That last one is probably pretty easy but that’s part of why STDs suck so much. Sex is incredibly awkward especially if you’ve never had it before or are with someone new. It sucks that people have to worry about it. I don’t think Ms Ams meant any harm by her comment truthfully but it does play into the sterwotypes and biases we have about HIV and gay men in particular.

Who said it's "confined" to them? Primarily implies most but not all. It implies you have higher risk of running into one in that group than on other group. Not that there's zero chance elsewhere.

 LordofHats wrote:


As to the next matter I refer to the selective way Ames hose to be concerned about HIV. I don’t think she meant any harm by it but HIV break outs have occurred in straight porn as well. In general I think people conflate the prevalence of HIV among gay men with not needing to be concerned if they are not in that group. It’s a little offensive by more than a little and it’s just foolish on a personal security level.

I don't think that's true anymore, and hasn't been for a long time. Obviously I can't know exactly what she was thinking, but I, and I think pretty much everyone in this thread has read it somewhat differently from that.

IMO, the reasoning goes something like this: HIV is much more prevalent in the gay community (and by extension presumably the gay porn community) than elsewhere. Porn actresses have to have unprotected sex with porn actors. There are safeguards in place, but those aren't foolproof even in straight porn. So if an actress has to have unprotected sex with someone who also does gay porn, she's increasing the already higher than average chances of contracting HIV, because she's now not only having unprotected sex without perfect safeguards, but that person has an increased chance of infection because he also does (or did) gay porn.
That's not being unconcerned because you're not a part of that group, that's being cognizant of the reality and odds of the situation. If she then decides she doesn't want to run that extra risk and warn others that the risk is, in fact, increased, then good for her. Not even remotely a reason to call her homophobic.

Sleeping sickness is primarily confined. Stay out of a specific region and your chances of getting it are minuscule bordering on zero (but it has happened). Ebola is primarily confined. Sickle cell anemia is primarily confined. HIV is not and never will be confined, primarily confined, or any combination of terms expressing the similar. Anyone can get it. Anyone can transmit it. It’s prevalence in specific demographics is a fluke of cultural and social variables and is unique to the West particularly the United States where the prevalence is higher. There isn’t exactly a big gay community in the Congo but there are a lot of prostitues and piss poor medical standards. HIV doesn’t discrimate and we shouldn’t pretend it does. That’s all I’m saying and I didn’t say fit to start some big tangent but merely because again the way we approach this kind of topic is important and how we talk about it needs to be carefully framed or the message will get lost. Some people of course just seem hellbent on being lost anayeY so maybe it’s best to just not bother.

 LordofHats wrote:
Sleeping sickness is primarily confined. Stay out of a specific region and your chances of getting it are minuscule bordering on zero (but it has happened). Ebola is primarily confined. Sickle cell anemia is primarily confined. HIV is not and never will be confined, primarily confined, or any combination of terms expressing the similar. Anyone can get it. Anyone can transmit it. It’s prevalence in specific demographics is a fluke of cultural and social variables and is unique to the West particularly the United States where the prevalence is higher. There isn’t exactly a big gay community in the Congo but there are a lot of prostitues and piss poor medical standards. HIV doesn’t discrimate and we shouldn’t pretend it does. That’s all I’m saying and I didn’t say fit to start some big tangent but merely because again the way we approach this kind of topic is important and how we talk about it needs to be carefully framed or the message will get lost. Some people of course just seem hellbent on being lost anayeY so maybe it’s best to just not bother.

Problem here is you are dismissing her rather valid fear of having higher chance of running into the disease that statistically is more prevalent in one group than others. YES others can have it but would you like 10% or 1% odds of catching as harmful disease as HIV? I know which I would pick...

tneva82 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Sleeping sickness is primarily confined. Stay out of a specific region and your chances of getting it are minuscule bordering on zero (but it has happened). Ebola is primarily confined. Sickle cell anemia is primarily confined. HIV is not and never will be confined, primarily confined, or any combination of terms expressing the similar. Anyone can get it. Anyone can transmit it. It’s prevalence in specific demographics is a fluke of cultural and social variables and is unique to the West particularly the United States where the prevalence is higher. There isn’t exactly a big gay community in the Congo but there are a lot of prostitues and piss poor medical standards. HIV doesn’t discrimate and we shouldn’t pretend it does. That’s all I’m saying and I didn’t say fit to start some big tangent but merely because again the way we approach this kind of topic is important and how we talk about it needs to be carefully framed or the message will get lost. Some people of course just seem hellbent on being lost anayeY so maybe it’s best to just not bother.

Problem here is you are dismissing her rather valid fear of having higher chance of running into the disease that statistically is more prevalent in one group than others. YES others can have it but would you like 10% or 1% odds of catching as harmful disease as HIV? I know which I would pick...

A valid fear is valid of course. 89% of of the people known to be infected with Syphilis are men, so clearly women should just all be lesbians to give themselves the best odds at avoiding infection. As long as they're not black. Once you eliminate gay/bi men, black women are the next demographic most likely to have HIV. So white and Hispanic women only. No wait that's equally foolish since 66% of the people known to be infected with chlamydia are women but hey chlamydia ain't as bad as HIV right? Maybe just move to the moon though. After all 67% of the human species is positive for herpes.

Using statistics in this manner is bad statistics. If I went around telling people not to associate with black men because they're statistically more likely to be convicted murderers I'd be called racist, and that's a pretty racist thing to be going around and saying. We shouldn't judge individuals by statistical probabilities. It's bad math, it's just stupid, and yeah it's prejudicial and we call prejudice directed against homosexuals homophobia. I think this kind of reasoning is very common in society though, no matter how faulty it is.

And if we're really going to go by statistics, primarily straight actors (male actors often do both but generally one more than the other) have infected more people than anyone in the industry. Marc Wallice hid that he was HIV positive for two years and infected seven women (he contracted the disease through drug use, statistically the least likely infection vector). Darren James contracted the disease from an actress and infected four women. Probably the most famous case of a gay actor infecting others is Rod Daily and he didn't even infect any men if I remember right. He contracted the disease from his girlfriend (most gay actors aren't actually "gay") Cameron Bay who contracted it from no one knows where. All of her scene partners eventually came out negative so she had to have gotten it at some point in her personal life. Point of this tangent being that out of the dozen times I can think of that the industry has shut down for testing only two were actually related to men who had sex with men. The rest were either mostly straight actors or contracted the disease through other sources.

 ZergSmasher wrote:
While I totally agree with you, those Terms of Service rules are worth jack gak in a case like this. There should be criminal penalties for bullying that leads to a suicide. At the very least, some sort of thing like being an accessory to murder. Maybe when some of these people end up behind bars for a while people will take notice.

Awesome, so if I'm suicidal all I have to do is name some people I had a fight with in my suicide note and I can get them sent to prison? There's a reason these laws don't and shouldn't exist.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 oldravenman3025 wrote:
gays who would prefer to avoid HIV infection at risk in the long term (i.e. those that don't engage in "high camp" for some sort of questionable BS notions of "taking back" stereotypes and anti-gay slurs).

JFC, are you serious? What does "high camp" have to do with disease risks? Is it impossible to have a thread like this without blatant stereotyping?

Make no mistake. It isn't all due to prejudices and myths among heterosexuals, conservative-leaning individuals, and fundamentalist religious types. The gay community, as a whole, does jack to combat bigotry. Instead, many of them contribute to the problem in a desire to flaunt it in the face of the "breeders", just because they can. And those who desire for legitimate acceptance in society have another weight chained to their necks in their uphill battle, performing legit activism. Such nonsense just reinforces the idea that all homosexuals are hedonistic, sick, disease ridden freaks, when in fact, that is an unfair broad brush painted across the group as a whole.

And yep, right on schedule, there's the victim-blaming.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 stanman wrote:
One would hope that any woman always has the final say in choosing who's penis would or wouldn't be allowed inside of her, regardless of her reasons it's exclusively her decision to make and nobody else should feel they have a say in it. It doesn't matter if she's bigoted/ignorant/racist/homophobic, etc end of the line is that she still has ultimate authority to say No and refuse anyone she wants because it's her body.

And nobody is disputing this fact. Nobody is arguing that she should be forced to have sex with someone if we don't approve of her reasons for declining. But refusing to have sex with someone and publicly telling other people to avoid them are two very different things.

 LordofHats wrote:
A valid fear is valid of course. 89% of of the people known to be infected with Syphilis are men, so clearly women should just all be lesbians to give themselves the best odds at avoiding infection. As long as they're not black. Once you eliminate gay/bi men, black women are the next demographic most likely to have HIV. So white and Hispanic women only. No wait that's equally foolish since 66% of the people known to be infected with chlamydia are women but hey chlamydia ain't as bad as HIV right? Maybe just move to the moon though. After all 67% of the human species is positive for herpes.

Using statistics in this manner is bad statistics. If I went around telling people not to associate with black men because they're statistically more likely to be convicted murderers I'd be called racist, and that's a pretty racist thing to be going around and saying. We shouldn't judge individuals by statistical probabilities. It's bad math, it's just stupid, and yeah it's prejudicial and we call prejudice directed against homosexuals homophobia. I think this kind of reasoning is very common in society though, no matter how faulty it is.

Nice strawman you have there.

 LordofHats wrote:
And if we're really going to go by statistics, primarily straight actors (male actors often do both but generally one more than the other) have infected more people than anyone in the industry. Marc Wallice hid that he was HIV positive for two years and infected seven women (he contracted the disease through drug use, statistically the least likely infection vector). Darren James contracted the disease from an actress and infected four women. Probably the most famous case of a gay actor infecting others is Rod Daily and he didn't even infect any men if I remember right. He contracted the disease from his girlfriend (most gay actors aren't actually "gay") Cameron Bay who contracted it from no one knows where. All of her scene partners eventually came out negative so she had to have gotten it at some point in her personal life. Point of this tangent being that out of the dozen times I can think of that the industry has shut down for testing only two were actually related to men who had sex with men. The rest were either mostly straight actors or contracted the disease through other sources.

This is a much better counterargument against what I assumed Ames' logic was. I'm not familiar enough with pornstars or its history (I prefer erotic stories for my kicks) to dispute this, so I'll take your word for it. Out of curiosity, how much bigger is the straight porn industry compared to the gay porn industry? That's the only number I can think of that can throw a wrench into this logic.

In regards to the topic though, at most it proves Ames' reasoning (or at least our conjecture about it) was flawed, not that she was homophobic.

Peregrine wrote:And yep, right on schedule, there's the victim-blaming.

While I abhor, completely disagree with and distance myself from the post you're reacting to here, surely the victim in this case was the poor girl driven to suicide because she made an unwise but (presumably) well-meant comment on social media?

 Peregrine wrote:
And yep, right on schedule, there's the victim-blaming.

Hypocrite.

 Dreadwinter wrote:
#1 No, they do not have thick skin. In fact, many get in to the business due to underlying mental health issues, which can cause them to do very irrational things such as this.

#2 Every group, no matter how good the intentions are, is going to have that one gak who doesn't really understand what he is saying or doing.

Edit: had notoriously in there for no reason, because why not

Underlying mental health issues? Like what? I mean if you are telling me they do it because they are depressed - get over it - everyone is depressed. Any girl that works in the industry has been called a lot of names - it goes with the territory. I'm pretty much an expert when it comes to porn too - the things they do...that gives you thick skin is all I am saying.

In regards to the current environment - it's not a few bad apples creating it - it is mobs of people. It is truly terrifying to me.

 Xenomancers wrote:
I'm pretty much an expert when it comes to porn too

oh?

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:
#1 No, they do not have thick skin. In fact, many get in to the business due to underlying mental health issues, which can cause them to do very irrational things such as this.

#2 Every group, no matter how good the intentions are, is going to have that one gak who doesn't really understand what he is saying or doing.

Edit: had notoriously in there for no reason, because why not

Underlying mental health issues? Like what? I mean if you are telling me they do it because they are depressed - get over it - everyone is depressed. Any girl that works in the industry has been called a lot of names - it goes with the territory. I'm pretty much an expert when it comes to porn too - the things they do...that gives you thick skin is all I am saying.

In regards to the current environment - it's not a few bad apples creating it - it is mobs of people. It is truly terrifying to me.

I watch a lot of hockey. Doesn't mean I'm an expert on hockey

By all accounts, Ms Ames was a lovely young lady. She certainly was pretty. It's damn tragic that she lost her life so early.

Those looking to score political points on both sides of this issue should be fething ashamed of themselves.

 Xenomancers wrote:
I mean if you are telling me they do it because they are depressed - get over it - everyone is depressed.

"Everyone is depressed" is such a non-statement. Many people might have had moments of depression. But there is an entire scale between having the monday blues and severe almost permanent states of depression.

Its frankly insulting to say all depression is the same when really its not. It shows a significant lack of understanding mental health problems.

 feeder wrote:

I watch a lot of hockey. Doesn't mean I'm an expert on hockey

But what if he used to play hockey professionally?

oh the implications

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:
#1 No, they do not have thick skin. In fact, many get in to the business due to underlying mental health issues, which can cause them to do very irrational things such as this.

#2 Every group, no matter how good the intentions are, is going to have that one gak who doesn't really understand what he is saying or doing.

Edit: had notoriously in there for no reason, because why not

Underlying mental health issues? Like what? I mean if you are telling me they do it because they are depressed - get over it - everyone is depressed. Any girl that works in the industry has been called a lot of names - it goes with the territory. I'm pretty much an expert when it comes to porn too - the things they do...that gives you thick skin is all I am saying.

In regards to the current environment - it's not a few bad apples creating it - it is mobs of people. It is truly terrifying to me.

I get the sneaking suspicion that you are not an expert on anything, especially mental health. So I am going to just let you walk away looking like a fool instead of calling you out over the "get over it - everyone is depressed" statement and making you look far, far worse.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:
#1 No, they do not have thick skin. In fact, many get in to the business due to underlying mental health issues, which can cause them to do very irrational things such as this.

#2 Every group, no matter how good the intentions are, is going to have that one gak who doesn't really understand what he is saying or doing.

Edit: had notoriously in there for no reason, because why not

Underlying mental health issues? Like what? I mean if you are telling me they do it because they are depressed - get over it - everyone is depressed. Any girl that works in the industry has been called a lot of names - it goes with the territory. I'm pretty much an expert when it comes to porn too - the things they do...that gives you thick skin is all I am saying.

In regards to the current environment - it's not a few bad apples creating it - it is mobs of people. It is truly terrifying to me.

If I understand you correctly, based on your degree in clinical psychology you can confirm there is no such thing as mental illness, and no reason at all why this particular woman should be affected by the messages directed at her.

Nonetheless. everything is the fault of leftist SJWs, and you are very frightened.

Is this a fair assessment, or would you like to re-present your thinking differently?

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:
#1 No, they do not have thick skin. In fact, many get in to the business due to underlying mental health issues, which can cause them to do very irrational things such as this.

#2 Every group, no matter how good the intentions are, is going to have that one gak who doesn't really understand what he is saying or doing.

Edit: had notoriously in there for no reason, because why not

Underlying mental health issues? Like what? I mean if you are telling me they do it because they are depressed - get over it - everyone is depressed. Any girl that works in the industry has been called a lot of names - it goes with the territory. I'm pretty much an expert when it comes to porn too - the things they do...that gives you thick skin is all I am saying.

In regards to the current environment - it's not a few bad apples creating it - it is mobs of people. It is truly terrifying to me.

If I understand you correctly, based on your degree in clinical psychology you can confirm there is no such thing as mental illness, and no reason at all why this particular woman should be affected by the messages directed at her.

Nonetheless. everything is the fault of leftist SJWs, and you are very frightened.

Is this a fair assessment, or would you like to re-present your thinking differently?

Thats a straw man... I see no references to "Leftist SJW's" in Xenomancer's post.

<quote = Xenomancers>In regards to the current environment - it's not a few bad apples creating it - it is mobs of people. It is truly terrifying to me.</quote>

I am sure you do not claim that 4Chan or the GOP are leading the rush to condemn someone for homophobia.

Hopefully Xenomancers can speak for himself.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Hopefully Xenomancers can speak for himself.

edit: nevermind.

Bran Dawri wrote:


Nice strawman you have there.

Statistics could probably tell you a lot about white Americans in their late 20s with college degrees but a lot of that information would probably make you completely wrong if you used it to make determinations about me specifically. People are stupid about this kind of think because they see HIV in the news. The exact same logic being used to justify not having sex with a guy who has had sex with other guys can be applied to straight men, straight women, gay women, bisexuals, and all of it is fundamentally faulty because it's bad statistics. Statistics aren't intended to be used to judge individuals. STD infection in the porn industry trends lower than the general population to begin with. People do this nonsense all the time and its an easy mistake to make because it seems rational even though it isn't. They'll be terrified of being bit by a shark even though they're much more likely to be seriously injured walking through the beach parking lot. If I were to just go around shunning white guys because they're statistically more likely to be members of the Ku Klux Klan people would think I'm being stupid.

Sorry. It's not a strawman to point out that people are using statistics in a piss poor way here. The logic being used here is faulty, and pointing it out by applying it isn't a misrepresentation.

Out of curiosity, how much bigger is the straight porn industry compared to the gay porn industry? That's the only number I can think of that can throw a wrench into this logic.

I don't know the exact number but its probably worth dividing the industry into three main areas; straight porn, lesbian porn, and gay (male) porn. The first two are much larger than the third but actors/actresses move between them. I don't even know if a woman can be hired in the industry if she's unwilling to do girl on girl. Men probably can, but a lot of the men who work as actors generally do at least one gay shoot in their career. The straight/lesbian areas produce a lot more content than gay male.

All three though are overseen medically by the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation whose track record is mired by a number of rather obvious feth ups, but they do so many tests that their more likely to run into bad results than most of the population which doesn't even get regularly tested at all.

In regards to the topic though, at most it proves Ames' reasoning (or at least our conjecture about it) was flawed, not that she was homophobic.

It's the difference between calling someone homophobic and saying what they said was homophobic. What she said was more than a little homophobic and it's the kind of low level you'll see it pretty much everyday prejudice that a particular brand of internet denizen loves to jump on and be absolute little monsters about. I don't know if she herself was homophobic (I don't think it matters a whole lot cause she didn't deserve to be treated that way), but I don't think she meant any harm with that comment. Looking into her history she seems to have been rather open about her struggles with bi-polar disorder and depression. Her full comment is this;

whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews , you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. BS is all I can say Do agents really not care about who they're representing? #ladirect I do my homework for my body

The agent bit is interesting. There's been increasing push back from actors and actresses for awhile now to have more control on set and during shoots. I think that's what Ames real focus was initially on, but like most people caught up in the speed and fury of the internet she did what happens quite often; someone jumped on her and she posted faster than her brain thought. She focused on the gay porn part, and lost track of the other half of what she was talking about. So yeah. There's a bit of that low key homophobia there, but there's another half to this comment that seems to have gone generally unnoticed and that's the part where she calls out agents for not taking the interests/safety of performers into consideration. This has been something going on ever since Darren James' infection as he's always maintained he didn't want to do the shoot where he was infected but was heavily pressured to.

EDIT: No idea why the end of my post got cut off there. Fixed now?

 LordofHats wrote:
Her full comment is this;

whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews , you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. BS is all I can say

Just correcting this, as you left off a sentence.

Full comment:

Whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews, you're shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. BS is all I can say. Do agents really not care about who they're representing? #ladirect I do my homework for my body

Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/actor-accused-cyberbullying-august-ames-responds-article-1.3689669

The "Do agents really not care about who they're representing?" statement makes me wonder how educated performers are about the safety standards in their industry, and how standardized those procedures are in the first place. If Ames believed that performers in gay films were a risk, and a risk her agent(s) should be aware of and protect her from, then are there different testing standards in place? That is a very specific fear of hers being voiced in that tweet, and I have a hard time chalking it up purely to homophobia. Misinformation, perhaps, but for an industry that supposedly has such strict testing it is doesn't add up that a performer would be "confused" about such an important facet of safety and regulation.

From that same article one of the actors who was Tweeting Ames, Jaxton Wheeler, who told Ames to apologize for her comments or "swallow a cyanide pill" has had backlash of his own. Dropped from two productions and black listed from a production company because of his interaction with Ames. Wheeler approached the gay porn blog The Sword to give his response to the situation and the editor of the blog is quoted as saying this:

Harlan Yaffe, editor of The Sword, told The News that Wheeler and others' public criticism of Ames came from a place of frustration in terms of long-standing stigmas that have plagued gay porn actors for years.

"This is really something that has simmered under the surface really for a long time. (They) were trying to get August to correct her record on the fact that in mainstream society, at first, all gay men were looked at as walking petri dishes of disease," he said.

"I think that in mainstream society some of that has chipped away a bit, but in the porn world, it really hasn't. And there's still a belief that gay men are walking petri dishes and they are somehow more of a health threat to their co-stars than men that don't do gay porn."

Yaffe explained that, as Wheeler said, all actors working for mainstream studios are required to undergo the same testing at the same frequency under industry protocol.

So who is right? One side claims testing is standardized across the industry, and yet there is still a bias among performers? That doesn't add up at all.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Her full comment is this;

whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews , you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. BS is all I can say

Just correcting this, as you left off a sentence.

Full comment:

Whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews, you're shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. BS is all I can say. Do agents really not care about who they're representing? #ladirect I do my homework for my body

Source: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/actor-accused-cyberbullying-august-ames-responds-article-1.3689669

The "Do agents really not care about who they're representing?" statement makes me wonder how educated performers are about the safety standards in their industry, and how standardized those procedures are in the first place. If Ames believed that performers in gay films were a risk, and a risk her agent(s) should be aware of and protect her from, then are there different testing standards in place? That is a very specific fear of hers being voiced in that tweet, and I have a hard time chalking it up purely to homophobia. Misinformation, perhaps, but for an industry that supposedly has such strict testing it is doesn't add up that a performer would be "confused" about such an important facet of safety and regulation.

From that same article one of the actors who was Tweeting Ames, Jaxton Wheeler, who told Ames to apologize for her comments or "swallow a cyanide pill" has had backlash of his own. Dropped from two productions and black listed from a production company because of his interaction with Ames. Wheeler approached the gay porn blog The Sword to give his response to the situation and the editor of the blog is quoted as saying this:

Harlan Yaffe, editor of The Sword, told The News that Wheeler and others' public criticism of Ames came from a place of frustration in terms of long-standing stigmas that have plagued gay porn actors for years.

"This is really something that has simmered under the surface really for a long time. (They) were trying to get August to correct her record on the fact that in mainstream society, at first, all gay men were looked at as walking petri dishes of disease," he said.

"I think that in mainstream society some of that has chipped away a bit, but in the porn world, it really hasn't. And there's still a belief that gay men are walking petri dishes and they are somehow more of a health threat to their co-stars than men that don't do gay porn."

Yaffe explained that, as Wheeler said, all actors working for mainstream studios are required to undergo the same testing at the same frequency under industry protocol.

So who is right? One side claims testing is standardized across the industry, and yet there is still a bias among performers? That doesn't add up at all.

Well that kinda is the crux of the matter. Which side is right?

Its kinda important.

Though if she had been told wrongly, or not been told about the level of testing he had been subject too correctly.

Its impossible to blame her for things she did not know or was misinformed about.

Yeah my browser clonked out. Not sure why it cut off the end of that sentence and like the paragraph I wrote after it.

 Desubot wrote:

 feeder wrote:

I watch a lot of hockey. Doesn't mean I'm an expert on hockey

But what if he used to play hockey professionally?

oh the implications

[George Takei] Ohh myyy [/George Takei]

Perhaps Xenomancer could establish his expert credentials?

 feeder wrote:

 Desubot wrote:

 feeder wrote:

I watch a lot of hockey. Doesn't mean I'm an expert on hockey

But what if he used to play hockey professionally?

oh the implications

[George Takei] Ohh myyy [/George Takei]

Perhaps Xenomancer could establish his expert credentials?

He's two fries short of a happy meal?

 feeder wrote:

 Desubot wrote:

 feeder wrote:

I watch a lot of hockey. Doesn't mean I'm an expert on hockey

But what if he used to play hockey professionally?

oh the implications

[George Takei] Ohh myyy [/George Takei]

Perhaps Xenomancer could establish his expert credentials?

You might know him better by his professional name, "Sweet Daddy Longlove".

 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah my browser clonked out. Not sure why it cut off the end of that sentence and like the paragraph I wrote after it.

When my computer acts up I blame it on Comstar. White robed bastards, all of them.

 jhe90 wrote:


Well that kinda is the crux of the matter. Which side is right?

Its kinda important.

Though if she had been told wrongly, or not been told about the level of testing he had been subject too correctly.

Its impossible to blame her for things she did not know or was misinformed about.

It was always my understanding that the industry regulated itself fairly well, but Ames tweet and the gak storm that followed says otherwise.

Living in California I got to vote last year on a proposition aimed at forcing performers in adult films to use condoms. The proposition failed to pass, and I voted against it because it seemed like a way to open the floodgates to frivolous lawsuits, but now I am wondering if there is some merit in the idea. Not that Prop 60 was the solution as it was written, but rather implementing some manner of state regulation. Granted, these musing are based purely on the confusion that seems to be at the heart of this story and why Ames felt the need to be protected by her representation from performing with certain actors.

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah my browser clonked out. Not sure why it cut off the end of that sentence and like the paragraph I wrote after it.

When my computer acts up I blame it on Comstar. White robed bastards, all of them.

Naw...It's WoB that caused all the issues...

I wonder about today's 'norms'. Everyone has their own life perspective and experiences.

So all of us will see and view things differently.

Now others will always 'present' their view in arguments to change your prespective. This has gone on forever.

But with the internet and a lot more crossover it seems that there is a mob policing mentality that if you have your own opinion and it is not 'correct' then you are taken to the gallows unless you shut up and go to your corner.

I thought we were moving into a more open society with the leaps and bounds in technology. It feels more and more that we are being coerced into nice little 'cow-pens' of mob thought.

Freedom or ?

 admironheart wrote:
I wonder about today's 'norms'. Everyone has their own life perspective and experiences.

So all of us will see and view things differently.

Now others will always 'present' their view in arguments to change your prespective. This has gone on forever.

But with the internet and a lot more crossover it seems that there is a mob policing mentality that if you have your own opinion and it is not 'correct' then you are taken to the gallows unless you shut up and go to your corner.

I thought we were moving into a more open society with the leaps and bounds in technology. It feels more and more that we are being coerced into nice little 'cow-pens' of mob thought.

Freedom or ?

Definitely. The Internet and society in general is on a downwards trend to Authoritarianism.

 skyth wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah my browser clonked out. Not sure why it cut off the end of that sentence and like the paragraph I wrote after it.

When my computer acts up I blame it on Comstar. White robed bastards, all of them.

Naw...It's WoB that caused all the issues...

True enough, and glad to find another Btech fan.

 admironheart wrote:
I thought we were moving into a more open society with the leaps and bounds in technology. It feels more and more that we are being coerced into nice little 'cow-pens' of mob thought.

A lot going on in your post that I don't want to touch, but in regards to this I'll just say when hasn't group consensus, public opinion, and all the other shortcomings of humanity's need to conform been an issue with regulating thought?

If anything technology opens up the potential for people to find other people who share their perspectives and "truths" to the point where facts are no longer facts. So, I am not sure what you are getting at.

 Peregrine wrote:

 ZergSmasher wrote:
While I totally agree with you, those Terms of Service rules are worth jack gak in a case like this. There should be criminal penalties for bullying that leads to a suicide. At the very least, some sort of thing like being an accessory to murder. Maybe when some of these people end up behind bars for a while people will take notice.

Awesome, so if I'm suicidal all I have to do is name some people I had a fight with in my suicide note and I can get them sent to prison? There's a reason these laws don't and shouldn't exist.

Oh for crying out loud, obviously there should have to be outside evidence. I had actually thought of the case you just described, a vindictive suicidal person who implicates someone just because they don't like them. Obviously there should need to be evidence before someone could be convicted of bullying. Like social media messages, texts, tweets, and other evidence beyond just the suicidal person naming names on a suicide note. I didn't say it would be easy, or that all such bullies would be caught, but at least some of them might if the right measures were taken.

 LordofHats wrote:


Statistics could probably tell you a lot about white Americans in their late 20s with college degrees but a lot of that information would probably make you completely wrong if you used it to make determinations about me specifically. People are stupid about this kind of think because they see HIV in the news. The exact same logic being used to justify not having sex with a guy who has had sex with other guys can be applied to straight men, straight women, gay women, bisexuals, and all of it is fundamentally faulty because it's bad statistics. Statistics aren't intended to be used to judge individuals. STD infection in the porn industry trends lower than the general population to begin with. People do this nonsense all the time and its an easy mistake to make because it seems rational even though it isn't. They'll be terrified of being bit by a shark even though they're much more likely to be seriously injured walking through the beach parking lot. If I were to just go around shunning white guys because they're statistically more likely to be members of the Ku Klux Klan people would think I'm being stupid.

Sorry. It's not a strawman to point out that people are using statistics in a piss poor way here. The logic being used here is faulty, and pointing it out by applying it isn't a misrepresentation.

I disagree. The logic isn't faulty. An assumption that the reasoning was based on was in error. The faulty assumption was that because gay men in general have a much higher chance of being infected with HIV that the same was true for pornstars who do gay porn. Your facts with regards to causes for porn shutdowns because of an HIV breakout set that straight.
However, the reasoning "People who have gay sex have an increased chance of having HIV, so if I have unprotected sex with such people I have a higher chance of contracting this disease than if I do it with someone who doesn't and I don't want to take that extra risk" is not faulty of itself without the extra information that almost all of the HIV breakouts in porn did not, in fact, come from gay porn sets even where the actor who introduced it did gay porn, but from other sources.

 LordofHats wrote:


It's the difference between calling someone homophobic and saying what they said was homophobic. {...}

The agent bit is interesting. There's been increasing push back from actors and actresses for awhile now to have more control on set and during shoots. I think that's what Ames real focus was initially on, but like most people caught up in the speed and fury of the internet she did what happens quite often; someone jumped on her and she posted faster than her brain thought. She focused on the gay porn part, and lost track of the other half of what she was talking about. So yeah. There's a bit of that low key homophobia there, but there's another half to this comment that seems to have gone generally unnoticed and that's the part where she calls out agents for not taking the interests/safety of performers into consideration. This has been something going on ever since Darren James' infection as he's always maintained he didn't want to do the shoot where he was infected but was heavily pressured to.

It's an important difference though. Someone saying something that comes across as homophobic because they make a mistaken assumption in an otherwise logical reasoning is differenct from someone being an actual homophobe. The former can be reasoned with by giving them the facts in the matter, the latter will not change their mind based on facts, as fear is not based in logic and reasoning.

Fully agree with you on the last paragraph. It's a big reason I prefer stories. No one gets forced into doing things they'd rather not do for those (possibly in them if your tastes run that way. Who am I to judge?).

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:



So who is right? One side claims testing is standardized across the industry, and yet there is still a bias among performers? That doesn't add up at all.

It does add up when you factor in the human element that people hold onto their preconceptions, prejudices and biases long after they are proven false or shown to have a complete lack of supporting evidence.

For evidence see flat earthism, abstinence only sex ed, young earth creationism, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, holocaust deniers, 9/11 truthers, obama birthers, moon landing conspiracists, string theorists etc.

The world is full of people who can continue to hold onto an idea even when it is plainly false with even the smallest bit of research.

Bran Dawri wrote:
I disagree. The logic isn't faulty. An assumption that the reasoning was based on was in error. The faulty assumption was that because gay men in general have a much higher chance of being infected with HIV that the same was true for pornstars who do gay porn. Your facts with regards to causes for porn shutdowns because of an HIV breakout set that straight.

It is faulty. Using a statistical probability to make a determination about an individual is extremely faulty especially if your using the wrong data. That the use of such statistics is highly selective is was makes it prejudicial.

There is indeed a difference that’s why I called it a difference and it is important. But it’s still prejudicial. The difference here is the key difference between being a bigot and just being part of a culture where casual prejudice is common place (and that’s basically every culture). That’s why I call it low key. It’s kind of like how people take all those Jewish stereotypes in old Disney stuff as evidence that Walt was an anti Semite ignoring that the guy gave millions over his life to Jewish charities. Those offensive stereotypes were just part of the culture of his time and shoddy evidence of how he felt on a conscious level. They’re important to recognize because they are offensive but jumping on people for them as often happens is imo counter-productive.

Fully agree with you on the last paragraph. It's a big reason I prefer stories. No one gets forced into doing things they'd rather not do for those (possibly in them if your tastes run that way. Who am I to judge?).

For sure. It’s a highly exploitative industry. STDs might rate lower in porn than generally but mental disorders especially depression rate higher and there are some obvious conclusions to drawn there. Unfortunately it’s something I think just isn’t going away. Can’t ban porn anymore than you can ban drugs or guns. People will find it no matter it’s legalitt.

If you are in this industry than you are already dealing with massive emotional trauma.

 LordofHats wrote:
It is faulty. Using a statistical probability to make a determination about an individual is extremely faulty especially if your using the wrong data. That the use of such statistics is highly selective is was makes it prejudicial.

There is indeed a difference that’s why I called it a difference and it is important. But it’s still prejudicial. The difference here is the key difference between being a bigot and just being part of a culture where casual prejudice is common place (and that’s basically every culture). That’s why I call it low key. It’s kind of like how people take all those Jewish stereotypes in old Disney stuff as evidence that Walt was an anti Semite ignoring that the guy gave millions over his life to Jewish charities. Those offensive stereotypes were just part of the culture of his time and shoddy evidence of how he felt on a conscious level. They’re important to recognize because they are offensive but jumping on people for them as often happens is imo counter-productive..

I think we're pretty much in agreement then. I'm just looking at it from a slightly different perspective. Pre-emptive caveat: I don't generally like analogies, but I do think this is a good one.

I think the (presumed) logic of Ames dicussed so far is more analogous to having to walk through an unlit park. Not everyone you meet in one is out to rob you, but the chances of actually being robbed by someone is (much) greater at night than in broad daylight, so it's better to cross during daylight than at nighttime. And pretty much everyone will do that given the chance. Why is the reasoning solid there, but not when considering the chances of getting a (specific) STD?
So it's not a slight against the individual actor because he's gay. It's not even about whether or not he's gay as such - she's not even saying he actually has HIV, just like not everyone you meet in a dark park at night is out to rob you, but she wanted to avoid the increase in chance of being robbed. I cannot fault her for that.
A point can be made she was in the wrong line of work for that (ie, she should've avoided the park altogether), or that she got daytime and nighttime mixed up (or maybe she was in the wrong park) because of a culturally widespread urban legend about gay porn actors, but there's nothing wrong with the base logic of trying to avoid unlit parks at night in order to not get robbed.

I'm just going to repeat that phrase here. It's too crazy not to. She got daytime and nighttime mixed up because of a culturally widespread urban legend about gay porn actors. I'm changing my mind about analogies. If they can lead to phrases as insane as that and still make sense, they're awesome!

 Frazzled wrote:
If you are in this industry than you are already dealing with massive emotional trauma.

Or not.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
If you are in this industry than you are already dealing with massive emotional trauma.

Or not.

I take it you have some experience in this industry then. It's not like you to be contrary after all.

Sadly theres no hard data about the number of people in the Porn-Industry with mental traumas/problems. Of course, not everybody is gonna have them, but I don't think is unreasonable to assume that a good number of them have some kind of problem.
You only need to read testimony of ex porn actors and actress. The use and abuse of drugs forced by the producers, how is normal to cheat on what is going to be filmed, especially for newbies in the industry, etc...

 Galas wrote:
Sadly theres no hard data about the number of people in the Porn-Industry with mental traumas/problems. Of course, not everybody is gonna have them, but I don't think is unreasonable to assume that a good number of them have some kind of problem.
You only need to read testimony of ex porn actors and actress. The use and abuse of drugs forced by the producers, how is normal to cheat on what is going to be filmed, especially for newbies in the industry, etc...

There are several very good books, documentaries on the subject, you are right. But if Peregine is trying to be a contrary WUM, rather than contribute to a meaningful discussion, he needs to be called out. No doubt he'll be delighted he's getting this reaction from me.

 Galas wrote:
Sadly theres no hard data about the number of people in the Porn-Industry with mental traumas/problems. Of course, not everybody is gonna have them, but I don't think is unreasonable to assume that a good number of them have some kind of problem.
You only need to read testimony of ex porn actors and actress. The use and abuse of drugs forced by the producers, how is normal to cheat on what is going to be filmed, especially for newbies in the industry, etc...

Well Id day its a fair guess Thetes a higher percentage above the average of having some kind of darker past or somthing in there that's less happy.

Its not a industry that people are gonna go, I wanna do this I grow up 99. 9% of the ime.

For whatever reason, she was uncomfortable shooting a sex scene with an actor from what she considers to be a higher-risk area of the business.

She could be 100% wrong about it being riskier.

She could be 100% wrong about that area of her business not having the same test protocols and standards as hers.

None of that changes the fact that, as an actor, she gets to choose what projects she is part of and which ones she isn't. Her body, her choice.

She gave her explanations and then was cyber-bullied because of it. I hope those responsible are charged to the full extent of their local jurisdictions laws and punished accordingly.

It's a damn shame she killed herself.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:



So who is right? One side claims testing is standardized across the industry, and yet there is still a bias among performers? That doesn't add up at all.

It does add up when you factor in the human element that people hold onto their preconceptions, prejudices and biases long after they are proven false or shown to have a complete lack of supporting evidence.

For evidence see flat earthism, abstinence only sex ed, young earth creationism, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, holocaust deniers, 9/11 truthers, obama birthers, moon landing conspiracists, string theorists etc.

The world is full of people who can continue to hold onto an idea even when it is plainly false with even the smallest bit of research.

I normally would agree with you, but I have a hard time placing adult performers in the same class of people who deny the moon landing, think 9/11 was an inside job, or think the earth is flat. For those groups there is an overt antagonism to education, authority and science. Those people are hostile to any facts which undo their world view, and they gain from sticking their head in the sand and believing their falsehoods.

For adult performers, though, the facts are crucial to their health and prosperity and shunning said facts in order to hold onto deeply held biases just doesn't hold water for me. I am not convinced that that was Ames' angle with her tweet, because again, she referenced her management as failing to protect her. That signals to me there is an institutional issue at play here within the adult industry. If Ames was so outraged that her manager(s) didn't properly vet the performer/production company she was scheduled to shoot with is that a personal bias on Ames part or some sort of behind-the-scenes reveal of what really transpires in that industry? She may have been tipping off the fact that certain performers/studios/producers don't play by the rules fully. I've heard those allegations before, especially during the Prop 60 debates, so it wouldn't be the first time claims were made of corner cutting occurring in the adult film industry.

Or she is a homophobe. But again, I just don't see that narrative playing out here. Someone who lives the lifestyle of an adult performer probably is a little more progressive with their ideas than most people, is probably a little more progressive with how they view the human condition than most people, so for her to be homophobic seems like a stretch.

It may also be worth noting that Ames's husband is also a longtime director and producer within the industry. So she wouldn't have had just her own knowledge and experience to rely on in making her decision.

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:
#1 No, they do not have thick skin. In fact, many get in to the business due to underlying mental health issues, which can cause them to do very irrational things such as this.

#2 Every group, no matter how good the intentions are, is going to have that one gak who doesn't really understand what he is saying or doing.

Edit: had notoriously in there for no reason, because why not

Underlying mental health issues? Like what? I mean if you are telling me they do it because they are depressed - get over it - everyone is depressed. Any girl that works in the industry has been called a lot of names - it goes with the territory. I'm pretty much an expert when it comes to porn too - the things they do...that gives you thick skin is all I am saying.

In regards to the current environment - it's not a few bad apples creating it - it is mobs of people. It is truly terrifying to me.

I get the sneaking suspicion that you are not an expert on anything, especially mental health. So I am going to just let you walk away looking like a fool instead of calling you out over the "get over it - everyone is depressed" statement and making you look far, far worse.

I am a nurse. My mom was a psych nurse. I've dealt with my own depression most of my life - it's never made me want to kill myself because someone said something bad about me. It doesn't make me an expert on psychology. It's pretty much common sense that a porn actress takes much greater humiliation and verbal abuse during their actual job than people saying bad things about you on social media. You can dispute that if you want...but if your object is to make me look like a fool you'll probably see the opposite.

Also the qubit about me being an expert on porn was kind of ment to be a joke (haha). I was just trying to say I've watched a lot of porn without actually saying "I've watched lots of porn".

 Xenomancers wrote:

I am a nurse. My mom was a psych nurse. I've dealt with my own depression most of my life - it's never made me want to kill myself because someone said something bad about me. It doesn't make me an expert on psychology. It's pretty much common sense that a porn actress takes much greater humiliation and verbal abuse during their actual job than people saying bad things about you on social media. You can dispute that if you want...but if your object is to make me look like a fool you'll probably see the opposite.

Still waiting on those "porn expert" credentials you hold.

 feeder wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

I am a nurse. My mom was a psych nurse. I've dealt with my own depression most of my life - it's never made me want to kill myself because someone said something bad about me. It doesn't make me an expert on psychology. It's pretty much common sense that a porn actress takes much greater humiliation and verbal abuse during their actual job than people saying bad things about you on social media. You can dispute that if you want...but if your object is to make me look like a fool you'll probably see the opposite.

Still waiting on those "porn expert" credentials you hold.

See above.

In Japan they don't have this kind of problems. Cartoons don't have feelings.

I think there's probably a world of difference between someone saying something on-set that all parties involved know is part of the job and getting death threats from faceless strangers.

 Galas wrote:
In Japan they don't have this kind of problems. Cartoons don't have feelings.

Well sure... but that gak gets weird man...





The above is actually just a translation failure that achieved memehood for being so absurd.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:
#1 No, they do not have thick skin. In fact, many get in to the business due to underlying mental health issues, which can cause them to do very irrational things such as this.

#2 Every group, no matter how good the intentions are, is going to have that one gak who doesn't really understand what he is saying or doing.

Edit: had notoriously in there for no reason, because why not

Underlying mental health issues? Like what? I mean if you are telling me they do it because they are depressed - get over it - everyone is depressed. Any girl that works in the industry has been called a lot of names - it goes with the territory. I'm pretty much an expert when it comes to porn too - the things they do...that gives you thick skin is all I am saying.

In regards to the current environment - it's not a few bad apples creating it - it is mobs of people. It is truly terrifying to me.

I get the sneaking suspicion that you are not an expert on anything, especially mental health. So I am going to just let you walk away looking like a fool instead of calling you out over the "get over it - everyone is depressed" statement and making you look far, far worse.

I am a nurse. My mom was a psych nurse. I've dealt with my own depression most of my life - it's never made me want to kill myself because someone said something bad about me. It doesn't make me an expert on psychology. It's pretty much common sense that a porn actress takes much greater humiliation and verbal abuse during their actual job than people saying bad things about you on social media. You can dispute that if you want...but if your object is to make me look like a fool you'll probably see the opposite.

Also the qubit about me being an expert on porn was kind of ment to be a joke (haha). I was just trying to say I've watched a lot of porn without actually saying "I've watched lots of porn".

Bullgak. The whole "it didn't happen to me, so it shouldn't happen to them" defense is absurd and as a nurse, you should know that all patients handle things differently. If you are a Nurse, it amazes me that you have reached that level without understanding that or killing a person. "Bee stings never killed me, get over it."

 Galas wrote:
In Japan they don't have this kind of problems. Cartoons don't have feelings.

I know you're being flippant, but just to be clear there is a porn industry over in Japan with real people that appear to be quite sizable. Idols can end up in the AV business, iirc.
The Hentai is still more messed up though. You can get away with a lot of things with fictional characters and ink.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 feeder wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

I am a nurse. My mom was a psych nurse. I've dealt with my own depression most of my life - it's never made me want to kill myself because someone said something bad about me. It doesn't make me an expert on psychology. It's pretty much common sense that a porn actress takes much greater humiliation and verbal abuse during their actual job than people saying bad things about you on social media. You can dispute that if you want...but if your object is to make me look like a fool you'll probably see the opposite.

Still waiting on those "porn expert" credentials you hold.

See above.

"pretty much common sense".... I'm beginning to suspect you hold no degree in Porniveristy at all!

 feeder wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 feeder wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

I am a nurse. My mom was a psych nurse. I've dealt with my own depression most of my life - it's never made me want to kill myself because someone said something bad about me. It doesn't make me an expert on psychology. It's pretty much common sense that a porn actress takes much greater humiliation and verbal abuse during their actual job than people saying bad things about you on social media. You can dispute that if you want...but if your object is to make me look like a fool you'll probably see the opposite.

Still waiting on those "porn expert" credentials you hold.

See above.

"pretty much common sense".... I'm beginning to suspect you hold no degree in Porniveristy at all!

Aww thats not what i was expecting at all :(

 Xenomancers wrote:

I am a nurse. My mom was a psych nurse. I've dealt with my own depression most of my life - it's never made me want to kill myself because someone said something bad about me. It doesn't make me an expert on psychology. It's pretty much common sense that a porn actress takes much greater humiliation and verbal abuse during their actual job than people saying bad things about you on social media. You can dispute that if you want...but if your object is to make me look like a fool you'll probably see the opposite.

You being a nurse doesn't add anything positive to this argument. It only makes me wonder how you can conclude that all patients must experience a mental health issue in exactly the same manner to exactly the same degree as you do.

Second, greater humiliation and verbal abuse during their job? Are you taking about what you see onscreen? Or do you have proof that every production has been a hotbed of human cruelty and every performer so demoralized he or she could not walk out?

Frankly, your dismissal of other people's depression makes you look like a fool more than anything anyone else has said.

 feeder wrote:
Porniveristy

We need to submit this word to Websters. Like now XD

Or just claim the domain name now, cause someone's going to want to slap a bunch of videos on that HTTP at some point

 LordofHats wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Porniveristy

We need to submit this word to Websters. Like now XD

Or just claim the domain name now, cause someone's going to want to slap a bunch of videos on that HTTP at some point

Wanna go halfsies?

We could be rich as kings!

Only if we buy purple suits with some of the money

Where does one submit a resume for a faculty position at The Porniversity? Asking for a friend.....

 Dreadwinter wrote:
Where does one submit a resume for a faculty position at The Porniversity? Asking for a friend.....

As a former professor of Computer Graphsex there, I don't recommend submitting for Tenure.

 BaronIveagh wrote:

 Dreadwinter wrote:
Where does one submit a resume for a faculty position at The Porniversity? Asking for a friend.....

As a former professor of Computer Graphsex there, I don't recommend submitting for Tenure.

I think I've seen some of your work, a real pioneer of the quadratic on cubic genre.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

I think I've seen some of your work, a real pioneer of the quadratic on cubic genre.

I still prefer 'Increasing and Decreasing the Amplitude of the Vibrational Frequency of Breasts' A real eye opener for women trying to keep Z cup or larger breasts from demolishing a bra before their cue.

I personally would go for psychology. The "psychosomatic effects of intense physical stimulation" sounds interesting.

 Xenomancers wrote:
My mom was a psych nurse.

My Mum was a teacher and my grandfather a doctor.... too bad education isn't passed on genetically

I've dealt with my own depression most of my life - it's never made me want to kill myself because someone said something bad about me.

That's awesome for YOU, but doesn't apply to EVERYONE. I'm sure more than a few people have been bullied in to suicide.

Times I've felt like I can't go on it can make a pretty big bloody difference what random people say to me.

Also I'll say that sometimes when I feel that way I consciously make the effort to do things I normally enjoy even if I don't feel like doing them, if something happens and the thing I enjoy kicks me in the balls it can just make matters worse. For me that might be working on or driving my hobby car, if the engine blew up when I was already feeling like gak then it's just going to make matters worse.

I know for a lot of other folks out there, social media is something they enjoy and I can definitely see how it biting you in the arse could be horrid.

It's pretty much common sense that a porn actress takes much greater humiliation and verbal abuse during their actual job than people saying bad things about you on social media.

One thing that you neglected to consider, though I still reckon is pretty common sense; not all humiliation and verbal abuse is created equal. Being called a slut/whore/whatever isn't going to sting nearly as bad if on a personal level you don't see those things as shameful. But being called a bad person, bigoted, etc may cut that same person to the bone.

You can dispute that if you want...but if your object is to make me look like a fool you'll probably see the opposite.

My objective in replying to you is to clear up what I think are some pretty big flaws in the thinking that has led you to your conclusions.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
My mom was a psych nurse.

My Mum was a teacher and my grandfather a doctor.... too bad education isn't passed on genetically

A damn shame isn't it? I'd know Spanish, how to plan a full tactical assault, be a fully competent lawyer, doctor, nurse, and be able to program in BASIC, and whenever a Nam vet complained about how "you weren't there" I could be like "yeah but my grand-dad was he thinks you've been milking that line 20 years too long"

Damn shame.

That problem could probably be solved by GITS style cerebral cyberization. Just download that stuff right into your metal brain parts. Instant renaissance man.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
That problem could probably be solved by GITS style cerebral cyberization. Just download that stuff right into your metal brain parts. Instant renaissance man.

But then am I really me, or just a ghost that thinks I'm me...

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

I think I've seen some of your work, a real pioneer of the quadratic on cubic genre.

Don't you mean Quadrotic?

RULE #1 is BE POLITE.

RULE #2 is STAY ON TOPIC.

Please follow these rules.

(Here and everywhere.)

Peregrine wrote:

JFC, are you serious? What does "high camp" have to do with disease risks? Is it impossible to have a thread like this without blatant stereotyping?



And yep, right on schedule, there's the victim-blaming.

Blatant stereotyping goes on because there are those in the community that are hell bent on keeping those stereotypes alive (stereotypes that I would like to see die). And the "high camp" culture is one that celebrates many of those risky behaviors, and you see it going on regularly at these events. But you already know that. If you want, I can post some nice juicy pics from pride events for your viewing pleasure. I've always thought that leather daddies in assless chaps were a hoot, every since those Police Academy movies back in the 80's.



And I don't know what you are on about with this "victim blaming" comment right out of left field. Nowhere in any of my previous posts, in this thread, have I blamed any "victims".

Bran Dawri wrote:
While I abhor, completely disagree with and distance myself from the post you're reacting to here, surely the victim in this case was the poor girl driven to suicide because she made an unwise but (presumably) well-meant comment on social media?

That's your prerogative, of course. The truth generally is disagreeable. But until we start addressing some of these problems instead of just going with it, nothing will change. And one of those is that the gay community does deserve some of the blame for the continued negative light many people continue to see them in.

Anyway, my previous post in question was an admittedly long winded response to a line in one of LordofHats posts before that. It's off topic, and I'll drop it and leave at "just agree to disagree".

Ames comment was unwise insofar as using social media instead of a more private venue. But she didn't do anything wrong in giving her colleague a heads-up about another performer in an upcoming shoot. The porn industry is already a shady one. And gay porn is in a darker corner of the industry (many of the same companies produce porn to cater to various preferences and fetishes) that doesn't get as much attention or in-house oversight.

Here is another fun fact: At least half of the performers in gay porn are not even homosexual. They are straight men who do it for the quick money, or to get their foot in the door of the industry (Porn legend Peter North got his start in gay porn in the 80's, where he earned the nickname "Beer Can"). With the exception of a few who have become popular with fans, most of the actual gay talent don't rise above "newcummer" status, or are just random gay dudes hired off the street or in bars. Some of them are gay "hustlers" (prostitutes). Combined with the lack of standards (or enforcement thereof),and lack of regular disclosure from corporate, one can see why the girls will have concerns when a performer crosses over to straight shoots.

Your negative reaction to "high camp" behaviour is 100% on you, my dude. The flamingest of flaming 'Mr Slave' stereotypes is not a reflection, either good or bad, of gay persons everywhere but just someone living their life.

Risky behaviour is risky, regardless if it is perpetuated by someone "high camp" or a married soldier overseas.

Oh my!

 oldravenman3025 wrote:
Combined with the lack of standards (or enforcement thereof),and lack of regular disclosure from corporate, one can see why the girls will have concerns when a performer crosses over to straight shoots.

Any sources to back up these claims? Not badgering, I am genuinely interested.

As someone who has been diagnosed with clinical suicidal depression (by actual doctors, not internet blowhards) I find some of the comments here stupid, insulting and in some cases dangerously uninformed.
Please do some reading on depression before writing about it, you won't look as stupid and you could save a life.

I have social and generalized anxiety stemming from CPTSD. I've experienced panic attacks since around 11-12. I have one of two reactions to uncomfortable confrontation (i.e. insults). Rarely I become angry immediately. It's much more common for me to start to choke up and have to fight back tears while fighting off the rising anxiety. I can easily see how someone with a history of child abuse would kill herself over bullying on the internet to that degree. Suicidal thoughts go hand in hand with panic attacks and sadly, panicking is not something I can physically control. It has taken years to get the point where I don't self harm during one of those moments.

If she didn't want to have sex with gay men, that's fine for her. I respect her choice.

People crossed the line when they started to get her fired from her gigs.

But.... ultimately, her suicide is on her. She must have had other things going on in her life that allowed her to decide to kill herself.

I blame her peers for being donkey-caves, heck, maybe even criminally liable for her lost income, but for her death? No. That isn't their fault.

 BuFFo wrote:


I blame her peers for being donkey-caves, heck, maybe even criminally liable for her lost income, but for her death? No. That isn't their fault.

Perhaps not. But Malicious Communications is a crime in many countries, so they are criminally liable for that.

Seems to have been missed/overlooked, ITT at least, but one of what I assume was one of her peers also appears to have killed themself a few days ago.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5144941/porn-star-yurizan-beltran-yuri-love-dead-drug-overdose-august-ames/

No apparent connection alluded to other than timing, but does seem a bit odd.

 BuFFo wrote:
I blame her peers for being donkey-caves, heck, maybe even criminally liable for her lost income, but for her death? No. That isn't their fault.

It is hard to know for sure, but maybe it is.
I have twice had a period of depression after some traumatic stuff happened, and when you are suffering from depression just the smallest things (well, they don't seem small at the moment of course) can push you further. I had several moments where something ostensibly small (like a friend not answering my messages) drove me to wanting to commit suicide, and I actually carried through on it several times as well. It is only thanks to people around me who stopped me at the last moment that I am still here.
Point is, people who are depressed don't think rationally, and things that a normal person would simply shrug off can completely devastate you.
I read somewhere that Ames was already struggling with depression, so the cyberbullying may very well have been that final push that led to her committing suicide. It would be far from the first time cyberbullying led to suicide. In a group I went to for therapy, there were several kids who had suicidal thoughts caused or made worse by cyberbullying, and I have also heard of plenty of cases on the news.

 BuFFo wrote:
But.... ultimately, her suicide is on her.

I'd say that's a pretty callous way of looking at it.

If you jumped out from behind a bush and said "BOOO!" to some random person and they died of a heart attack, would you turn around and say it's "on them" for having a heart condition?

If you tackled someone and their body shattered and they died, would you turn around and say it's "on them" for having osteogenesis imperfecta?

There's good reasons you don't scare, tackle or bully people. Part of it's because doing so makes you an arsehole, but another big part of it is that it's dangerously irresponsible to assume they are in a strong enough state physically and/or mentally to take it on the chin.

 BuFFo wrote:
She must have had other things going on in her life that allowed her to decide to kill herself.

Maybe she did had stuff going on in her life, but lets not forget that while depression can be a temporary state caused by circumstances, many people have medically recognised disorders and illnesses that can lead to depression and are exacerbated by circumstances rather than directly caused by them.

 BuFFo wrote:
But.... ultimately, her suicide is on her. She must have had other things going on in her life that allowed her to decide to kill herself.

I blame her peers for being donkey-caves, heck, maybe even criminally liable for her lost income, but for her death? No. That isn't their fault.

Another uninformed person talking rubbish about something they don't understand.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 BuFFo wrote:
But.... ultimately, her suicide is on her.

I'd say that's a pretty callous way of looking at it.

If you jumped out from behind a bush and said "BOOO!" to some random person and they died of a heart attack, would you turn around and say it's "on them" for having a heart condition?

If you tackled someone and their body shattered and they died, would you turn around and say it's "on them" for having osteogenesis imperfecta?

There's good reasons you don't scare, tackle or bully people. Part of it's because doing so makes you an arsehole, but another big part of it is that it's dangerously irresponsible to assume they are in a strong enough state physically and/or mentally to take it on the chin.

Real life and the internet are not the same thing.

Maybe she did had stuff going on in her life, but lets not forget that while depression can be a temporary state caused by circumstances, many people have medically recognised disorders and illnesses that can lead to depression and are exacerbated by circumstances rather than directly caused by them.

Yes, I keep on seeing posters here bring up their personal depression issues. Okay? You can block/ignore/report people on twitter like anyone else.

Twitter isn't real life. It isn't you walking down the street and being attacked, or being bullied in school by a crowd of girls pushing your head into a toilet. I fail to see how you can compare the two.

Just report people breaking terms of services of the service you are being annoyed on, and put them ignore. Blocking and ignore are tools rarely used by people looking to be offended. Reminds me of people constantly listening to Howard Stern on the radio in the 90's, just to get offended.

I already addressed the real life issue of these people making her lose jobs, which DOES affect her in real life. She could have pursued them in court for lost income.

I make a distinction between something she can control, and something she can't, in my previous post.

You are comparing being offended with being in a state of depression, a diagnosed mental illness where a person doesn't act rationally as Iron Captain said.

If a horde of people bully on the internet a depressed person do you really believe he/she is gonna start ignoring everyone? Even people that isn't depressed has many times failed to overcome a negative backlash for some form of social media.
Now, I'm not saying the people that bullied her where direct responsible for her dead. Of course not. But lets stop with the "Omg if you are depressed is because you are just weak, get yourself up you punny little rabbit, sticks and stones yada yada!". At this point and age, "Internet is not real life" isn't true anymore.

 BuFFo wrote:
I make a distinction between something she can control, and something she can't

"Why don't people with mental illness just act rationally"?

 BuFFo wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 BuFFo wrote:
But.... ultimately, her suicide is on her.

I'd say that's a pretty callous way of looking at it.

If you jumped out from behind a bush and said "BOOO!" to some random person and they died of a heart attack, would you turn around and say it's "on them" for having a heart condition?

If you tackled someone and their body shattered and they died, would you turn around and say it's "on them" for having osteogenesis imperfecta?

There's good reasons you don't scare, tackle or bully people. Part of it's because doing so makes you an arsehole, but another big part of it is that it's dangerously irresponsible to assume they are in a strong enough state physically and/or mentally to take it on the chin.

Real life and the internet are not the same thing.

That argument doesn't hold water and hasn't for quite a while. It might be true-ish on a forum like this where none of us have our real identities tied to our accounts***, but when people have accounts tied to their actual selves like facebook/twitter that argument falls flat on its face.

***I'd argue even on an anonymous forum like this it can have a pretty big effect on the emotional state of someone who is maybe a bit more unstable, but since the topic isn't even about an anonymous forum it's probably not worth arguing about it.

Maybe she did had stuff going on in her life, but lets not forget that while depression can be a temporary state caused by circumstances, many people have medically recognised disorders and illnesses that can lead to depression and are exacerbated by circumstances rather than directly caused by them.

Yes, I keep on seeing posters here bring up their personal depression issues. Okay? You can block/ignore/report people on twitter like anyone else.

Just because you can block people after the event doesn't mean damage hasn't been done. We can put people in jail and give them restraining orders too, it doesn't magically fix things.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

Maybe she did had stuff going on in her life, but lets not forget that while depression can be a temporary state caused by circumstances, many people have medically recognised disorders and illnesses that can lead to depression and are exacerbated by circumstances rather than directly caused by them.

Yes, I keep on seeing posters here bring up their personal depression issues. Okay? You can block/ignore/report people on twitter like anyone else.

Just because you can block people after the event doesn't mean damage hasn't been done. We can put people in jail and give them restraining orders too, it doesn't magically fix things.

Not only that, but just because you can block or ignore someone online, doesn't make it go away, it still exists. Other people will still read it. Your friends and family can still see it. While you might not care about the hurtful opinion of some jackass on the internet, people whose opinions you do care about are reading Mr. Jackass's comments about you.

Just look at the ignore function on Dakka. I can ignore someone, but I'll still see their name in a thread, so I'll know when they're saying something. If someone else quotes them, then I'll see that quoted text.

 BuFFo wrote:
If she didn't want to have sex with gay men, that's fine for her. I respect her choice.

People crossed the line when they started to get her fired from her gigs.

But.... ultimately, her suicide is on her. She must have had other things going on in her life that allowed her to decide to kill herself.

I blame her peers for being donkey-caves, heck, maybe even criminally liable for her lost income, but for her death? No. That isn't their fault.

Still communications for offensive or other negative purposes.

Her peers and others may not have had direct responsibility but various laws apply both off and online. There may still be valid charges.

She had various preexisting issued and previous issues in her past, major ernough issues to not just go away. She did not have a good or easy childhood it seems.

Her choice was her right to make at end of thr day though. She was perfectly allowed to choose who she filmed with.