Hey Cindi,
I wanted to let ya know I am scheduled to be on Nightline this evening where they filmed me in DC at the Capitol Hill briefing US Congress members and had me in studio as well. Here is an article that someone wrote which I thought they described what happened really well.
Shelley
Here are some relevant excerpts. You can read the whole story here http://motherjones.com/politics
Have the Feds Gone Soft on Porn? Activists urge members of Congress to take a stand against online smut.
— By Stephanie Mencimer
…On Tuesday, a group of anti-porn activists and scholars arrived on Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress and their staffs and to call for beefed-up federal enforcement of obscenity laws. They weren’t there to fret about the pornographers of old: the loveable chauvinist Hugh Hefner and his scantily clad bunnies, or even the not-so-loveable-but-occasionally-principled First Amendment crusader, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. No, they had come to alert Congress to websites like GagFactor.com, whose teasers alone are way more graphic than anything Hefner ever published, and whose content doesn’t portend a spirited First Amendment defense.
"The days of women wearing a coy smile and not much else are long gone," Gail Dines explained to the congressional crowd. A women’s studies professor at Boston’s Wheelock College and author of the upcoming book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality, Dines has perused Gag Factor, and she described some of its content to the crowd—including a video of a woman with her head in a vice during oral sex. "Porn is an industrial product," said Dines, who has studied the industry for 20-plus years. "I cannot believe how brutal it has become so quickly." Gag Factor and their ilk, she added, are now the main source of sex education for boys…..
…But by far the most compelling argument came from Shelley Lubben, who during the 1990s performed under the name "Roxy" in such screen gems as The Cumm Brothers 3 and Beaver Hunt. She eventually left the business, found the Lord—Lubben showed up at the event with Bible in hand—and founded the Pink Cross Foundation, a nonprofit that offers support to adult industry workers.
Lubben described how her porn career left her with incurable herpes, papilloma virus, and ultimately cervical cancer. She is anemic, she added, due to hemorrhaging from reproductive injuries sustained during filming. "The last thing I want to do, people, is talk about porn," she said, dabbing her eyes with tissues. "I have been hit, spit on, penetrated in every orifice imaginable."
She also worked for a while as a prostitute: "At least with prostitution, you get a dinner sometimes." Her story had the kid sitting next to me weeping. Beyond pimps and porn producers, Lubben spoke of an epidemic of suicides and other violent deaths of film stars, and talked forcefully about the doctors who collaborate with the industry to keep the performers "wasted" most of the time on prescription drugs. "This isn’t happening underground," she said. "This is happening in America."