Orgasm News continues talking to Kelly Shibari and discusses Measure B as well as the importance of social media for her career. If you’ve missed Part 1, Part 2 or Part 3 of the interview be sure to check it out. You can also win an autographed DVD from Kelly click here for more information!

Orgasm News: Switching gears to another hot topic these days, Measure B. What are your thoughts on it?

Kelly: Measure B is the Los Angeles County measure to make mandatory that male performers have to wear condoms. It also reaches out to safe sex practices all across the board, dental [dams] and gloves. Also…having them come to your set to make sure that those policies are being adhered to.

The problem is we’re an industry that is self-regulating. We have been self-regulating for a while now. Only performers get tested every 14 to 28 days. It’s mandatory that we get tested at least every 28 days. Some performers choose to be tested more frequently. The problem with forcing performers to wear condoms is, there’s a couple of things.

One, financial. The adult health care, the AIDS Health Care Foundation, which is the group that’s trying to get this to be approved, they’ve already spent $4 million on a measure. You know that money could have been really [been spent] somewhere else; [i.e.] for testing of civilians. Civilians being people who are not in the industry. To try to get the word out for the general population. If you compare the amount of STDs that are present in the adult industry versus outside of the industry, just the sheer fact that we test every single month makes us have a much lower incidence of STDs. Most people who are out there don’t get tested on a regular basis because they don’t think about it.

One of the other reasons that I got into the adult industry was because I live in a metropolitan area that’s extremely transient. Los Angeles is a city where actors and models and people come and go every single year. Hooking up with people in bars, it can be very scary. That was one of the things that my friends who were trying to get me into the industry had mentioned, and I agree with them. This is one of the safer industries that you can be in if you’re a highly sexual person.

Secondly, if we start telling people that they have to wear a condom in order to do scenes, then the likelihood of people opting to get tested will drop. It’s the whole, “I’m wearing a condom anyway, so why bother getting tested.” In a weird way it actually makes it more dangerous. I’m completely in agreement with everybody, like the CDC and all those people that do say that condom use is the number one way to prevent STDs. I completely agree with that, especially for a population that doesn’t get tested on a regular basis.

But for us, we’re an industry that does get tested every 30 days and if there’s an outbreak, the very few times that there is an outbreak, there is a record of who that person had sex with and who those people had sex with. It’s like a six-degrees of separation. It’s easily contained. The minute you start telling them to wear condoms, and then they stop testing, the likelihood of people not being able to do that kind of control when something like that happens goes away. In a weird way it makes a much more dangerous community.

That’s the thing. People do use the: “Oh, I have a condom,” thing as an excuse not to get tested. Just in general, I would much rather see more people who are not in the industry get tested on a regular basis than the money be used to promote that, than to promote putting condoms on people in an industry that actually tests on a regular basis.

Orgasm News: We’re switching gears! What are a few things people out there don’t know about you?

Kelly: I’m a pretty open book, but it seems that most people are surprised the most when I tell them my age. Because I’m Asian, and I do take pretty decent care of myself, I don’t look 40. A lot of people don’t realize that I was born and raised in Japan, so I’m actually completely fluent in both languages: reading and writing. And that’s because I don’t have an accent, and people automatically assume that if you’re born and raised in Japan, you must speak with an accent, and I don’t. That’s mainly the two things that surprise people the most. When it comes to things that people don’t know, I don’t know. I’m a pretty open book because of social media.

Orgasm News: Going back to the Internet…How have you utilized the Internet snf other technologies to foster your career? You’ve already touched on this, but is there a specific example you can give us?

Kelly: Oh, absolutely. Flesh Light is a perfect example of that. The fact of how I’ve used social media and blogging and Twitter and Facebook and my presence not only out there as an adult performer, but an articulate one; who knows how to market herself, and the fact that I’ve been able to use that to increase a fan base online. It’s actually funny because a couple of months ago [I used this] website that you can plug in anybody’s handle from Twitter and they’ll tell you how many of their followers are fake or inactive. What they found was a lot of the porn stars, even people like Ashton Kutcher who has a bazillion followers, but a lot of the porn stars, only 30% or so were real followers. You type in my name, and I checked a couple of weeks ago and it was 82% real.

Orgasm News: That’s a very good number.

Kelly: For somebody who’s a niche performer, I’m not a mainstream porn performer. I’m not in a Vivid film or a Digital Playground film. I just performed in my first Evil Angel film, but that’s the first BBW title they’ve ever done. For somebody like that to figure out how to use social media properly. Now I’ve got 46,000 followers, which puts me in a completely different category than most of the other plus size performers who are in adult. I think that’s why a lot of companies have seen me, perfect example again, being Flesh Light. Steve [Shubin] being, “Well, if we’re going to try to reach a certain market that we’ve never tried before. We should try that with somebody who understands how to market to that space.”

Stay tuned for part 5 of Orgasm News’ 5 part interview with Kelly tomorrow. Please check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of the interview where Kelly talks about her Fleshlight experience as well as being a savvy marketing guru. And remember to check Kelly at: www.kellyshibarixxx.com and you can tweet her at: @kellyshibari