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mygif

I’m not necessarily disagreeing here, but to your last paragraph – can you elaborate? I’m not quite sure how official recognition is necessarily going to translate into a sales-boon “worth quite a bit”. If your commodity is something that is dwindling and shrinking due to piracy, I’m not exactly sure how additional health and safety regs for the performers will translate into a more substantial monetary pay off.

It’s not to say that I don’t think some people won’t go and point their money at those companies they believe treat their performers better, but I just don’t see it being that much of a bump.

Great article – thank you for sharing!

PS: CUCAMONGA.

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mygif

If legislators were smart they’d know how to change things without the need for any more input or enforcement from them. Make it legally the employers fault if an actor catches anything – wavers are not legal. They are responsible for your welfare whilst on the job (sorry).

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mygif

[…] On the regulation of smut So the L.A. City Council voting to require male pornographic actors to use condoms has been getting play from around the internet, including the nigh-mandatory Reason article that thinks it is much funnier than it in fact is. Seriously, reading that post just made me feel bad. You could tell the writer thought they were coming up with really awesome zingers, and sadly the zingers are not that awesome and in fact are sad and predictable.1Let’s be clear: this regulation won’t work. It won’t wo… […]

mygif

I’m actually the web producer for The Crash Pad – I’ll respect your sentiment above and not link – which is a female-run, queer porn site out of San Francisco (Nina Hartley’s been on it). We’ve got a voluntary policy – condoms and gloves are freely available and models can bring their own, but they don’t have to use them if they don’t want. The general consensuses of my coworkers has been that mandatory laws like what L.A. put through are a terrible idea that will likely make sets more dangerous, not less, as unscrupulous producers will actually become lax about testing figuring “hey, they gots condoms!” While I agree with you about self-regulation, in this case it’s actually worked damn well – the odds of catching an infection on set are actually much lower than off. While I want to say I’d favor a government-enforced testing system… the truth is, when you’ve worked in any type of porn for any amount of time, you start to realize things like this are more often than not just a tool the religious right is using to try and shut you down, not make things safer. The major proponents of mandatory-condom use don’t care that it’s unenforceable or that producers will just go elsewhere. That’s what they wanted in the first place – producers to go away.

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mygif

Re: Footnote #2

“Hey ladies, I’m here to report municipal violations”.
Waka-chica-waka-chika-
“No, seriously, you’re all getting fined.”

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mygif

SEATTLE!

MGK, on an unrelated note, do you have any thoughts on bill C-11?

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mygif
Sean D. Martin said on February 1st, 2012 at 12:22 pm

You “won’t link here”, but will advise folks to Google specific terms you’ll provide.

Seems a bit… prudish?

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mygif

Chris Lowrance just said all my views on the matter. I’d add that if you really want to change the environment of the porn industry, you need to start encouraging positive growth. They are plenty of model porn companies out there, who care about the safety of their workers and treat their talent well, but it’s always a willing loss and typically it’s by people who do it out of love for porn and sex positivity. There are no immediate benefits to running a safe operation.

What those benefits could be, I don’t know, because I feel awkward even typing the words “grant to make porn”.

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mygif

“2. Presumably police will not be accidentally wandering on to porn sets on a regular basis.”

I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that happen in a few porn movies.

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mygif

There are two likely outcomes of this: it is a toothless regulation that everybody it (should) involve laughs at, or some significant portion of L.A.’s porn industry moves out of town. The second possibility could certainly be an unspoken reason for the regulation.

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mygif

Not just Krusty material, but SUBPAR Krusty material.. THAT, sir, is a fine burn.

More to the point, if the industry vacates the city, how much revenue has L.A. just lost, realistically? Seems to me like they’re kind of shooting themselves in both feet here.

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mygif
Sean D. Martin said on February 1st, 2012 at 3:01 pm

if the industry vacates the city, how much revenue has L.A. just lost, realistically?

Exactly. Sure, LA is hurting for revenue (who isn’t) so you’d think they’d prefer not to do something that would drive an industry away. But what portion of their total revenue is provided by the porn industry? And what costs does LA have that would go away if porn moves out?

In short, does the “think of the bad economic impact of losing this industry” argument really carry much weight?

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mygif

Is porn actually filmed in LA? I was under the impression that, to circumvent public decently laws, most porn was filmed in suburban municipalities with unclear enforcement. And most distribution was actually handled by out-of-state interests.

(Despite Porn Valley being a solidly Californian construct, for a while the largest actual international distributor was in Ohio. I don’t know how it is now.)

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mygif

I’ve read on other sites how the policy differences between the gay porn and straight porn industry causes some of those HIV flare-ups. Because the gay-porn industry requires condoms, but not testing and the straight-porn industry requires testing, but not condoms gay-for-pay actors who might work in both industries might be unknowing disease vectors.

So condoms aren’t a cure all for the porn industry (and, as mentioned above, might actually cause more harm than good. The abrasions caused by the latex and the increased likelihood of a condom tearing under the strain of professional-level sex might actually INCREASE the chances of STI transmission. NOTE: this is almost never a problem for civilian sex) This new regulation has ‘well-meant but uninformed’ written all over it.

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mygif

You “won’t link here”, but will advise folks to Google specific terms you’ll provide.

Seems a bit… prudish?

Start a blog or a website with comments. Link to a bunch of porn studios or porn sites. See what happens.

Go ahead. We’ll wait.

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mygif
highlyverbal said on February 1st, 2012 at 10:28 pm

He meant “prudent.”

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mygif
highlyverbal said on February 1st, 2012 at 10:31 pm

The most humorous quote from those supporting this regulation:

“Facial ejaculations could be simulated through the use of inert materials such as liquid antacids combined with filming techniques, which would eliminate any health risk to the performer.”

You know. Filming techniques.

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mygif
Pantsless Pete said on February 2nd, 2012 at 12:29 am

I’m mostly just thinking licenses and proper inspection and regulation from people with the same grim impartiality as building inspectors is the way to go.

Though in regards to the porn industry, it’s worth remembering that, while profitable, they tend to massively over-report the amount of money they industry produces under the impression that Big Money = respectability.

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mygif

Forget porn. What I want is to see prostitution get this kind of regulation. Mandatory testing, protections for the workers, taxes, minimum wage… But first it would have to be legal, and we can’t have that now, can we?

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mygif

How about mandatory insurance? If a film company is responsible for insuring their actors against catching something then they’ll want to make sure their premiums are kept low, which will be through ensuring preventative measures.

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mygif

Something worth keeping in mind: Performers in porn are independent contractors. They are not employees. Yes, even those big-name “contract stars” for Vivid or Adam and Eve (an aside: A&E is based out of my home state of North Carolina).

Something else worth keeping in mind: Porn isn’t monolithic. Rules and ideas crafted around the way Hustler does things also affect small companies like the one I work for (even the production people like me are contractors). Those small companies are mostly the ones introducing positive change in the industry. They also would all be shut down by any regulation that introduced another expense to the equation. Producing porn ethically is already very expensive (more than it should be, because the stigma insures most services won’t work with us, and the ones that will charge a premium) and it’s difficult to make that money back. The best way to make all of the small, ethical producers that have been introducing feminist and queer-friendly ideas all go away and make the entire industry resemble the 1980s again? Make it even more expensive to make.

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mygif

Also, talking about what impact this will or will not have on L.A. is missing the big picture: The L.A. decision is actually the result of an ongoing push to get Cal-OSHA to introduce the same rules state-wide.

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mygif

I agree with whatever commenter above said they’d need to make employers liable for infections for any ‘condom’ regulation to be effective, and of course it’d have to be nationwide and etc. All other arguments of expense and margins aside, that’s just how workplace safety rules have to work.

But I am curious about the paragraph on piracy–I know porn producers had started an RIAA-lawsuit campaign and that piracy of porn is…endemic, but I haven’t seen any articles or studies on that industry specifically. Most old media, when you get down to it, can’t show losses that are genuinely and solely from piracy except for anime–and with that it’s the fansubbing culture that’s existed for years and has only gotten bigger.

While ‘fansubbing’ seems like a term that could be at play in porn, it doesn’t seem like the cause for their losses.

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mygif
Consumer Unit 5012 said on February 3rd, 2012 at 4:48 pm

Things I Don’t Understand, Part 98512: Last I checked, paying people for sex is illegal in California. But paying people for sex if there’s a camera running is… ok?

Huh?

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mygif
highlyverbal said on February 4th, 2012 at 4:29 am

Freedom of the Press strikes again.

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mygif

This is too much work. Just watch amateur porn and be done with it. If nothing else, you have a sense that the women are actually enjoying themselves in AM.

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