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.1
Let’s be clear: this regulation won’t work. It won’t work because there’s no viable enforcement mechanism, which you kind of need in order to enforce municipal regulations.2 It won’t work because it’s a local regulation in an industry which is, to an extent, notoriously mobile. (Even were this regulation federal – numerous porn producers already book time in the tropics and shoot multiple features in a row there. There is no reason this practice would not continue and/or expand.) And it won’t work because the performers – both male and female – mostly don’t want to use them, because pornographic sex takes a lot longer than regular sex and, to put it bluntly, there are chafing issues when condoms are used.
But the spirit of the regulation, at least, is welcome. I don’t believe there’s another economic sector that is as large and as under-regulated as porn is, which is the product of a public that is not willing to admit they mostly use porn regularly and equally not willing to stop using it. The result is an industry whose exploitation of young just-off-the-bus girls has become a well-known joke, where worker protection is essentially nonexistent and where HIV flareups are, sadly, not uncommon.3 We should demand a healthier, safer work environment for pornographic actors, because all it will do is make the industry better. (People who worry about whether better treatment of women within the industry could result in less wild porn should consider that some of the raunchiest and craziest pornographers working today are women. I won’t link here, but Google “Burning Angel” or “Ovidie” or even Nina Hartley.)
Plus, as a bonus for pornographers, regulation carries with it official recognition as well, and in an industry where copyright violation has become so endemic that numerous films are produced simply as loss-leaders to get additional longterm money from the shrinking portion of the porn audience that is still willing to pay money for it, official recognition is worth quite a bit.
- Memo to all writers everywhere: when you use “bratwurst” as a euphemism for “penis,” you’re writing subpar Krusty the Klown material. CUCAMONGA! [↩]
- Presumably police will not be accidentally wandering on to porn sets on a regular basis. [↩]
- Many porn companies will talk about their rigorous testing schedules, but the day I trust self-regulation is the day I join the GOP and start ranting about immigunts takin der jerbs. [↩]
Related Articles
26 users responded in this post
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.
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).
[…] 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… […]
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.
Re: Footnote #2
“Hey ladies, I’m here to report municipal violations”.
Waka-chica-waka-chika-
“No, seriously, you’re all getting fined.”
SEATTLE!
MGK, on an unrelated note, do you have any thoughts on bill C-11?
You “won’t link here”, but will advise folks to Google specific terms you’ll provide.
Seems a bit… prudish?
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”.
“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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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.
He meant “prudent.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Freedom of the Press strikes again.
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.