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Performers. directors, and fans alike have weighed in on condom use in porn: they don’t like it. But a series of moves by California’s Department of Occupational Safety and Health (OSHA), the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, California’s Labor Board, and anti-porn activists may make condom use mandatory, thus constituting what might be the final nail in the coffin of Porn Valley’s once-thriving homegrown industry.
An alliance of disgruntled former porn performers, including born-again Christian Shelley Lubben, and community and public health agencies like AIDS Healthcare Foundation has created a perfect storm of righteous indignation at the way the porn business handles itself with regard to the health concerns of its employees.
Most recently the alliance petitioned LA County to crack down on porn talent agencies, stating, “Labor Code § 1700.9 provides that “[n]o license shall be granted to conduct the business of a talent agency [i]n a place that would endanger the health, safety, or welfare of the artist.”
So if the workplaces are thought to be unsafe, it may be inferred from the latest challenge, then the agencies that procure 98 percent of the talent are unlawfully conducting business because they are putting performers in harm’s way.
That leaves the performers themselves, each of whom performs of his/her own free will and accepts the occasional dose of chlamydia as an occupational hazard.
“Condoms just don’t feel good to suck on, or to take in the ass, hard and fast,” said Belladonna. “If I were required to use condoms, my performance would most likely suffer, and in the end I would suffer.”
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Belladonna requires frequent testing for her productions, more common than the current 30-day adult industry standard.
But the forces marshaling against SoCal’s adult business are aiming at the heart of what the industry produces: its most popular hardcore content.
DVD sales have been noticeably flagging since 2005, not only in porn but also in the larger entertainment industry. The economic slump of 2008/2009 coincided with a boom in free adult tube sites, and a concerted rubber drive by the organizations listed above, combined with a comparative lack of action on the part of the disorganized adult industry, may well be the end of porn as we know it.
As we know it. What would porn look like if California mandated condoms? What would it look like if the industry moved elsewhere?
Condoms have long been a mainstay of the content distributed by Wicked, one of porn’s oldest and largest studios, and condoms have frequently been mandated at Vivid in times of increased pressure, such as now. But if condom use in porn became law, only the largest companies with established libraries would survive.
And even they would have to radically alter their content in the face of decreased sales.
The organized attack on porn’s health practices flies in the face of the statistical reality of porn performers‘ comparative cleanliness to their peers in the general population, says Ernest Greene.
Greene is a board member at Adult Industry Medical (AIM), the testing facility of record for the porn business in the San Fernando Valley. He is also a director, an editor at Hustler, and the husband of Nina Hartley.
“In thirty-five years of legal pornography in this country,” Greene says, “not a single clinical death has been correctly attributed to HIV transmission in the making of heterosexual porn. During that time, thousands of sexually active young Californians from very similar demographic cohorts have died of AIDS contracted in circumstances utterly unrelated to porn, including a significant number whose cases were contracted in bathhouses and sex clubs where HIV prevention has been the province of governmental oversight.”
Regardless of who is right, what is the individual choice of a consenting adult, or what feels good, change is coming to porn.
