My latest at Jezebel looks at a local issue with national implications: Los Angeles County Measure B, an initiative on the November 6 ballot that will mandate the use of condoms in porn. Even here in the global capital of mainstream adult film production, the measure is widely misunderstood.
For the piece, I interviewed sexual health experts like Charlie Glickman and Chauntelle Tibbals; I also spoke with porn legends James Deen (a Pasadena City College alumnus) and Nina Hartley. Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Video (one of the largest porn production companies in the world) also shared his thoughts.
As it turns out, it’s not that simple. For starters, as Deen and sexual health experts familiar with the industry agree, what makes for safer sex in private doesn’t translate well to an adult film set. In an email interview, porn legend Nina Hartley explained that in her business, “condom burn is a real issue. The friction from the latex, even with lubrication, is painful and breaches the integrity of my mucosal membranes, putting me at greater risk for disease transmission.” Pointing out that the average length of sexual intercourse in “civilian life” is only a few minutes, Hartley noted, while the shortest porn scenes require an absolute minimum of “half an hour of hard thrusting by a well-endowed young man. It’s hard enough to deal with w/o condoms. Add latex to the mix and I’m down to being able to work with a man once a week at best, to say nothing of the damage it would do to my private life and intimacy with my husband.” Veteran sex educator Charlie Glickman agrees, pointing out that “what you do in your home kitchen never has the same protocols as you have in a catering business.” Adding to Hartley’s concerns about the damage rubbers can do to women’s mucosal membranes, Glickman notes that condoms themselves degrade rapidly over the course of scenes that can last upwards of two hours to film, making them less effective as barriers to infection.
What does work, according to Hartley, Deen, and other performers, is testing. Porn actors are tested for HIV and other STIs at least once every 28 days (Deen notes he’s tested twice as often) at a variety of private testing sites overseen by Adult Production Health and Safety Services, a service administered by the industry’s trade group, the Free Speech Coalition. The track record of these testing protocols has been extraordinary, with even critics of the industry willing to admit that porn performers test positive for STIs at a rate well below that of the sexually active “civilians” who are their fellow Angelenos. (For a detailed description of how testing works –- and how negative test results are verified by onset inspections -– see this post from the porn performer Stoya.) Vivid Video CEO Steven Hirsch told me that the porn industry has produced “more than 300,000″ hardcore sex scenes since 2004, with only two cases of HIV infection – both in performers who contracted the virus from untested civilian partners. That remarkable safety record is attributable to testing and what Deen describes as a “close-knit family atmosphere… where mutual trust is sacred” in the business.
My interviews with Glickman, Hirsch, and Deen were all on the phone. Nina Hartley, however, answered a number of questions in email form. Below the fold, I’m posting our entire Q&A.
1. Is Measure B a bad idea? If you had only a few words to explain why, what would they be?
It’s patronizing, condescending, ego-driven and makes no medical sense when you look at the actual numbers of STIs in our business (especially HIV) when compared to the rates of STIs and HIV transmissions in Los Angeles County during the time we had the AIM clinic (1998-2011) running all of the testing. We had four; the County had nearly ten thousand.
2. What’s the biggest misconception civilians have about health issues in the adult industry?
The biggest misconception the general public has about our community vis a vis health is that we don’t know how to protect ourselves or don’t have the self-esteem necessary to give a heck about our health and our futures. In truth, our health is our business and if we’re not healthy we can’t get work. Since, like many workers in the US, most of us live month-to-month, staying healthy is essential for our economic well-being. We have no workmens’ comp or unemployment insurance upon which to fall back should we be out of work for a while.
The second biggest misconception is that we’re a bunch of diseased, sick people who don’t care about ourselves or our co-workers.
3. Much of the campaign against Measure B has focused on “government waste” and first amendment issues. Does that strike you as the right strategy? Or would the industry be better off focusing on the fact that testing is a much more reliable safety protocol than mandatory condom use?
I think it’s a good strategy, actually. Implementing Measure B would cost about a half-million dollars, plus the ongoing costs of staff, etc. California is broke and is laying off teachers, law enforcement and fire fighters. We really need to spend tax-payer money on a NON-ISSUE that affects a tiny portion of the populace?
Besides the proven track record of regular testing of ALL PERFORMERS, and especially those who are seeking entry into the business, the money issue alone should sink it. It’s an ill-advised measure, clearly motivated by politics and not science. The “yes on B” campaign is counting on the “squick” factor that most people have when contemplating “those poor young people” who are “forced” to make porn.
In fact, most performers are fierce, competitive, ambitious and striving young people who do not need any one’s pity.
The First Amendment issues are not to be taken lightly. Are we really prepared to force an expressive, made-for-entertainment form of speech to act as a back-door sexual education medium? It fails the sniff test.
It’s not porn’s job to educate. Its job is to entertain. We don’t tell Hollywood that its movies must be educational. No. In Hollywood movies people smoke, have sex w/o condoms, shoot people, drive dangerously, lie, cheat, steal, kill and die, all for your entertainment pleasure.
In porn, NO ONE dies, is shot, kills another, goes to jail, shoots drugs, etc.
It’s not porn’s fault that comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education in the schools has been gutted like a fish, leaving people grasping at an entertainment medium for scraps of sexual information.
Unless a porn movie’s been made expressly to be educational (as my Guise series was), it’s a lousy way to learn actual facts about sex and sexuality.
4. What do you think will happen if Measure B passes? Will production move outside of the county? Or will producers gamble that enforcement will be sufficiently haphazard that they’ll ignore the law, claiming that any condomless scenes were filmed elsewhere?
I doubt we’ll leave town, as it would be very expensive to do so. The infrastructure to make movies is here in Southern California. We live here. Our kids go to school here (there are a lot of parents in porn). Some have bought homes here. I think production will go underground (i.e. no permits pulled) and it will be a cat-and-mouse game until someone is dinged (either by a competitor dropping the dime on a shoot, or by some other means).
Then it will go to the courts, where it will be challenged on First Amendment grounds, and likely win. The government cannot force a creative person to include, or exclude, a specific form of speech in their body of work, claiming it’s for the “public good.” This is not a case of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater and I doubt any court or judge will see it that way.
It will be expensive and a waste of taxpayer time and money.
5. Do you think Measure B is really about performer health? Or is it just the first part of a larger agenda to regulate L.A.’s adult entertainment industry to the point that the business stops being viable?
It is most definitely NOT about performer health. As recently as ’08, Michael Weinstein was on record as a supporter of AIM, claiming it to be a model system, and that no government program could, or would, be able to do a better job of STI/HIV mitigation in the adult entertainment industry. (I believe that either XBiz or AVNonline has a recent article quoting Mr. Weinstein at a council meeting a few years ago, heaping praise upon AIM.)
It is pure politics, as well as ego, hubris and greed. Mr. Weinstein is not used to being challenged by an entity toward which he has turned his gaze. He’s used to getting money by suing and I think he figured that, should measure B pass, there would be some money for AHF to cover testing/monitoring services. That’s my educated guess, of course. I don’t have his phone tapped. Though he did seek to harass AIM out of existence, and he did that.
He has done MORE to INCREASE performer danger by shutting down the one place where EVERYONE tested, and where ALL RESULTS were in one place, allowing for speedy notification of any performers in a timely fashion.
Our current plan of frequent testing of all performers has done more to keep us safe than any thousands of condoms could ever do. Condoms in porn are a Bad Idea, and less than 5% of performers want condoms to be mandated. It would make work more difficult and make my life harder.
For women in an industrial sexual setting such as a porn set, “condom burn” is a real issue. The friction from the latex, even with lubrication, is painful and breaches the integrity of my mucosal membranes, putting me at greater risk for disease transmission.
Most ‘regular” intercourse lasts fewer than fifteen minutes. The minimum for adult entertainment is 30 solid minutes of hard thrusting by a well-endowed young man. It’s hard enough to deal with w/o condoms. Add latex to the mix and I’m down to being able to work with a man once a week at best, to say nothing of the damage it would do to my private life and intimacy with my husband.
In short, Measure B is a bad idea, driven by less-than-sterling motives, by a man who changed from being a supporter of our system to one who thought to benefit from its destruction.
Shame on Mr. Weinstein. Any illness we may have because of this will be on his hands.
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This piece of legislation is another tragedy of legislation that is attempting to force Neo-Puritan prudery on modern society by a determined moralistic minority. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
And congratulations on getting in touch with Ms Hartley. She’s one of the most well-spoken advocates of the adult film industry and for sexuality in general.
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