When a voter referendum mandating the use of condoms in porn passed earlier this month in LA, pretty much everyone who makes a living in pornographic movies was upset about what it was going to mean for their industry. Civilians, meanwhile, were kind of ambivalent; I know I’ve talked to several people who are wary of restricting creative freedom, but think that if it prevents even one person from contracting H.I.V. at work, then it’s worth it. In an effort to get to the bottom of what this law really means and why performers are so fervently opposed, I emailed my friend Zak Smith, an LA-based artist who moonlights in porn under the amusing moniker Zak Sabbath. Here’s what he had to say.
Jamie Peck: Hi Zak! So first of all, are you for the measure or against it? I think I know what you are going to say.
Zak Smith: Totally against it.
JP: Why is that?
ZS: First: This law isn’t about “Should there be condoms in porn?” It’s: “Should we make shooting the kind of porn that makes the most money hard enough for companies in LA that they will move to Miami, San Francisco, Las Vegas or the closest meth-and-stripmall Breaking Bad-looking suburb that falls outside the area the law covers?”
This kind of prohibitive entertainment law only makes sense if it’s national (if it makes sense at all). As a health measure, moving a bunch of porn people from LA (a real actual city with doctors and shrinks and culture) to Las Vegas (a place whose levels of STDs, corruption, income-inequality-based crime and vice are pretty much post- apocalyptic, a place where the cops say “Every night is Saturday night for someone” and is generally so dodge city the police won’t even release the crime statistics) is about the dumbest thing you can do. The current system has controlled STDs and gotten things to the point where a single incident of AIDS in the industry is such rare, stop-the-presses news everything and everyone grinds to a halt as soon as it happens.
People know what they have because they have to get tested all the time to work, and if someone works dirty they stand a good chance of losing all work forever. The industry regularly flies people to Miami, San Francisco and Montreal already all the time, this will help no one be healthier. No-one actually thinks that. It’s a typical example of a once perhaps well-intentioned organization (the AIDS people spearheading this) trying to get prestige and donations by going up against an easy target: in this case playing off the prejudices people have (even allegedly progressive people like the ones reading this who wanted to have babies because Kim Gordon made it look ok) against porn people. It’s fucking bullshit and completely insulting.
There’s a big PRO measure B billboard saying “Pornographers want you to vote NO on B!” Can you imagine them doing that to people in any other legal profession? Hells no.
JP: And how about the idea that porn sex should tell people how to have real life sex?
ZS: As a paternalistic “Your entertainment should educate you” measure:
1- It won’t work unless the internet somehow makes it impossible to google free porn made before the law was passed. And, y’know, in the area of regulating free internet pornography, law enforcement has not been what you’d call shockingly successful.
2- It’s not a path adults should be going down in general: if you have a populations reading its life off cue cards, the answer isn’t changing the cue cards. Since the 80s, anti-AIDS activists have been phenomenally successful in teaching people to use condoms the grown-up post-Enlightenment way: by explaining what STDs are and how condoms are really good at stopping you from getting them. LA should spend the money it’s going to drop sending a cop to every porn set to do that and leave the business trying to tell people under what conditions they can shoot what loads on whose tits to the red state hogfuckers real people move to cities like LA to get away from.
JP: Check out this article by Aurora Snow:
If requiring condoms in porn (for argument’s sake, let’s say all porn) is not a good solution to the problems she outlined (feeling pressured to work with people whose tests aren’t up to date, I mean), what is? [The industry standard is that performers must have a current test on file in order to do a scene; porn performers are tested every 30 days.]
ZS: Aurora Snow’s entire argument is annihilated by what I just wrote: This law won’t make people in porn wear condoms. It’s not a national law so it will just make the porn industry move to a different place. I wear condoms when I fuck girls off set, too, but the law isn’t about condoms or safety.
If that crazy puritanical thing ever happened, people should vote their conscience on it, but they should be voting for or against the thing that will happen not the thing they are being told the law is about.
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anya
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lucygoosey74
