It sounds so well-meaning — Prop 60 would require all porn films to use condoms. That’s got to be good for the actors and actresses, right? If I walked in cold to a voting booth and saw that idea, with no prior research, I’d probably say “yeah, sure” and punch in “yes”. Only it turns out that you really should listen to the people it affects the most, and the porn stars are all dead set against it. I’m not even a consumer of porn, so my opinion shouldn’t matter at all, and this bill seems to be designed to cater to the prejudices and ignorance of us straight unkinky vanilla people.
Proposition 60 looks great at first glance. I wouldn’t fault anyone who doesn’t know anything about it for voting “yes” if that’s all they knew about it. I can easily imagine myself getting suckered into voting for it if I didn’t have such strong connections to the sex worker communities. But the fact is, it’s a lousy law, the latest in a long string of attempts by the AIDS Health Foundation to profiteer off the fear of sex and the stigmatizing of sex work. I want to talk about why it’s a lousy law here, but I want to do more than that, too: I want to use it as a demonstration of why it’s important for everyone in this country who works for a living to pay attention to the organizing efforts of sex workers and support them.
It’s also good to look at who the law rewards, and who it punishes. Even if your well-meaning idea is to protect poor sex workers from their choices, like any good Puritan, maybe you ought to rethink the proposition when the consequences are to do further harm to those you piously wish to “defend”.
Where Proposition 60 is concerned, this reality isn’t just a matter of optics: It determines who the law punishes. Performers who shoot and distribute their own material are subject to prosecution under the law if condoms aren’t visible in their films. The limited media coverage of this point has focused on the argument that married couples who make porn in their own homes could be sued for not using condoms. That’s a legitimate example, but it misses one of the most important points: The porn workers who are most likely to be targeted by such a clause aren’t going to be married, hetero cisgender couples, but those with the most marginalized identities.
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Besides who it targets, the enforcement mechanisms of Proposition 60 are weird and poorly thought-out. If the state doesn’t act on a reported violation, any Californian is able to act as plaintiff and sue the producer for not showing condoms in their film. If the lawsuit is successful, the plaintiff — who again, can be any Californian who watched a porn film and didn’t see condoms being used — gets 25% of the judgement. Fines can go up to $70,000 for repeat violations, which is a pretty strong motivation to sit around watching porn that doesn’t turn you on.
Oh, no. That’s all we need — a financial motivation to let yet another collection of straight-laced people to pruriently spend their time watching pornography so they can get the added thrill of passing judgment on others. Getting paid for being prudish and judgmental? Win-win for awful people!
Mental note, move to California and watch a lot of Ray Comfort videos. There’s a lot of intellectual wanking in them, so that should count as porn.
My first thought was: “what about lesbian porn?” I think absolutely no-one would be surprised if the lack of necessary anatomy wouldn’t make you exempt from that law.
Even without the legal loophole, this bill is puritanical. Why should all porn performers be required to wear a condom? I get health being an issue and that tackling it makes sense. They should definitely receive regular STI screenings and be excluded from performance if they’re not turning up a clean bill of health so that we’re not seeing actors transmitting diseases to each other. But if people have responsibly gotten tested, have negative results, and want to pop some birth control pills and film without a condom, that ought to be their right.
If people are concerned about porn teaching people bad practices, I feel they need to ask themselves why porn is the device through which we should be delivering information. Porn is not sex ed, folks. Sex ed is sex ed. (When you do it right. )
So…loophole or no loophole, I still wouldn’t vote for this bill.
I am fairly certain who was involved in writing this idiotic drivel.
See last year, when an attorney submitted the “sodomite suppression act”, with Californians enforcing the law if the state doesn’t enforce that law being a chief component of that anarchic law.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/03/24/california-ballot-measure-to-kill-gay-people-exposes-bigotry-congested-channels.html
How he retains his license to practice law is beyond me, as he’s repeatedly advocated for summary execution.
I’ve read where the porn industry took steps after the AIDS was detected in the industry, and have had the situation under control for decades. There is no need for such a law.
Porn industry in France mainly use condoms for years, but it seems it’s part self regulation.
Producers don’t want issue with the worker protection administration, and most performers don’t want to take risks.
On the other hand the broadcasters don’t buy condom-free content, which had a big impact in the 90s, not so much now.
Amazingly for France, no law was required, just basic employer/employee negotiation (and some pressure on the broadcast size of the business)
Interesting fact however is the impact on public health for the viewers : http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0154439
While we’re all oh-so-concerned for the safety of actors, let’s pass a bill requiring all Hollywood actors to wear hardhats while filming. After all, there are cranes and heavy equipment operating nearby, so it makes perfect sense. And we can all sue Spielberg next time we see Indiana Jones without a hardhat.
If we really cared to help the sex workers, we could support a strong UNION to bargain for their interests.
p.s., I’ve already voted NO on this prop.
Artor @ 7
A hard hat didn’t save Mr Ford while he was playing Han Solo.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/26/star-wars-production-company-admits-health-and-safety-breaches-harrison-ford.
While I completely agree that this particular law is a really bad one and I’d vote against it if I lived in California, I still haven’t heard a rational argument against enforcing worker protection.
The ones I heard (and read), here and elsewhere are:
Why do we suddenly turn libertarian? Why do we suddenly act as if “hey, if people decide to take that risk for the money, we shouldn’t regulate it!” was a sound argument?
Why do we act as if it were a free choice in a market where you are apparently out of the business when you choose to use condoms?
The other one is “the porn stars are against it”!
Yeah, I can guarantee you there’s tons of construction workers who are against hard hats as well. Ear protection? Girly! Should we scrap workplace safety regulation in construction as well because the construction workers are against it?
Another argument made is that requesting condoms increases the stigmatisation of sexworkers. I’m afraid that’s putting the cart before the horse. The current discourse is that condoms are unsexy. If public perception is that only people with STIs need condoms, then yes, using a condom makes people suspect you have an STI. Which is the exact bullshit that gives you high rates of HIV and STIs. Having one or the other isn’t a personal failure, it’s a medical problem. SEx work carried its specific risks: violence and yes, STIs. Workers should be protected from those risks.
razzlefrog
This is another thing that puzzles me: Why is porn totally off limits for cultural critique? Video games aren’t school lessons either but we can criticise them for reinforcing harmful cultural messages, but heavens forbid we do that with porn because seeing a condom might make your boner sad? I also highly recommend you read the link provided by euclide.
Funfact: You don’t see people transmitting diseases. Quite often people don’t even see those themselves, especially people with vaginas because in them STIs often lie dormant for a long time. And yes, you can get tested but no, even though it means that the risk is smaller, it doesn’t mean people have a clean bill of health. Also congratulations for demonstrating the problem with your argument: The risk is solely on the shoulders of the actor. If they were unlucky and caught an STI from somebody who didn’t know they had an STI because condoms are icky, it’s them who are out of work.
2, prae:
https://s.yimg.com/ea/img/-/130621/naked_gun_condom_full_body_ridiculous_sex_scene_18s775s-18s776p.jpg
My pretzel logic, tells me, this was a workaround to the usual opposition to teaching use of condoms and how to don them during conventional sex ed classes; recognizing that many use porn as their form of sex ed, best to see the act performed with all protection methods in action. In order to make use more widespread and more a standard operating procedure of intimate encounters.
sorry. no justifications behind that argument, just sharing my pretzel.
A couple of points: No, the “sodomite suppression” guy had nothing to do with Prop 60; it’s entirely the brainchild of AIDS Healthcare Foundation president Michael Weinstein—and interestingly, if Prop 60 were to pass, one of its clauses guarantees Weinstein a job for life as California’s “porn czar” unless BOTH houses of the legislature vote to fire him. Also, the comment about “lesbian porn” is almost right on the money. See, the new law wouldn’t just require condoms but other “barrier protections” as well, including goggles, latex gloves and dental dams (for licking “down there”), all to prevent person-to-person contact with blood and “other potentially infectious materials.” (That’s all part of the California Health Code’s Sec. 5193.) Hell, if read literally, the law calls for hazmat suits to be worn by the participants in sex scenes! And yet, there hasn’t been an on-set HIV transmission on a California porn set in 12 years, and thanks to testing every 14 days, STDs in the industry are about at the levels that one finds in the general 20-something population. It’s safer to have sex with a porn star than to pick up a partner at a local bar!
Giliell @ 10
Well, off the top of my head, there’s this:
“All” films? Does this apply to films made outside CA? If not, there could be a burgeoning industry for close-ups only. Stock film to be edited into films shot in CA: Pizza delivery boy winks at customer lady, she winks back, he lays on top of her… cut to Massachusetts-shot close-up of unprotected pee-pee and hoo-hoo doubles engaging in wow-wow… cut to California couple saying, “Unprotected sex with you sure is fun!”
Therefore, beautiful actors in California do not have the issue of diseases, get the benefit of being associated with many different genitalia-stand-ins, the same production money is spent across a greater number of performers, impressionable youths learn the wrong messages because politicians tried the wrong way to legislate their morality… win-win-win!
davidnangle @15:
Now I’m picturing Klamath Falls as becoming an overnight porn Mecca.
Ruby
Damn, those French guys must be the toughest lovers ever and the ladies have vaginas made of steel!
That’s strait-laced people: it doesn’t matter whether the laces curve, just that they squeeze tightly.
If the danger of sex without condoms is so great that we need to force sex workers to utilize them, why can’t we mandate private citizens to use them?
If the danger isn’t great enough to try and mandate that private citizens use them, why penalize them just because they decided to film it?
If the danger of sex without condoms is so great that we need to force sex workers to utilize them, why can’t we mandate private citizens to use them?
This may be more about setting an example for a big audience than protecting the actors. Kind of like why cigarette commercials are illegal now but smoking is not.
I disagree fundamentally for trying to force people to moralize in a way that happens to be popular now. That’s how you end up with crap like the Hayes Code.
One thing you learn really fast, if you read anything written by people in the industry, all across the the industry is, “No one bothers to listen to the people doing the work.” Its almost on the scale of, “I am dying of thirst.” -> “The comity has decided that the best legislative solution to this problem is to give out free flavor enhancers, and ban the word thirsty!” The disconnect between what needs to be done, what effect the legislation will actually have, etc. and what the workers think needs to happen….
@ Giliell, 10
Is that what this proposition is? If so, I hardly see how it can be defended as an honest, good faith attempt at diminishing harm to the industry’s players. Nor is it about public health, because porn performers are not typhoid Marys, and what they do on a work site is vastly different than what they do in the privacy of their own homes. No one is encouraging them not to practice “safe sex” with non-industry partners.
That is not the objection. Also and, again, if we’re now characterizing the proposition as an attempt to normalize condom use for audiences, it’s not porn performers’ health and safety we have in mind.
I am reminded of the benevolent “reasoning” anti-abortion activists employ to intimidate pregnant people and inhibit them from exercising their bodily autonomy by promoting and enforcing unnecessary, counterproductive, and burdensome complications and regulations in the hopes of limiting access to and making abortion de facto illegal.
The parallels, in fact, are uncanny, because the “regulations” 60 proposes already exist in California, but are rarely enforced. Likewise, 60 wants to force upon the industry a process that already exists, works well, and was created and implemented by the industry itself years ago–screening for STDs on a strict, bi-monthly basis. Moreover, 60 facilitates harassment against actors by creating a system that might require performers to disclose and publish their real names and current addresses for members of the public to identify for potential lawsuits. This will drive many underground for fear of violence, retaliation, and lengthy legal battles. Finally, we get to “virtue signaling” of the pearl-clutching, anti-sex worker variety with a generous portion of bureaucracy. 60 will be unenforceable: it purports to enable viewers to sue companies that produce films without condoms. The psychic “harm” they experience by voluntarily watching a film could almost never be proven to the satisfaction of any court or jury.
Because god knows we can’t have movies glorifying miscegnation or swearing. That would be too dangerous for the public good.
Sorry, your desire for artistic freedom is just libertarian hogwash, it’s better for everyone if we mandate that you cannot show interracial couples or include swearing in a film in order to keep society safe.
Yes, it’s a horrible bill. I know people in the industry, and I can tell you porn actors get to choose who they work with, and they get to see their partners’ bills of health on set already. Not a single actor anywhere in the country is concerned about getting an STD from their acting partner. Of course depending on what you’re doing and how careful you are, you can still get a UTI or the common cold, but guess what – ironclad health insurance. What will happen if/when this is passed is studios will begin working out of state, which will mean CA actors have to commute or they will get bounced in favor of local actors. The bill directly hurts the studios’ sales and then indirectly affects the actors in this way.
snuffcurry
Me: This bill is horrible, but here’s other points I find interesting in the context of this discussion.
You: Long drivel starting with the assumption I was talking about the proposition.
In response to davidnangle, the law does indeed only apply to films (and web content) made in California—but you make an excellent point: How is the potential plaintiff who’s trying to sue the producer for non-condom content supposed to know where the movie was actually made? Short answer: He/She doesn’t—so he/she will sue over ANY movie he/she sees that doesn’t have a condom in it, and the defendant producer will have to spend likely thousands of bucks just to prove that the film (or web content) he/she shot wasn’t shot in the state. Hence, he/she loses either way, and it doesn’t matter where the stuff was shot; he/she will get sued anyway.
markkernes, incentivizing production companies to film outdoors with easily-recognized landmarks in the background? Maybe the Grand Canyon area becomes the hotbed of the industry… Heh.
@ Giliell, 26
And yet you prefaced your comments by handwringing that no one had yet offered “a rational argument against enforcing worker protection.” Your tired, uninteresting dogwhistles were, of course, not rational, had nothing to do with supporting (euphemistically) “worker protection,” but rather undermining the efforts of performers to create reasonable and proven health and safety standards while protecting their rights as laborers. You did give us a citation-free aside about the preferences of French vaginas as trumping those of Americans, so I oughtn’t be surprised.
>blockquote>The other one is “the porn stars are against it”!
Yeah, I can guarantee you there’s tons of construction workers who are against hard hats as well. Ear protection? Girly! Should we scrap workplace safety regulation in construction as well because the construction workers are against it?
Sigh.. See, you have it dead f-ing wrong. In all three cases, porn, general sex work, and abortion, the people that are actually involved “already have the hard hats, and They where the ones that came up with the idea in the first place.. What the anti-porn/sex work/abortion legislators are doing is claiming that, “Those hard hats and safety rules are not good enough, never will be. We need to reduce, or eliminate the construction industry!”
That is the thing with these laws. This one purports to “protect” porn makers. The same porn makers who have already, as has been pointed out, instituted monthly checkups, and pretty much everything else named, with the possible exception of 100% condom usage, and.. most of them now do that too.
What the law **actually** does is place California porn makers into a position where they can be harassed, sued, even exposed to the public, when they wanted to keep their performances “in” porn as private as possible. As one person, on another blog, pointed out, he spent all of one day at a shoot, appears in only one very obscure porno, and only for all of a few minutes, yet, 20 years, or something like that, later he lost a job offer because someone happened to know that obscure porno, and recognized him in it. But, lets create conditions which expose *everyone*, so that, as another one put it, to paraphrase, “Once you are in, you can’t ever get out again, because you are screwed in all other professions, unless you can avoid having ‘everyone’ know you did it.”
A similar bunch of BS has happened with “trafficking”. The original definition was, “The use of coercion, violence, etc. to force someone to do work they would otherwise refuse.” It very rapidly morphed into both, “Protect prostitutes”, and, “Save the thousands (we made this number up, but trust us, there are really thousands, if not tens of thousands of victims of Satani… err, sorry, got the date wrong there – Trafficking) of trafficked children.”
What the laws actually do, in almost all cases, some combination of these – 1. Attack and kill online ad sites, which provide a way for non-trafficked sex workers to find clients, 2. attack and kill sites that allow them to communicate (and in some cases actually make it illegal to aid and abet the practice, by providing such communication), so they can’t talk to each other about clients, or tell each other about dangers, bad neighborhoods, or horrible clients, 3. arrest the relatively normal people, who are public about hiring them, while leaving the creeps, rapists, etc. on the street (since they are not stupid enough to hire in “safe” neighborhoods, where they might be arrested, and which are now unusable for workers that want to stay safe). Oh, right.. and they a) usually turn out “rescued” kids back onto the street, or into the same places they ran from in the first place, while failing to “rescue” the ones actually being trafficked.
You see a trend here? Guess what – sex workers, of the less “acceptable” variety also hate those laws, suggested and even implemented other ways to solve the problems, lament that they have no way to get kids off the street, which they don’t want out there doing what they are doing either, and have *actually* not just been ignored, but in the case of shutting down ad sites and lines of communication, and even, in some of the laws, making it criminal to rent to them, actually had any and all efforts to make things safer, or more legal, shot down. Well, fuck the solutions they have come up with to make things safer, and lets just make it more dangerous. After all, the point of all of these laws isn’t to “help” the people doing the work, its to make it impossible to do the work, on the delusional theory that if you make it scary, dangerous, and unprofitable enough (though, in the last case, only to those trying to do it safely, honestly, without working for a pimp, or being trafficked), that they will just give up and stop doing it.
And, a law like Prop 60 will do exactly what is intended, especially if more BS where to get, invariably, tacked on later, to improve the legislation – drive porn out of California.
Other people here are also absolutely correct – its exactly the same misguided, and ultimately useless, tactic used to attack abortion, and women’s health in general – “Who gives a damn what the women want, or go through, we have a mission to end this!!” Or, in this case, “Who cares what the people that actually take the risks are doing to mitigate them, or improve things, etc. We have a mission to stop porn!” I don’t for a damn second buy the idea that the people pushing this give a damn about the workers, unless its the same sort of “care” you get from an evangelical preacher who is convinced you will go to hell, if we doesn’t “convert you”. They are not listening to the people “in” the industry. The only people they are listening to are a) each other, and b) anyone else, including the anti-sex-in-general nuts out there, who all think that they need to fix both real, and completely imaginary, problems, from the outside, by forcing worthless, and often outright dangerous, solutions on the people they intend to “save”.
To believe otherwise is to assume that the people actually involved in the problems are too stupid to know they exist. And.. if that is the way you want to treat “anyone” in “any” aspect of the sex industry, like they are women trying to find a clinic, and you are the bloody clown in the state legislation who just closed down the only “abortion factory” in 500 miles… I will happily join anyone dehumanizing them in such a manner in spitting in that persons face (which, hopefully wouldn’t get me arrested for “aiding or harboring” them in the state it happened in).
One factor that concerns me is the public factor, authorizing the populace to enforce the law via civil courts.
Not by a merit of legal argument, not by the judgement of law enforcement and a district attorney, but at the whim of any member of the populace.
The result, a clogged court system, clogged by a very few individuals, dubious motivation, with every participant in the film now having their name, work address and home address a public record and potentially, a target for those of violent intentions.
That isn’t rule of law, it’s rule of the mob. To think that it’s protecting adult film workers and actually believe in it is pure, unadulterated Orwellian doublethink.
That is double plus ungood.
Actually, thinking on it more.. we seem to be in “one size fits all, but tweak the definition of victim”, solutions. The drug war seems to be the template. What do those who have been on drugs, know people that are, and want a realistic solution want? 1. Research on addiction. 2. Funding to rehab. 3. Arrest of the big sellers.
What did we get? 1. Attempts to take out cartels, whose leaders keep escaping, are literal hydras, and seem to be actually harder to take out than terrorists. 2. Redefinition of who the “victims are”, so that now more people are in jail, probably, who bought too much for their own use than there are actual dealers in jail. 3. Defunding of social services, denials of research into drugs, and anything else that might really solve things (but, since this defunding is happening all across the board, to all services…). Mind, those same services are needed to help the “victims” of porn, and sex wok. Who.. used to be society, then the people buying it, and, in the new narrative, are now, “The exploited workers”. Which explains why, in the case of “illegal” sex work, they skipped over the, “how many ounces do you need to be a dealer”, and just went with, “Arrest anyone that buys it.” Its so much easier to wedge every problem into the same box, and ignore what *everyone* involved says about how to fix things… Sigh.