There’s nothing unexpected about the AIDs outbreak currently ending careers in the San Fernando valley. When the greed of the biggest porn producers pressed against a short-lived condoms-only policy, cowardice won, the condoms came off, and a countdown to today’s disaster began.
The traditional arguments for condom-free porn no longer fly. No-one under 40 has lived in a world where unprotected sex was normal. We don’t wilt at the thought of a condom, or hark back to a halcyon past of spontaneous rutting. The idea male talent can’t perform reliably wearing condoms seems laughable in the face of a gay porn industry which requires them and the idea that testing removes the need for barrier protection has been proven false so many times I dare anyone to defend its efficacy.
So porn’s businessmen follow their own logic, making what sells and listening to customers over critics. Until porn consumers choose to reject condom-free material, it will remain the bulk or their production. Even as their profits dwindle, Darwinian marketing rules.
When the illness comes the industry turns to AIM, Adult Industry Medical, the clinic responsible for providing performers with clean test results and for notifying the industry when an unlucky individual falls through the massive holes in their net. AIM’s policy favors the business interests of the producers, most obviously because they are funded almost entirely thanks to their largesse. They once publicized every infected performer and sought the maximum attention. Today they respect the privacy HIV+ sex workers at the potential expense of their partners. The system is broken in ways perfectly suited to supporting the ongoing production of condom-free porn in the face of overwhelming evidence it costs lives. Porn’s newest intake were born into a world where AIDs is a problem you live with, not a death sentance. To a teenage starlet all this commotion can seem a little overblown. AIM doesn’t share it records with Los Angeles public health community, like the companies who fund it, they are comfortable interpreting everything but praise as attack.
It will get worse.
Female performers have careers so short they leave before they stop to think. Those who earn the power to protect themselves choose not to lobby for standards when doing so labels them as “difficult”. The independence and wealth the web can provide now bypasses those who appear on MySpace on their 18th birthday and sign contracts the following week. Agents and directors are powerful again. The future changed and it looks like 1990 now.
Male performers, at much lower risk of infection condom or no, compensate for comparatively low scene fees with volume. As advancing age makes chasing wood a problem, condoms, are more a threat to their car payments than a cause for good.
The owners are watch their sales decline and worry about piracy to the exclusion of all other thought. If sex doesn’t sell like it used to, how to sell safety? Scared to act alone, the few who worry stay silent.
Customers spend less and surf more. They don’t know where the clips come from or how they’re made. Retirement and death are invisible online. Traci Lords is still 19 and Jenna’s still a star. The hipsters who were going to change everything didn’t. Reluctant to look beyond a performers name to the system they work in, they haven’t realized the wave of independent production houses launched in the mid noughties has been subsumed by the establishment. They buy tattoos, youth and packaging in place of change.
Bullshit. Our recipe for disaster. Serves everyone. Bon appetit.
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