A new L.A. law requring condoms to film pornographic movies means a local industry is taking a serious hit in the wallet. (Wikimedia Commons)

Newt Gingrich apparently extends that definition all the way to child labor laws. I am amused by the ridiculous false choice they present between jobs and things like public health standards. Imagine a Romneyesque figure calling a subordinate into his office: “sorry pal, it’s either you clean out your desk or tomorrow there will parasites in our drinking water.” I know some of them want to go back to the laws of 1860, but I don’t think they are rugged enough for the plumbing of 1860. 

Anyway, there is actually one textbook job-killing regulation in the news, which violates many core conservative economic principles. A third party has responded to a nonexistent crisis in a major local industry and pushed a bill through the city legislature requiring businesses in this industry to apply a modification to its product.

Consumers are averse to this modified product, which will likely cause the major local businesses to look into locating their production in areas without this type of regulation. This could reduce local tax revenue and jobs tied to that industry. Not only do these businesses have to deal with an extra production hurdle, the new law establishes a tax tied to this regulation that pays for its enforcement by local authorities. 

To recap: A local industry is hit with an additional tax that goes into enforcing a regulation that business owners, employees and consumers all did not ask for, and that does not respond to an urgent worker’s rights or public health need. 

So what is this regulation? None other than Los Angeles’s new law requiring the use of condoms to obtain a permit to film pornographic movies. And why haven’t Republicans attacked this regulation passed by a mostly Democratic city council and signed by a Democratic mayor? Well, if there’s one thing GOP politicians won’t touch with a ten-foot pole (sorry), it’s the porn industry.

The condom law was the brainchild of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF). I’m not going to sit here and talk down on an organization that is dedicated to helping people around the world win the fight against this disease. However, if a group is advocating for legislation that would place an additional regulatory burden on a major local industry, it has to have a truly compelling argument. This is where the AHF, despite its good intentions, missed the mark.

The AHF has a brief summary of its condoms in porn advocacy work on its website that in one short paragraph, spells out its argument. Splitting that paragraph into its two points can help hone in on where the AHF’s reasoning is flawed.

1. The porn industry maintains that its voluntary monthly testing practices are protection enough for its actors. But those tests show infections after the fact, rather than preventing them from occurring.

Porn actors do test positive for sexually-transmitted diseases at a higher rate than the general population. They also get tested every 30 days while engaging in unprotected sexual intercourse multiple times per week with different partners.

There are also people not employed in the professional sex industry who have unprotected sex with random partners multiple times per week, and we can be confident in assuming they are not getting tested on nearly as rigorous a basis as porn actors. Therefore, these types of studies can be flawed; all porn actors get tested, but most “civilians” who behave like porn actors do not.  In other words, having unprotected sex with a porn actress is somewhat riskier than with an average person but probably less risky than with the shoeless girl at the club at 2 am.

The important point that supporters of the condom law seem to miss is this: Both the industry and the actors themselves feel like the current testing system is “protection enough” for them. There will never be a perfect system that will eliminate STDs in porn, and absent an epidemic or public health crisis, there is no need to stick it to local businesses with a major regulatory disincentive. 

Porn actors realize the profession they chose gives them a higher risk of contracting an STD relative to the general population, just like professional football players know they are much more likely to suffer head injuries than the average American. As long as the infection rate isn’t a grave threat to the actors or the public, which it’s not, the fact that a career in the porn industry may lead to an increase in lifetime cranberry juice consumption is just a consequence and not a crisis.

2. Meanwhile, the lack of condoms in straight adult films sends the message that safer sex isn’t sexy. 

I think that message has already been sent and received, but it doesn’t matter. People don’t watch porn to learn about how to have sex responsibly. They watch it to fantasize.

I’m not breaking any ground here with the revelation that unprotected sex is much better, and sexier, than sex with a condom. Nothing sets the mood like foil packets, a rubber gasket, an awkward pause to get “dressed” and an impermeable latex barrier between lovers. Men only have a love-hate relationship with condoms because we have a hate-hate relationship with STDs and “I didn’t get my period this week.”
   
None of us have visions of prophylactics in our sexual fantasies. However, the overwhelming majority of sexually active people are not walking around with STDs. Let’s be honest, watching a condomless porn film does not make most men or women want to have unprotected sex at the Jersey Shore house.

People are personally influenced by what they see in porn, but can only act it out to the point their sexual partners allow. Some of us have been “fortunate” enough to find equally “open-minded” and compatible partners, and are therefore corrupted forever, but for many men, their porn life and actual sex life have very different “ingredients”, so to speak.

Plenty of men watch videos of high-risk, multiple partner sex on their laptops and then go have FDA-approved missionary intercourse with their wives. Maybe they fantasize about bringing other people into the bedroom, but they live in the real world and know both the possibility and consequence of every sexual decision they make.

That’s really the point. The fact that unprotected sex is sexier than protected sex does not mean that protected sex is somehow under threat, and whether porn actors wear condoms or not has nothing to do with this fact of life or how men behave. Groups like the AHF shouldn’t be worried that people are going to want to emulate what they see in porn (duh), they should instead take comfort in the fact that people know the consequences of unsafe sex in real life.

There are no consequences of having unsafe sex in a fantasy world. There is also no outcry for safe sex among the real people who play in this fantasy world. Therefore, there is no need for the condom requirement. It addresses (and is not even certain to solve) a nonexistent problem by slapping a regulatory burden on local businesses. Condoms and frivolous regulations simply do not combine to stimulate anything.

Reach Staff Columnist Matt Pressberg here.