Condoms and cotton swabs, oh my!
Think about the last time you watched a porn film. Were you at home, by yourself? Were you with your partner? Did you have fun and get off? Probably so, right? After all, what’s hotter than… watching one person give another an incurable STD?
Nothing, right?
Wait. Not what you wanted to see? Well, chances are pretty good that you are. After all, the likelihood that you’re watching performers who are wearing condoms or taking other safer sex precautions is fairly slim, especially if you’re watching heterosexual porn. Condom-less porn (or bareback) is on the rise in gay outlets as well, and as popularity creates a demand for more and more, studios and performers are leaving the protection in the nightstand.
For decades now, there’s been a wide gap between the use of condoms, testing, and other safer sex practices in gay and straight porn. Currently, the straight porn industry relies on monthly STI testing via the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation (AIM). Testing is an effective way for tracking infections and monitoring them, but it’s not a perfect system. HIV can take almost ten days to appear on a test. At best that leaves a performer ten days to work without knowing their status and, at worst, possibly forty days if they’re infected shortly before their monthly test. While HIV is certainly one of the most concerning STIs, it’s not the only one: according to The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles County receives between 60 to 80 reports of new cases of Chlamydia and gonorrhea a month from adult performers from AIM.
When a straight porn performer contracts HIV, the industry reacts, production shuts down as it did in 2004 and the performer is generally barred from working with companies of any note. When a gay porn performer contracts HIV, nobody knows. Everyone keeps making porn, and everyone keeps watching it.
In the gay porn industry, major studios generally require condom use, but few also rely on testing. In a non-scientific survey conducted by Michael Stabile of TheSword.com, a popular website that regularly features and interviews mainstream gay porn stars and producers, 96 self-selected performers answered questions on their HIV status and work practices. 18.4 percent of the performers who responded anonymously admitted that they were HIV+, while another 10 percent acknowledged that they weren’t sure of their status.
“[There] has been a significant increase in the bareback business, creating pressure to have unprotected sex. Some productions are ready to pay more for unsafe sex, even shooting films in poorer countries where actors are more likely to accept the risk of HIV infection,” wrote Thierry Schaffauser, a sex-worker and activist, in a recent editorial for The Guardian.
Multiple agencies have tried to urge regulation of testing and condom requirements, and the idea isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. Porn sets, like factory floors, are work places, and should fall under the purview of OSHA just the same. However, the porn industry isn’t inherently centralized, and productions happen all across the country—often under less than legal or honest circumstances. While it’s easy to target the large studios, small producers also risk the health of performers and are harder to regulate. Even if legislation were to be considered and passed, enforcing it would be nearly impossible.
Just because we can’t regulate it doesn’t mean that we have to support it.
Vote with your dollars
An argument can be made that producers have the right to make bareback porn, just as consenting adults have the right to perform in bareback porn. But just because an entity has a right to make something doesn’t make the production itself right. Wal-Mart has the right to move production off-shores to benefit from poor labor laws, it doesn’t make it ethical that they do so.
In order to better understand the mindset of the bareback porn consumer, I did a small, completely non-scientific survey of my own. I put out a call to my readers, asking if anyone would be willing to discuss their viewing habits. The four men who answered my questions ranged from 22 years of age to 43 and lived anywhere from Alabama to Berlin. Each had his own reasons for watching bareback porn, but in the end it came down to wanting to see sex uninterrupted by a condom.
“(Bareback porn) shows the purest form of sex,” says Conrad, a 22-year-old from Berlin.
“Being HIV+, it is affirming watching my people have bareback sex with each other. Porn stimulates fantasy, imagination, and forbidden desires. For me these don’t involve condoms,” says Martin, a 37-year-old from New York. “My point of view is informed by the initial bareback porn produced in the late ’90s by three studios (HDK, Dick Wadd, and Treasure Island), whose performers were all already positive... Clearly, as your questions imply, things are different now.”
All of the men I spoke to admitted to being ignorant of the testing policies involved in the production of films they watch. “I am not aware of them, but I hope they are very rigorous,” says Conrad.
“Honestly, I don’t really want to know and I don’t go check on these things before I watch porn that features [bareback] sex,” says Adrian, a 29-year-old from London.
Porn performers might be better off if every actor were treated as HIV+, but only if that means that condoms and testing become mandatory. It’s not likely to happen, though, unless we as consumers become more educated about the porn we support. Bareback porn is like the worst kind of capitalism as practiced in America. We tend to value low prices more than we do ethical production methods. With consumer products it gets you cheap goods, purchased without any consideration for how those goods were produced. With bareback porn it gets you your fantasy—condom-less sex—without any consideration for the risks to the performers onscreen.
There are a lot of things that humans do or pay to watch others do that aren’t completely safe, and there’s nothing wrong with that. People should be allowed to take risks, but there is a difference between a risk and an unnecessary risk. NASCAR is an incredibly risky form of entertainment, but we don’t ask the drivers to go without seat belts. We don’t ask football players to play without helmets, construction workers to work without hardhats, or nurses to work without gloves. Why should we ask porn stars to perform without a condom just so that we can see “natural sex?”
It’s impossible to make porn—or sex of any kind, for that matter—completely safe. It’s unfortunate that we live in a world where sex comes pre-packaged with a slew of potentially dangerous side effects. This is nothing new. The reality of STIs hang over any sexual act. Putting a camera in between the performers and the consumers may protect the consumer, but the consumer was never really at risk anyway. Masturbation is one hell of a safe sex act. Having sex with multiple partners in order to entertain consumers is not.
A common complaint that I’ve heard regarding safer sex and porn is the unfortunate sleight-of-hand that comes with having condoms magically appear. If done artfully, there’s no reason showing performers putting condoms on couldn’t be sexy. Even fumbling or lack of continuity is preferable to putting the performers at risk.
Let’s be clear about something: porn is a sleight-of-hand. It is not real sex. Where producers edit out the step of rolling on a condom, they also edit out (in most cases) the enemas, the lube, and the removal of socks. They cut out the lost erections and the Viagra. They cut out the lights necessary to ensure that you can see every wrinkle in a performer’s asshole. Porn is an illusion. The risk that performers are taking is not. One person’s fantasy should not trump another’s reality. Honestly, if the presence of a condom—in your porn or in your sex life—can derail your sexual enjoyment then you’re doing something wrong.