Commenting on Los Angeles county's Measure B – a ballot measure to require porn actors to wear condoms for anal and vaginal intercourse – Amanda Hess considers the demand side of the equation:
Carmen Valentina has testified that performing with condoms doesn’t turn off her fan base. “I [asked] my web members and twitter followers when I shot for Wicked what their thoughts were of the scene and condoms in general … the majority claimed they did not care,” she wrote on one adult forum. “There were a few that did NOT want to see condoms at all in any scenes and were quite vocal about it but the majority seemed at the very least indifferent to it.”
So how pervasive is the anti-condom stigma, really? And how big is the market for protected porn? In lieu of any scientific studies on the matter, I conducted a highly unscientific survey instead. I asked a group of male and female friends for their thoughts on the aesthetics of condoms in porn. My findings were similar to Valentina’s: Most people expressed ambivalence (“not a deal-breaker”) or mounted defenses of the sexiness of safe sex (“condoms make the porn look more like the kinds of sex I actually have—and that makes for hotter fantasies”), but those who rejected condoms in porn seemed … particularly energized by the issue. These viewers—all of them men—announced that condoms are just “less sexy,” “understandable, but ugly” and “UNWATCHABLE, FOR SURE.”
Porn star Aurora Snow recently voiced her support for the measure:
Bringing something like condoms into porn may contribute to ruining the fantasy, because in fantasy land no one has to think about safety. But if I were your girlfriend, your sister, your mother, or your daughter, what would you want the law to be?
Previous Dish coverage of Measure B here.
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