I’ve been hemming and hawing for a week about what my opinion on the mandatory use of condoms in porn is. Honestly, I have to say that I am not a porn consumer, and I’ve thought about porn and it’s moral implications more in the past week than I ever have.
Some porn I’ve found exciting, and beautiful, some disturbing and disgusting. However, I don’t dispute that what I find disturbing, some find exciting. Everyone has the right to explore and enjoy their sexuality however they want.
Sex is tricky though, and really we have to rely and trust that commercial sex won’t propogate harm against other beings. We belong to a species that produces John Muirs and Joseph Goebbels, and most of us are flailing along in the ethical soup between the two.
So, the other day in my porn-o-centric frame of mind; I was in line behind a well heeled fellow at the meat counter at Whole Foods. I was irritated, I knew what I wanted, had a bus to catch, and this guy was asking everything short of the possible name of the person who had fed his chops when they were still trotting around.
I thought it likely that at some point this man had watched some porn, maybe with his wife, husband, or hiding out in his den on the ‘puter after his family was asleep. I wondered if the provenance of his porn was as important to him as the production of the pork he was buying.
Did he care if the performers had proper health care, if their STD screenings were current? If they consented to do the scene without a condom because they couldn’t afford to take a pay cut because they had bills to pay?
In the course of researching whether or not performers should be required by the government that one piece kept coming up- performers who insist on condom use are paid less than their counterparts who take the risk. Because it is a risk to have “unprotected sex” with a partner(s) who also has had multiple partners.
In my system of belief, we take on the energy of the sentient beings we eat for sustenance and pleasure, therefor I choose not to eat animal protien that has been raised in hideous unnatural conditions. What does this have to do with sexual behavior and porn consumption?
Just as I can’t enjoy a cut of meat from an animal that I know was grown in darkeness and filth and fed poisonous feed; I can’t derive pleasure from watching people having sex in a fashion that could be potentially putting them at risk for contracting a disease.
Admitedly, I suffer from crushing empathy at times, sometimes I feel sad to tears when I see an elderly person checking out groceries and struggling with a heavy bottle of detergent. There is some porn that I watched and couldn’t get into it because I couldn’t stop wondering about what the woman was thinking - if she wished they would hurry up so she could get her kid out of daycare, or if this was the last time she had to do this to pay off a loan.
Other times I think “god, that is amazing- I wish that was me!” That’s just me- how I feel. Does it answer the question of whether or not the government should make porn performers wear condoms? Make them all wear rubbers so I can watch more porn? What about the people who like their porn without condoms? Do they have a civil right to pay to watch un-safe sex?
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| Rick Santorum |
So, yeah- if it promotes and facilitates the dissemination of the kind of sex that Rick Santorum, and the Pope, and others of his ilk think are scary, bad, and wrong - then yes, make it mandatory to wear condoms in porn.
Cherub
2-2012
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