A great article at Spiked-Online, by medical student Jeremy Cave, about top-down paternalism and its cost to personal liberty and artistic freedom —
Picture the following scene. You and your partner are a pair of rather unabashed exhibitionists. You spend your weekends producing home videos that you upload to an amateur-porn site for money. In the middle of a passionate scene your bedroom door is opened. A health-and-safety inspector with a clipboard strolls in and begins inspecting your partner’s appendage. He notes that your partner is not wearing a condom. Because of this, he says, you face civil or criminal charges under the County of Los Angeles Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act. You attest to your clean bill of health and your partner’s consent, ‘but alas’, the inspector replies, ‘crucially you are without a condom’.
It has been almost a year-and-a-half since this legislation, also known as Measure B, was passed with a 57 per cent majority vote in Los Angeles County. Since 14 December 2012, actors performing in adult films there have been required to wear condoms.
Measure B is a self-avowed public health policy. The ordinance states that Measure B is needed to ensure the industry ‘cleans up and protects its performers, and the general public, from the spread of disease’. It is also felt that the act will bring the adult industry into line with other work-and-safety regulations: ‘The public health department regulates restaurants, tattoo parlours, vending machines, laundries, swimming pools and more. The adult film industry should also be regulated.’ It would seem, then, that Measure B is just another everyday workplace health-and-safety restriction. As Michael Weinstein, founder of AIDS Healthcare Foundation and a Measure B proponent, argues: ‘Dentists must wear latex gloves; construction workers wear hard hats; machinists wear goggles. Why should porn performers be different?’
However, we should be worried about Measure B. It is not a harmless piece of health-and-safety legislation; it is yet another act of top-down paternalism. Unhappy with the risks porn stars are consenting to, the Los Angeles County population has demanded that porn stars wear condoms to protect themselves. Metaphorically, 57 per cent of Los Angeles County has jumped into bed with the porn stars and insisted they put something on the end of it. This is regrettable; liberty must extend to making choices others would disapprove of. But more importantly, and in answer to Michael Weinstein’s question, porn performers should be treated differently because they are undertaking an expressive act. Measure B is not only a health-and-safety policy, but also a restriction on actors’ and directors’ freedom of expression.
Leave a Comment