Los Angeles Condom Requirement for Porn, First Step Regulating Industry Rife with “Abuse”

February 2, 2012

Updated: 02-15-2012

By Bilbo Poynter

It’s official: all performers in adult films will have to use condoms  on set if they want to work in the City of Los Angeles.

A city ordinance to require condom use on porn sets passed 9-1 by City Council in January, and was signed into law by L.A. Mayor     Villaraigosa the next week.

It’s a move that has members of the adult film industry reeling and threatening to pull up stakes from the cradle of the industry, the San Fernando Valley, sometimes known as “porn valley”.

The industry maintain that they do a good job self-regulating themselves for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s), and view the push that led to the ordinance as vendetta politics by groups that want to see the industry shuttered.

“I don’t have a problem with that,” said Shelley Lubben, an ex-porn performer who now runs the Pink Cross Foundation, an organization that helps women to get out of the industry and views pornography as violent, and its producers as sex traffickers.

“I want them to use condoms right now, at least it’ll save women from getting STD’s .  . . If I can’t shut this industry down then at least I’ve protected their health. At least I’ve done something positive in the lives of these workers.”

The issue of mandatory condom use on porn sets dates back to 2004 when there was an HIV outbreak among performers. The California state Occupational Health and Safety Administration fined two production companies for allowing unprotected sex  on the basis that they failed to “protect workers exposed to blood or body fluids on the job”. That’s when the L.A.-based Aids Healthcare Foundation took up the cause.

“They weren’t very successful for a number of years, and just within the last two years they’ve been building momentum,” said Rhett Pardon, who writes for industry trade publication, XBIZ.

According to Lubben there were as many as 25 unreported HIV infections among porn performers in 2004.

The porn industry did have their own clinic to test seasoned porn stars and would-be actors. The Adult Industry Medical clinic, run by Sharon Mitchell, herself a veteran of the industry, ran from 1998 until it closed last year. Newcomers to the industry would get tested for sexually transmitted diseases before their first shoot, while all performers were supposed to get tested once a month in an act of industry self-regulation.

Despite this, there was another HIV outbreak in 2010. And sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes, Chlamydia, and Gonorrhea in porn are “rampant,” according to

Lubben – a fact borne out in the industry’s own chat rooms.

So why would an industry, predicated on sexual intercourse between adults, fight laws in place to protect  against sexual disease transmission?

The answer it seems comes down to attitude and economics. “The porn consuming public doesn’t want to see condoms in porn. . . there’s more production, more money when it comes to condom-less production,”  said Pardon.

Pornography is worth billions every year. How much? Few in the industry will say, or seem to know, but what is known is that even with the threat of online piracy cutting into profits in recent years (something the “renegade” industry has fought mightily) annual revenue sits at around $8 billion worldwide, according to Pardon.

Few industries today can count on those kinds of profits. And like the great industries of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, such as oil and steel, porn in the 21^st century goes largely unregulated.

“The adult community, from my perspective, doesn’t like to be told what to do,” said Pardon.

“People keep saying its consensual adults having sex and I’m like, ‘In a workplace’,” stressed Lubben, “if you’re in a workplace you have to obey the law, you have to protect workers.”

To make her point Lubben has produced a video, available on YouTube, showing  several young women brought to tears, in obvious pain, or refusing to continue to do extreme sexual acts, mid-act, on porn sets. The images are hard to watch.

“They’re being forced into sex acts they would have never agreed to, they have no advocate, they have no one on the set, to say, ‘you know, you can’t do that.’

The bigger companies look the other way at the abuse on porn sets by the smaller online outfits that make up the majority of porn productions, according to Lubben. For the entire industry, it’s, “anything goes”.

Though neither Lubben or Pardon feel the industry threat to pull up stakes and move elsewhere is a real one, “Good luck bringing the porn stars to Europe. They want to live by the beach, and near Hollywood,” said Lubben.

“It’s kind of hard to flee, when you have all the infrastructure here,” said Pardon. “What’s really going to matter is enforcement.” Pardon has heard that any inspections of porn sets to make sure they’re in compliance with the ordinance may need to be done by health professionals.

According to Paul Audley, the president of FilmL.A., the organization responsible for issuing permits to all film shoots – including adult films – in Los Angeles, the city hasn’t figured out how it’s going to enforce the law, and is struggling to put a taskforce together.

Audley’s office issues about 40 adult film permits a month, roughly 500 a year, but the actual number of adult films being shot in Los Angeles is hard to quantify, “because under a single permit, a single day, they may make several movies.” Audley estimates that the porn industry was responsible for about $300,000 of revenue to his office a year.

It’s been reported that the City of Los Angeles saved $4 million dollars by passing the ordinance now, to avoid it becoming a ballot initiative.

Despite the adult industry’s flexing over the new ordinance, Pardon thinks the condom requirement may have little impact for another reason, “Most of the shoots aren’t actually done by the studios themselves, but are contracted out.”

This was confirmed by one porn producer (outside of Los Angeles), who explained to CCIR Investigates that when they want hardcore content they outsource the work to Romania, because female performers there, “work for peanuts”.

Still, for Lubben,  a law requiring the L.A. porn industry to wear condoms during filming is a victory because,  “[the industry will] never be able to live again without being regulated.”