Big Brother is Watching You; He Says To Stop Before You Go Blind
Following five years of procedural hurdles, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health has proposed a set of safety standards outlining how adult film performers and others on set can operate in their jobs more safely. Among 21 pages of proposals, it emphasizes the use of condoms as a way to protect against sexually transmitted diseases and additionally calls for producers to pay for medical visits and hepatitis B vaccines.
Last Thursday in San Diego, adult performers and supporters criticized the many regulations, including those which include wearing protective eye gear. “These are regulations designed for medical settings, and are unworkable on an adult film set — or even a Hollywood film set,” said Diane Duke, CEO of Free Speech Coalition.
The proposed regulations come as a result of a letter filed to the Cal/OSHA standards board in 2009 by Michael Weinstein, executive director of AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF). While condom use in adult film production in California has been required under Cal/OSHA, Weinstein stated that the industry has widely disobeyed this law due to an absence of effective enforcement. The new regulation would specifically refer to condoms as a way to prevent STDs.
In 2012, AHF supported a successfully passed Los Angeles County law making condoms mandatory on all adult film shoots, and the organization is also working to get a statewide measure on next year’s ballot to strengthen mandates under Cal/OSHA.
Many in the adult film industry fear that tougher regulations would drive their business out-of-state or underground. The Free Speech Coalition has stated that on most sites, performers are tested every 14 days and are not supposed to work until they receive clearance. The industry also has said that while condoms are available if requested, using them is impractical because they break, and can ruin the aesthetics of sexual fantasy.
While such a proposed regulation may seem trivial in the grand scheme of creeping tyranny in the US, the most intimate and personal liberties may be perhaps the most important. It is the same sort of argument advanced when we discuss the arguments against the surveillance state employed by the NSA: most of us have nothing or very little to hide in terms of criminal activity; but that doesn’t mean that our privacy is not extremely important in order for us to have a free society. If adults wish to watch some sort of “mature content” featuring other consenting adults, that liberty should be granted to them.
Furthermore, the freedom to engage in subjectively mutually beneficial exchanges, including those which result in mistakes, is one of the greatest liberties which we have. Adult actors have an understanding that they are in a somewhat dangerous profession, where diseases can run rampant if precautions are not taken. They therefore have a vested interest in maintaining their own physical welfare, and verifying the same about any possible partners.
Adult films necessarily require numerous voluntary transactions, just like any other area of commerce; it is for this reason that there is an immorality and lack of liberty in relation to sexual acts which would incorporate either forcible engagement or minors (who by default lack any “capacity” to consent), as they do not receive that same freedom.
Liberty is a concept which is meant to encompass all walks of life; even those of which we are somewhat ashamed or embarrassed to discuss. While it may at times feel that we should prescribe upon others beneficial life habits, we owe to them the liberty to make mistakes and learn on their own. In the end, when it comes to both the adult film industry and the citizenry in general, the only prophylactic which should ever be mandated are those which are to be used against an overreaching state: natural law and individual liberty.
