Personal Responsibility is a myth! If porn stars don’t wear condoms, I won’t either.

Ah crap, now I have to buzz my head and buy a wife beater. Condoms? Booo!

A California advisory board has convened and is building the framework for the regulation of the the porn industry. For years, many have claimed the porn industry has run rampant with dangerous practices and is long overdue for regulatory oversight. I am in favor of oversight, if it is necessary. Mandatory STD testing and proper protection for employees and performers should be enacted, in regards to full acknowledgment of their employers expectations and their own responsibility. However, there are open calls to create a law forcing all adult film actors to wear protection in their films.  The logic is that people watch bareback porn and thus engage in bareback sex, because watching a video effectively removes all personal responsibility.

I understand that HIV rates are no longer shrinking and the public in general has a blase attitude towards the disease, but to assume people engage in bareback sex because of a video and not a lack of personal control is faulty and lazy reasoning. People engage in unprotected sex because it feels much better than protected sex, period. I have never met a gay men who openly stated, “I love the feel of joyless sex and condoms are the bees knees! However, I really want to be popular and when I see whores on tv do it unprotected, it makes me want to fit in. I really desire popularity above my personal health.” It is one thing to regulate STD testing and another to strip the public of yet another expectation of personal responsibility. If you engage in risky behavior, you are more than aware of the risks associated with that choice and it would be childish to blame pornography for your own short comings.

We demand so little of our populace as it is and the more we continue to treat them like children, the more we will have to step up and protect them from themselves. HIV and AIDS are very serious issues that require proper dissemination of information and a well informed community, but to claim that bareback sex makes one act without will is the same as claiming that Halo causes children to become violent.  I happen to be a fan of pornography and it has kept me out of trouble through out my life, but I have no real interest in whether or not actors wear condoms. The problem with this comes down to creating another path towards a nanny state in which we remove the public from the realm of personal responsibility. Grown adults are responsible for their own lives and their own action Us.ntil we demand more of our public, they will continue to find a scapegoat for their own failures.

How do you feel about this? Are you in favor of this law? If so, why?