Public health versus performer privates: Measure B's failure to fix subjects

Abstract

Porn performance and its interface with the public inhabit a blurry and shifting zone that is difficult to fix. The sex and bodies of pornography are both public and private, both real and fantasy, both individually inhabited and collectively viewed. What happens when the state tries to locate its role and intervene in such a slippery relationship? As of November 2012, Measure B legislation mandates condom use in pornography made in Los Angeles County, USA. This measure is presented as a public health and labour rights measure. Health regulations and discourses of work ethics are often covert means to communicate moral and social imperatives. This is particularly true under neoliberal logics that responsibilize the entrepreneurial subject, and neoconservative logics that promote a certain moral tradition. This article discusses how Measure B, through its appeals to pornography's pedagogic potential and its disingenuous labour rights rhetoric, displays confusion and uncertainty regarding the state's role in individual health and labour. This is partly owing to the inherent contradictions of neoliberal and neoconservative theories of subjectivity, and partly owing to the precarious nature of porn itself.

Keywords:

• Measure B
• neoliberalism/neoconservatism
• liminality
• risk discourse
• public health
• labour

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Dr Diana Gustafson for her thoughtful and helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. The author is also grateful for the detailed, attentive, and insightful comments of two anonymous reviewers. This research received no funding and there are no conflicts of interest to report.

Notes

1. §2257, the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988, regulates proof-of-age record-keeping to ensure porn performers are not minors. The law underwent sweeping changes in 2004 that called for a complex record-keeping system and massive expansion of who is responsible for holding these records (not just the initial producer of the material, but anyone involved at any level of production or dissemination).

2. See www.yesonb.info

3. The employed HIV test is not the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay test, which often requires a three-month incubation period, but rather the polymerase chain reaction/DNA test, which requires only a two-week exposure window since it tests for the virus rather than antibodies. This is crucial considering the number of co-stars an active porn performer may have in a three-month period. The system remains imperfect, however: studies have shown that performers show higher rates of STI infection than the ‘general L.A. County population’. At a time when testing schedules were monthly, Goldstein et al. (2011) concluded that in a given one-year period between 14 and 21% of performers contract at least one case of chlamydia and 5 and 8% at least one case of gonorrhoea, about 8.5 and 18 times the rate, respectively, compared with non-performer LA County residents aged 18–29. However, one must account for performers’ heightened testing schedule as a potential source of bias since other residents are unlikely to be undergoing monthly screenings and so will display lower STI rates.

4. The idea of using porn to promote safer sex is not novel. As Cindy Patton (1991, 36) has discussed, attempts to harness the educational power of pornography and its influence on ‘sexual vernaculars’ came about during the beginnings of the North American HIV epidemic, the difference being that in that era it was various activist groups who sought and fought over ways to insert safer sex into gay and lesbian pornography so as to capitalize upon it for the wellbeing of their own communities. The questions to be grappled with, however, are the same as today: do people imitate what they see in porn? Does watching porn that shows unsafe or risky sex act as a cathartic substitute for such sex, or does it serve to normalize it?

5. This bias is also indicative of racist hiring practices whereby racialized women are cast less often than white or ‘white-passing’ performers.