Bareback porn

I just read an article in the Daily Telegraph which has incensed me.

Just for a change, not because it 's the Daily Telegraph, but the substance of the story.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9095169/Porn-industry-threatens-to-boycott-Los-Angeles-over-new-condom-law.html

Apparently, the US health authorities have managed to get a new law introduced banning all new bareback porn production in the USA (EDIT: it seems that  this applies only to Los Angeles - so I assume it's a Californian statute) from next week. It seems the porn industry is up in arms about it because bareback porn is a heck of a lot more popular and makes more money.

I don't watch a lot of straight porn (to be honest, I don't deliberately watch ANY) but I watch unconscionably huge volumes of gay porn (blush).  I genuinely don't see why anyone considers bareback to be so much more fun to watch. Surely it's about the models/actors and their activity? And bareback sex itself is not significantly more pleasurable than using a condom.

It's pretty much established that most young people nowadays get most of their sex education from online porn rather than from playground chatter or - god forbid - the classroom or their parents. As a result, they have some odd ideas about what their genitals should look like, what sex is, and how to go about performing it.


While I appreciate that the porn industry is part of the entertainment complex rather than the education system, there is no reason why porn productions should not  take a more active role in promoting safe sex practices. Something I find really quite idiotic in most "responsible" gay porn is that almost invariably, the active partner (or top in gay parlance) plays around the bumhole of the guy who's about to get fucked (the bottom) with his erect penis and then there's an edit, on the other side of which we have a change of angle, and penetration occurs, with a condom having magically appeared on said penis.

Why can't porn productions show that putting on the condom can be as sensuous and integral a part of lovemaking as the rest of it? SHOW guy A put a condom on his erect member before entering guy B's anal cavity!

Out of the last 20 porn films I saw (generally five scenes each, one of which is usually a threesome or more, so a total of probably 110-120 acts of anal penetration) no more than TWO SCENES showed the condom going on or coming off. This is scandalous.

There's little wonder that while kids nowadays seem to know all about the kinkier side of sex, they don't seem to know what a condom is, or how to put it on.

And probably even worse is the number of older guys (around my age and older) who insist on bareback sex despite remembering the advent of the AIDS pandemic in the early 80s and the shivers of fear and apprehension which went through the worldwide gay community. Absolutely everyone my age, gay, straight or bi, knows someone who has died of HIV/AIDS and we all know people who've contracted all kinds of other diseases.

Have they all forgotten? I am horrified by the number of people who think it's normal to have unprotected penetrative sex with a complete stranger and yes, I blame the porn industry.

Regrettably, I fear that this new US law won't really change much - porn production will just move to Eastern Europe where the models will work for a lot less money and be prepared to take much larger risks, and thanks to the transnational nature of the internet, will find its audience just as readily.

Rather than fight this change, I genuinely think the porn industry should accept the responsible - and long-term - attitude of fully embracing safe sex and actively promoting it. After all, an educated audience is a better audience!