In your private life, condom use is optional. But the LA City Council has decided that if your bedroom antics are filmed, you’d better wrap that rascal:
The ‘enforcement’ will be the market. Condom porn is gross and everybody hates it! Porn is the furthest thing from reality and rubbers have no place in it…
The options are not unlimited. The reason porn production is so centralized is because there are only a few areas where there’s a court ruling explicitly declaring it’s legal to pay people to have sex on camera. Porn film studios that relocate risk, at the very least, some expensive court battles.
On a related issue, I wonder if this law could withstand a legal challenge. Can the government mandate the content of a movie? Suppose the City Council enacted a law forbidding any movie and television show filmed in Los Angeles from depicting a person smoking? I can’t imagine they’d be able to defend that in court.
Well, various townships have banned smoking from bars and the like to protect workers at those establishments, I don’t see how this is different. Its been pretty well established that towns can pass regulations forcing safety measures to protect workers on the job.
FWIW, if the claims of STD rates amongst porn actors are true, I suspect that these types of regulations will follow the industry if they flee to LA suburbs. We wouldn’t allow any other industry to continue as it had been if their workers were subject to similarly high health risks, especially when a cheap and effective countermeasure is available.
I have never understood why it was OK for adult film performers to risk death and/or disease for my entertainment, I’m perfectly OK if those rascals all get wrapped. Of course, you may say, “Isn’t it the same thing as high wire acts performing without a net?” To which I say, “I’m perfectly OK with them having a net.”
That said, letting city councils regulate the content of films is probably a dangerous precedent.
I don’t really see it as regulating the content of a film so much as a safety regulation regarding the actors. Presumably there’s a pretty long list of stuff I can’t do in movies because it would be illegally endangering the safety of the actors. Indeed, as far as movie stunts go, there’s a pretty large number of regulations due to reactions from past on-set accidents. So far as I know, they’ve never been challenged in court.
The effect on the content of the film is incidental. And if someone comes up with an invisible condom or something, presumably that could still be used legally.