They use condoms in porn? As boring as I find porn sex, I never could have conceived of anything more boring than “safe porn sex” 
Do you really think that fake boobs do no harm to the women who have them?
I mean, if a woman feels that the benefits are worth the risks, then I have to respect her decision to get them. But to say they do no “harm” is ridiculous.
I’m okay with vintage style porn being condom free. Not just the big moustache wokka chikka wokka stuff, but I’ve seen ones where artiness was attempted. It’s pretty adorable.
These days, the amateur ‘a guy and his girlfriend’, or variations thereof being condomless, I’m comfortable with. I assume those are people that know each other and have a level of trust.
Professionally made modern porn–the kind that has stars that sell molds of their body parts, etc? I expect to see safe sex there. If not, I can’t enjoy it. As said–I don’t want people dying so I can get off.
And though this may sound like I’m some porn freak, I’m not. I’m just hitting forty and have seen a bunch of porn.
It is for me. I don’t want to think about STDs either. Nothing kills a boner like thinking about syphilis.
I hereby retract the vast majority of the snarky remarks I have made about you and your posting habits, EC. That’s a classy POV.
That should be the next safe-sex ad campaign by the health organizations. 
Anyone who has sex (outside of a completely monogamous couple) without a condom is a numbskull with a death wish.
Most porn “plots” involve getting it on with total strangers. Part of the viewer’s experience is imagining him/herself being part of the action, or at least in the same room. Even in fantasy, I don’t want to be around dangerously stupid people.
So, yes, wrap that rascal if you’re making a porno for me.
Just thought I’d mention that I picked up an issue of Scarlet Magazine and noticed a mention of a condom in quite a few of the erotic stories (or ‘clierature,’ as the call them. Still better than Playgirl, I suppose)
As much as the good little queer I try to be knows he’s not supposed to admit it, yes, condom use does detract from the hotness of porn for me. It also detracts from the hotness of actual sex. But, I think part of the reason why condoms make porn suck is that it came part and parcel with the genericization of mainstream gay porn. Porn actors have come to fit a small handful of fairly rigidly defined body types and the lack of variety along with what I perceive to be a certain lack of enthuiasm on the part of the gay-for-pay performers and it dampens the overall effect. Pre-condom porn is much hotter, not only because the flow isn’t interrupted by their stopping to suit up or by the magical appearance of a rubber, but because of the variety and the enthusiasm of some of the old school porn stars.
I have bought bareback DVDs before. I don’t seek them out but if the guys are hot and happen to not be using condoms, I don’t feel bad about the informed decisions that other adults make.
Perhaps the reason some folks are put off by condom use in porn is that serendipity, spontaneity, and animal urgency are all part of the fantasy, and the thought of interrupting that flow to don a wrapper spoils the fantasy. The other possibility is that arousal comes directly from watching the genitals interact, and knowing that, even though the guy will undoubtedly pull out to ejaculate, he could, at any moment, deposit his load of semen inside the woman and impregnate her, thus fulfilling the male-dominance fantasy that seems so prevalent in pornography.
Or something.
Ditto.
If I’m supposed to believe that people acting in porn aren’t homeless drug addicts being coerced into porn to feed their addictions, then I must believe that they are grown adults making informed choices that work for them.
If that’s the case, then I’m not going to get too worked up about what choices they make regarding their safety with regards to STDs.
(I can’t believe I’m actually contributing to this thread)
For me it takes away from the believability of the fantasy. Sure there is a lot in porn that you need to suspend a lot of belief for. But as mentioned, so many porn scenarios are the spontaneous fantasy encounters. In these scenarios, I think the condom detracts because it takes away from the fantasy/spontaneity.
Take a typical porn scenario: hunk pool cleaner comes across naked sun-bather. They chat for 2.7 sentences, and then it’s down to business right there on the pool deck. Add a condom to this scenario and it begs the question: just where did it come from ? Does the pool cleaner score that often that he carries one with him at all times ? Is the sunbather “always prepared” with a stash in her…towel ?
Back when my best friend came out and started dating a fellow lady soon after, I did some research on this. I found out that many health organizations recommend that women sharing sex toys put condoms on them every time, and switch condoms every time they switch, er, “end” users.
I hear that within the upper tiers of the porn industry, all of the stars are regularly checked and they end up blacklisted if they come to work with an STD. That’s not fail-safe, of course–a number of porn stars do escort work too, and they could pick something up on the outside and then contaminate another star before they start testing positive–but from what I hear it’s pretty effective.
In “amateur” porn, though, or with stars who make movies with their fans (like Brandi Belle–God she’s a brave woman!), it only makes sense. But then again, maybe they test those people too before they can get on camera.
There’s a non sequitur if I’ve ever seen one. Of course it’s a suspension of disbelief thing: many of us watch porn in full disbelief-suspension mode. It is a fantasy, after all. Every time I watch porn I suspend my disbelief about a number of things–that’s the point. One of them is the necessity of condom use during sex. Call it irresponsible, call it what you will, but it turns me off and I can’t help it. Then again, I never use condoms; I use testing and alternative methods of birth control, because sex with a condom is much worse than no sex at all for me. That’s a personal thing, of course.
Everyone already said what I had to say, but I’ll just throw my ‘detracts’ vote into the hat.
Interesting. It doesn’t make a difference for me one way or the other in terms of arousal, but I do note with approval when they use condoms, in a social-responsibility sense. I just asked my husband, and he feels the same way.
I agree wtih this.
This is the one thing I hate about mainstream porn. I hate the money shot. I don’t want to see that mess. I go for the “internal” vids.
For me, it depends on how seamlessly the condom is integrated into the scene. I’ve noticed that a lot of the condoms they use in porn are practically invisible during penetration, as long as you can’t see the “reservoir tip”.
On the other hand, sometimes the usage seems a bit ridiculous. For example, I recently had a month’s subscription to a domination & submission site. Due to the nature of this type of porn, the actual sex is often broken up into several … installments, if you will, interspersed with various forms of domination. And so quite a bit of the time, you see the dominant guy walking around with his condom-wrapped dick hanging out, and it looks kind of silly.
On top of that, the usage itself made little sense in the context of this site’s basic formula: lots and lots of oral sex sans condom, followed by vaginal and or anal sex with condom, and then the money shot onto the woman’s breasts — never a facial, which seems odd when the whole theme of the videos is domination & submission. But they explain the lack of facials by citing concern for STDs (specifically, herpes) His unwrapped cock was in her mouth a few minutes ago! To the best of my knowledge, most STDs (herpes and warts in particular) are transmitted by contact, not via semen, so how would a facial shot be any more risky than an unprotected blowjob? So the honest answer is that, because everything in the video is consensual, these models/acresses simply didn’t consent to taking a facial. If the issue was really STDs, then the male actor would wear a condom during the blowjob.
It doesn’t detract from the enjoyment for me, though neither does the absence of a condom. I’m more into watching breasts and faces than genitalia anyway, so the extreme penetration close-ups are more likely to make me giggle over the whole actor-actress-cameraman arrangement involved.
One case I found where the lack of a condom would make the video unwatchable:
I didn’t see the video in question, just the DVD cover. I found a shop in Akihabara that was an absolute pornutopia. Tens of thousands of DVDs, cataloged by actress, theme and fetish, with just about every arrangement imaginable, and plenty that I hadn’t imagined until walking through that shop. It was a labrynthine arrangement of shelves, the contents of which got more unusual as you went further back. At the back of the store was one with a group of women supposedly brought out to the tent villages by the river to fuck all the homeless guys there, one after another, without any protection. The lack of protection, and the fact that these guys probably had more than a few diseases between them, appeared to be the main selling point.
Y’know, for me it really depends on the set-up – I can fully [del]get behind[/del] dig a scenario wherein the rubbers show up because the scene is an organized “swinging orgy” taking place in contemporary time and there’s bowls of rubbers all over the room. Or the boss and secretary start getting it on on the desktop and she reaches into the desk drawer and pulls out a packet, and he smiles wickedly as he says * “Miss Finkstein, what would I ever do without you, you always have me prepared with what I need!”* OTOH I can also fully go along with the mood of a scene where it’s supposed to be completely natural, spontaneous and in total excape from reality, no precautions necessary because the characters portrayed are from Planet Freelove where antibiotic resistance and retroviri never evolved.
BTW what Otto said about the desoulment of gay porn performance goes just the same as well for much of modern commercial straight porn. Standardized body types, standardized formulaic sex, standardized I’d-rather-be-bowling demeanor. I don’t think I’ve actually ever sat down to a major-US-commercial-label porno produced since the early 90s, and that ain’t because I’ve settled down.
Agreed. I’ve never, ever seen the attraction in that. It doesn’t look fun or erotic in any way to me.