Performers ARE capable of advocating for themselves, but when the voice concern for “the final product”, they aren’t advocating for themselves, but for the production companies.

“the most obvious solution, then, would be NOT to make performers work for 4+ hours at a time, and/or NOT to require the type of rough, rapid penetration that makes condom use less effective and more uncomfortable.”

Yes! And wouldn’t *that* be pro-worker? But it isn’t the direction the porn companies are choosing, because they aren’t pro-worker.

Lube is for a lot of things, but it really doesn’t, in my experience, stop all condom-related friction. Hartley, though, is sounding more and more clueless every day.

I don’t care about the “final product”, and when an anti-condom advocate mentions the final product, I hear the voice of the production companies, not the voice of the worker. For the workers, I have concerns about safety, comfort, and bodily autonomy. The argument that the customer won’t like the final product holds zero water with me.

This is the part that I find very questionable. I am sure that many porn performers ARE educated and self-aware, and that many are not. I was really, really shocked to see Nina Hartley claim that Gardasil will keep all porn performers HPV negative, when that simply isn’t true. If Hartley doesn’t know her stuff, she can’t be the only one.

http://00goddess.net/2013/09/nina-hartley-you-let-me-down/

I think performers get to be the authority on their experience and how they want to work, but I’m not buying that working in porn makes you an expert in STI health.

This is pure political theater and it puts our health (condom “rash” is a real thing) and medical privacy at great risk. We have a well-tested system that reduces risk to acceptable levels.

All jobs have risk, and non-lethal STIs are a risk of being sexual, either in private or on a commercial porn set. I accept that risk and the patronization of male politicians about my body and choices is enraging. There is no way to reduce risk of STIs to zero, though we’ve done a darn good job of it.

If I wanted zero risk of contracting an STI, I’d choose to be celibate.

We’re adults and would like to be treated as such, as opposed to mindless femme-bots who don’t know what it is we truly want.

Ideally, it seems performers should get residual payments for every sale of their work, like unionized actors do. This is what I’ve always found exploitative about porn – performers just get the one sum for a shoot, but their image continues to make money for the producers long afterwards. Whereas if you are an actor shooting a commercial, for example, you also earn something each time it airs.

I’d love to see that happen with performers. I’m not sure of the practical details of how that would function given how many of us are freelance and how transient the work is (there are a ton of ‘one-and-done’s). Maybe I need to shift my thinking from stripper organizing to looking at something like Actors’ Equity.