OK I feel that I have gathered my thoughts enough to make another comment on porn regulation. Like drugs, alcohol and tobacco (I'll leave guns out of this conversation), porn and prostitution need to be regulated to avoid abuse and disastrous consequences. The term 'consenting adults' eliminates: pedophilia, necrophilia, animals and rape. Unfortunately it does not end there where you can list practices that can lead to disastrous consequences. It leaves out poop, fisting and open wounds that could lead to infections. Now we can have an extremely long list of porn that is permitted and not permitted and it will take perhaps days of debate. But a government permitting porn needs to have that debate. On top of that I have not even gotten into health regulations. Should all male performers wear condoms? In order for me to illustrate why porn should have stricter regulations, I need to draw some parallels with other things. Banning advertising for smoking and making plain packaging for cigarettes is because people do not want to celebrate and encourage the destructive behavior of smoking while not banning it all out because that would be counter-productive in dozens of ways. There are movies which celebrate violence. Fortunately for the most part that just sates fantasies people have that they will not act on. But it does not work the same way with sex. When we have movies about drug use, with the exception of marijuana, the person using the drugs either gets over his/her addiction, or dies tragically. What we don't have is somebody happily walk into the sunset sticking a needle in his/her arm. We simply do not celebrate drug use. So we should celebrate sex but not destructive and dangerous sex. In short, we cannot force people not to engage in self destructive behavior but we should definitely not be encouraging or even celebrating it.
I am fine with it generally as long as it involves consenting adults. Some of it freaks me out but more because it is fetish stuff that freaks me out, not because they filmed it necessarily. Money or attention are big drivers of why people do it. I suppose dangling money in the face of someone who needs money technically could be a form of coercion, but largely the people have something going on in their lives that makes it more desirable than working at Subway. I am not sure very many people if any have a hard time escaping if they want to leave the industry. They are easily replaced. A lot of them tend to get pushed out by their studios these days because of the need for fresh faces. The studios will monitor social media and the like and if you are not creating buzz or your buzz is declining with each new scene, they will gladly show you the door. The risk to performers is that once they get shown the door, they are very likely going to be moving down the rung of quality studios instead of up it, so they are putting themselves in situations where they are going to have to do things they might otherwise not do or work in sketchier outfits just to have work.
Really? So you want an army of auditors sitting in porn shoots? Why just porn? How about the food industry. Maybe we should have a federal regulator sitting in every restaurant in the country making sure the food is prepared in a safe and satisfactory manner.
Sex sells and always has. It isn't called the first profession for nothing. I have no problem with it. I can't say I'm for or against it though. If that is what someone wants to watch, fine. I do think pornography should be kept away from kids. It's like prostitution, I have no problem with that either. I think both should be legal, but regulated.
