Regulations Kill Industries: Porn Edition

Did social conservatives think of this?

This week, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation launched a new war against porn’s potentially reckless ways, proposing a strict initiative that would require male porn stars to wear condoms during vaginal and anal intercourse.

Since California is one of two states in which porn is legal (the other is, only recently, New Hampshire), could this be the end of porn?

Immediately, the porn world was up in arms over the initiative. “Hey, dicks, it’s really quite simple,” says Jeremy. “We don’t mind wearing rubbers, but no matter how you slice it, the viewers don’t want to see them.”

“The fact that these workers’ health and safety has been neglected is a very dangerous situation,” AHF president Michael Weinstein tells The Daily Beast. “It’s a matter of fairness. Why is this the only industry not afforded protection when they go to work?”...

...But Cal/OSHA and the AIDS Health Foundation insist the initiative—a stricter version of the state law—will be easier to enforce on a smaller scale. They need 200,000 signatures by June 5 to add the measure to the November 2012 presidential ballot in L.A. County. Weinstein is confident they’ll amass the votes, since they easily collected 70,901 signatures for the citywide measure. The initiative argues that the adult entertainment industry should have to comply with the same laws as any other private employer in California. Just as construction workers are required to wear hard hats on site, porn stars should have to wear rubbers on set. Cal/OSHA even mandates that porn bosses provide employees exposed to blood-borne pathogens (seminal and vaginal fluids) with dental dams, gloves, and eye protection.

This all raises the question: If condoms are enough to drive viewers away, who’s going to pay money to watch people go at it while looking like CDC agents?

It's a brilliant plan, if it is a plan.

SIDS is Cute. AIDS is cool.

I generally have trouble comprehending a lot of visual style in Japan.  But from what I can gather, pulp generally wins the day, and the shocking stands out over neon.  That being said, I present two posters I recently saw in the clinic where my first nephew was born.  

SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) is cute.

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The Catholic Church: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

I'm proud to be a Catholic.  While Protestants were busy reading the Bible, addressing each other as "Goody", building barns, and milking cows, my religious ancestors were hunting down witches and heretics and setting them on fire, writing books about damning people to Hell and following through by actually damning them to hell, devising complex codes and secret societies to keep losers at bay, invading an entire region of the globe in search for a magic cup, building labyrinths, burning surviving classical texts, improving torture techniques, trying to keep a dead language alive, and otherwise founding Western civilization.  But to really appreciate how cool Catholicism is when compared to Protestantism, one need only compare Gregorian Chant to Creed.

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The Silent Good Times Roll

If you listen to the mood of cultural zeitgeist right now, you'd think the world was slipping inevitably towards calamitous anarchy.  The economy is in decline, our cultural values are eroding and America's place in the world is in doubt even as we are confronted with a multitude of problems: two wars, climate change, pandemic disease, Islamic terrorism, the rise of China and a looming deficit, debt and entitlement problem.  While this analysis contains some of substance, this granular reality obscures a larger truth: things in the world and in America are better than at any time in history, perhaps excepting five years ago when we had all of this plus a housing bubble.  This relatively brief moment of crisis has not weakened the core strength of American society, culture and economy and the arc of history continues to bend towards increasing societal welfare.

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