Welcome Back! Porn Goes Back To Its Underground Roots

by Coleen Singer at Sssh.com

Back when the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) first began its major push to get California to enforce a condoms-required policy against the porn industry, just about anybody you talked to within the industry was clear about where it would all lead: underground.

While a small handful of producers are complying with the ordinances that now govern how porn must be shot, many more have either stopped producing new movies altogether, picked up and moved to another state, or simply gone off the radar, shooting ‘underground’ without permits – and all the pesky requirements that getting a permit to shoot porn in L.A. now requires.

For reasons that are hard for me to fathom, some porn producers publicly announced their relocation to Nevada… an announcement that rather unsurprisingly (and quickly) resulted in a complaint being filed against them in Nevada by the AHF.

Given that a lot of porn companies strongly believe that depicting condoms in their movies will reduce sales, many performers actually prefer to not use condoms given a choice (chafing and other problems can become a serious issue over the course of the hours that it often takes to film a sex scene that ends up being 25 minutes in the final cut) and the rest of the burden that the law imposes (it’s not just about using condoms; compliance involves employee training and instituting various workplace protocols, each of which has a cost), it’s no surprise that the porn industry is returning to its roots – and like most literal roots, the adult industry’s roots are decidedly subterranean.

For decades, the porn industry was hardly an “industry.” The risk of prosecution was so great, and the legal framework within which one could create sexually explicit depictions was so shaky and unsure that not only shooting was underground, but distribution, as well. That began to change in the 1970s, and the last 40+ years have generally moved in one direction for porn, which was toward greater acceptance and tolerance on the part of the public.

The industry’s standoff with AHF is changing all of that, and turning back the clock on the industry, whether that is AHF’s intent or not. AHF says it’s just trying to get the industry to take care of its own, and to comply with workplace safety regulations like any other industry. 

I’m not sure I buy that the AHF’s interests are purely altruistic here, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that they are; let’s assume that all AHF really wants is for adult performers to be protected in the workplace. What the AHF is missing is that the adult industry just isn’t like other industries, and it’s not going to respond the way most industries would – which is to say by spending massive sums of money on lobbying and/or outright buying the legislators whose votes they would need in order to maintain the status quo, then finally complying with the regulations if that effort failed. 

For starters, the adult industry still operates in a quasi-legal environment; with the massive vagaries inherent to obscenity law, producers can’t be entirely sure that the movies they make are legal until after a jury or judge says so. By the point that decision is made, the porn company in question is already fucked, quite frankly, because that means they are already on trial, already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers, and already being painted as the worst sort of scum in a forum where their real names are on display for all their neighbors and peers to see, and at which to wag their collective finger.

At its core, the porn industry is made up of people who have accepted a degree of risk that most jobs just don’t have. I’m not talking about the sort of daily life and death risk that law enforcement personnel face, obviously, but until you have been made a pariah before your peers, until you have been proclaimed a felonious pervert in court (and, just as bad, in the court of public opinion), until you have had your bank accounts frozen because the bank doesn’t approve of what you do for a living, until you have been denied a job based on the fact that there’s a video of you out there doing something that’s clearly legal until you put it on film and sell it, it’s hard to appreciate just how risky working in porn can be.

In a space where people knowingly shoulder the risks of being social outcasts and immediately find themselves stereotyped as broken, drug-addled, maladapted miscreants, is it any surprise that many of those same people would opt to employ sub rosa production protocols in order to avoid paying high permit costs, subjecting their sets to government inspection and otherwise opening themselves up to scrutiny?

Meanwhile, above ground, adult companies that can afford to do so will start shooting in South America, Europe, and other places where entities like OSHA are going to find they don’t have a whole lot of authority. Smart companies will restructure such that their American corporation is simply purchasing and licensing content from a foreign entity that actually shoots the content, so as to avoid liability that might attach due to their company still being incorporated/located in the U.S. Still others will renounce the U.S. market other than as a market in which to sell their wares, relocating their operations overseas, seeking both tax havens and laxer regulatory environments.

So let me be the first to say: “Welcome back underground, adult entertainment industry!”

I know it has been a while since you last called this place home, so if you need a refresher on how to operate in this environment, representatives from the Sinaloa Cartel are in the Casanova Ballroom as I speak, holding a highly informative seminar on the do’s and don’ts of money laundering! 

About Coleen Singer:
Coleen Singer (@ColeenSinger) is a writer, photographer, film editor and all-around geeky gal at Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen), where she often waxes eloquent about sex, porn, sex toys, censorship, the literary and pandering evils of Fifty Shades of Grey and other topics not likely to be found on the Pulitzer Prize shortlist. She is also the editor and curator of EroticScribes.com. When she is not doing all of the above, Singer is an amateur stock-car racer and enjoys modifying vintage 1970s cars for the racetrack. Oh, she also likes porn.

Visit Coleen at Sssh.com for more sex news, commentary and hot entertainment for women and couples!