scott271 wrote:They're paying the performers to do a job not to enjoy themselves.
You're missing this from two different angles, I suggest.
First: Yes, they're paying the performers to do a job. But the job definitely involves the performers enjoying themselves. If they don't enjoy themselves, it will be really shitty porn, and surely the producers know that. When the performers enjoy themselves (broadly defined, to include even very rough treatment when it's genuinely consensual), so will their fans, which leads to money for producers and performers.
Second: Apart from the diminution in my enjoyment of a scene when the performers' enjoyment is diminished, there's my own selfish desire not to look at the damned things. Porn isn't real life, from the consumers' point of view. It's fantasy, for us. I don't want porn directors reminding me that I ought to wear a glove IRL; I don't need that; I find that insulting and patronizing. I don't buy these for sex education. In my sexual fantasies, I want to be as free of reminders of STDs as I am free of reminders that I have to pay next month's rent. So again: Why would I pay to watch a fantasy which includes something that
affirmatively turns me off and that makes me think about awful diseases? Answer:
I won't, if there is any other alternative. (And there always is, with porn and the internet.)
I don't mean to be cavalier about performers' safety, and I certainly hope they, and the producers who hire them, aren't either. Yes, STDs are a real and serious threat, one which scales with frequency of new partners. And yes, HIV/AIDS and other STDs can be awful, even fatal, diseases. I'm pro-glove in real life unless one's in a circumstance in which there are other effective means of STD prevention in place.
But condoms aren't risk free, either for STD prevention or birth control. And heck, the most newly famous STD, the Zika virus, can also be transmitted by mosquito bites, meaning that abstinence isn't even sufficient to eliminate all STD risks. The way you handle risks is to eliminate or at least mitigate those that can be eliminated or mitigated without cost; then you do a cost-benefit analysis in order to decide whether the remaining risk is acceptable (which varies from person to person and time to time).
Producers and performers alike, and everyone who makes money from the industry, have very high incentives -- both financial and safety-focused incentives alike -- to
mitigate STD risks, but they can never eliminate them. I don't know one way or the other whether the producers making porn for LP do or don't require contemporaneous STD testing or not, but they certainly have long-term self-interested reasons to do so, just as the performers have long-term self-interested reasons to submit to that, and to prefer (or perhaps insist upon) working with such producers. And from the producers' and performers' joint standpoint, they have strong incentives to find and use other means of STD prevention
other than condoms.
EDIT: This isn't a new issue. I'm ripping some legacy DVDs to mp4 files tonight, and I just noticed this on a credits-crawl from 2006: "Diabolic is proud to inform our viewers that all performers appearing in this video have been medically tested and have shown proof that they are free of sexually transmitted diseases. Diabolic encourages our viewers to practice safe sex."