Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

The mainstream, professional, American pornography industry lives in the shadow of sexually transmitted infections. This, of course, makes sense. Performers in porn have unprotected sex all the time with up to hundreds of people a year. If, for example, a few performers were to get HIV, it could go through a massive part of the industry incredibly quickly, endangering both the lives of the performers and the viability of the industry. Accordingly, there is a strict testing regiment: a PCR DNA test every month. Unlike the antigen or antibody test, which look for, well, HIV antigens and antibodies, the PCR DNA test actually takes a sample of the patent’s genetic material and look for the presence of HIV itself, not just antigens or antibodies. That the industry requires such an extensive test shows how seriously they deal with the problem. And the results have paid off.  To quote Tracy Clark-Flory’s piece at Salon, “Since 1998, the Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation has reported five HIV cases among actors in straight porn. That’s a relatively low number, industry insiders point out, given the cosmic amount of condomless sex that has gone on in that time” Now, Clark-Flory, along with the AIDS Healthcare Foundation “are disturbed by the idea that five infections over 11 years is considered adequate.”

So, naturally, they suggest that condoms be mandated, or at least adopted, in pornographic movies. This is a pretty strange demand. Best I can tell, there’s no market demand from the viewers of porn for condoms, and even more importantly, the performers themselves really, really don’t want them. Clark-Flory even quotes some of them. This one is particularly graphic:

[A single scene amounts to] over two hours of intercourse in various positions with constant stops and starts during which male performer’s erections rise and fall, condoms frequently tear or unravel and the degree of latex abrasion on the internal membranes of female performers’ vaginas lead to micro-abrasions that make them more vulnerable to all kinds of STIs. Most condom-only female performers eventually abandon condom use, not under pressure from producers, but rather because of the constant rawness and end-on-end bacterial infections produced by countless hours of latex drag.

But because 5 people over 11 years have transmitted HIV — which considering the high HIV rates among people who even approach the sexual activity of porn performers is absurdly low — the admittedly feminist and pro-liberation Clark-Flory thinks there’s justification to mandate condom usage despite the fact that almost none of the stakeholders (or at least no stakeholders she could quote) want them. She thinks that “ethical” porn consumers should demand something that no one wants!

If you allow me to reference some Eastern European Lacanians, well, just one Eastern European Lacanian, I think Flory-Clark’s advocacy for condom usage in straight porn, which she seems to think is just such an obvious idea — neigh, an “ethical” one — to support, is almost perfectly indicative of how hedonism, tolerance and freedom has created its own restrictive structures that, in classic Zizekian fashion are still incredibly limiting, not to mention insidious. To quote the Slovene himself:

Is this not the attitude of the hedonistic Last Man? Everything is permitted, you can enjoy everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. (This is also Last Man’s revolution — “revolution without revolution.”) Is this not one of the two versions of Lacan’s anti-Dostoyevski motto “If God doesn’t exist, everything is prohibited”? (1) God is dead, we live in a permissive universe, you should strive for pleasures and happiness — but, in order to have a life full of happiness and pleasures, you should avoid dangerous excesses, so everything is prohibited if it is not deprived of its substance; (2) If God is dead, superego enjoins you to enjoy, but every determinate enjoyment is already a betrayal of the unconditional one, so it should be prohibited. The nutritive version of this is to enjoy directly the Thing Itself: why bother with coffee? Inject caffeine directly into your blood! Why bother with sensual perceptions and excitations by external reality? Take drugs which directly affect your brain! – And if there is God, then everything is permitted — to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will; clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any “merely human” constraints and considerations (as in Stalinism, where the reference to the big Other of historical Necessity justifies absolute ruthlessness).

Today’s hedonism combines pleasure with constraint — it is no longer the old notion of the “right measure” between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-Hegelian immediate coincidence of the opposites: action and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine. The ultimate example of it is arguably a chocolate laxative, available in the US, with the paradoxical injunction “Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!”, i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. Do we not find here a weird version of Wagner’s famous “Only the spear which caused the wound can heal it” from Parsifal? And is not a negative proof of the hegemony of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking…) is emerging as the main danger? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today’s “biopolitics.” Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the paradox of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is “safe sex” — a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying “Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?”. The ultimate goal would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent “opium without opium”: no wonder marijuana is so popular among liberals who want to legalize it — it already IS a kind of “opium without opium.”

I’m not familiar enough with the safe-sex corpus to really comment on in authoritatively, but in my own experience (health classes and so forth), the near-obsessive focus on the “safe” part of safe sex always struck me as slightly dishonest, and almost puritan in its obsession with hygiene and control. I should not that it’s particularly interesting that Clark-Flory who wrote a piece entitled “In Defense of Casual Sex” is the one recapitulating this all-encompassing focus on health and safety in sexual activity. It’s ethical!