So, now the most recent hullabaloo as regards the Adult Entertainment Industry. For a long long while now the industry has been decrying the need to use condoms when filming. The industry insists that condoms would harm the "fantasy" that the films hope to create.
ABC News reported on the issue:
Jules Jordan of Jules Jordan Video has worked his way from being a porn store clerk to having his own studio and he has a strict no-condom policy.
"Testing's a must for everyone in the industry and that is how I can back up my stance on no condoms. I don't think the fans want to see condoms on film, because the fans are coming to see fantasy and condoms are not usually part of fantasy," Jordan said.
And the modern special effects that would be able to get rid of the condoms on screen are outside the budgets that the movies usually have. But the industry claims that it's in a good place for the prevention of a major outbreak. After an outbreak in 2004, the industry changed its policies and briefly instituted an all-condom policy - now, the quick test that can detect HIV 2 weeks after contraction is supposedly responsible for stopping "all spread of HIV in the adult entertainment industry in the last four years."
But a new outbreak has the industry suddenly nervous:
An actress who works in Southern California's pornography industry has tested positive for HIV, renewing county and state health officials' concerns that the adult entertainment industry lacks sufficient safety measures to prevent the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases...
Los Angeles County has been receiving reports from the clinic of 60 to 80 new cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea a month among adult performers, Fielding said.
That rate of chlamydia and gonnorhea is terrifying.
That creation of fantasy is nothing new - and it is nothing new for people to put up barriers to whatever methods people wish to take to create that fantastic world. But AIDS is more than a prudish restriction for the protection of public morals - like the restriction of women in the Elizabethan Theater. And I wonder if the adult entertainment industry counts itself as being art. I, at least, don't consider it art - but there could be some that do.
Modern modeling skirts very close to that sneaky barrier between sexualized art and sex. A documentary about the modern modeling industry tries to display that secretive world for the first time - unlike the adult entertainment industry, which does have some regulation, the modeling industry has much, much less.
A 16-year-old model is on a photo shoot in Paris. She has very little experience of modelling and is unaccompanied by her agency or parents. She leaves the studio to go to the bathroom and meets the photographer - "a very, very famous photographer, probably one of the world's top names", according to Ziff - in the hallway. He starts fiddling with her clothes. "But you're used to this," says Ziff. "People touch you all the time. Your collar, or your breasts. It's not strange to be handled like that." Then suddenly he puts his hands between her legs and sexually assaults her. "She has no experience of boys, she hasn't even been kissed," says Ziff. "She was so shocked she just stood there and didn't say anything. He just looked at her and walked away and they did the rest of the shoot. And she never told anyone."
The documentary is unique - they did a lot of sneaking video cameras into modeling shows, and were sometimes emphatically shown the door. The documentary, called Picture Me, exposes an industry that desperately needs some regulation - but art - Art if you prefer to make it fancy, uses the artistic privilege to create an alternate universe. Where the line is drawn is really, really important.
This industry is booming and continue to grow in many parts of the world. It really affects many people lives. I have read a story about a sexy model who use elisa test kits just to identify whether she has HIV. The result is positive and she started to became depressed.
ReplyDeleteThat is the result and impact of that kind of industry.