Condom Referendum: Los Angeles 2012 (17 NOV. 2012)

         Cheers for the voters of Los Angeles County! Two cheers for their approving 2012 County Measure B, the initiative requiring condoms in pornographic videos shot in LA County!

         Not three cheers: the law raises serious questions on free speech and the limits of government power, topics about which you will hear plenty because the condom requirement is opposed by the porn industry. (An industry I will not knock: the big-time spending that keeps America out of another Great Depression includes the great three p’s of Politics, Pot, and Porn.) Two cheers, though: since the law moves in positive directions on crucial issues of public health and toward reasonable resolution — not solution but messily political, tolerable resolution — of the profoundly dangerous issue of abortion.

         For me, the strongest objection to Measure B is that it requires artists, or at least communicators, to propagandize in support of policy endorsed by the State: in this case “the State” in its very minor incarnation of the County of Los Angeles. I’m a life-member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and even more than to censorship I object to requiring people to participate in propaganda. Still, the message to be propagated by Measure B is important enough that I support the idea for professional pornography shot in the LA area and would support similar laws throughout the porn-producing and porn-consuming world (which I guess is most places on Earth populated by humans).

         As the anti-Measure B forces will explain vigorously and at length, sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) aren’t a major issue with porn performers: porn actors know who their fellow cast members at least by name and have probably checked out their filmographies on the web — and porn professionals get tested regularly for STDs.

         Sexually-transmitted diseases are, however, major issues outside of pornography.

         AIDS the last couple of decades has gotten a lot of attention — along with such other sexually-charged, politicized diseases as breast and prostrate cancer — but there are other STDs.

         During the 1964 summer I worked for Illinois Public Health — and 1964 was in the late 1950s in terms of American sexuality — there was no big public announcement, but the word went around the lab I worked in that gonorrhea was pretty much endemic in the State of Illinois and that the State’s public health concentration — in what was called “venereal disease” at the time — would be on following up on cases of syphilis before syphilis became endemic.

         Gonorrhea is a bothersome disease, and one becoming antibiotic resistant. Syphilis can be deadly. And syphilis is on the rise again — especially in the Developing World — and the spread of syphilis, and STDs generally, can be reduced by widespread use of condoms.

         Widespread condom use also decreases unwanted pregnancies.

         My words here are “reduced” and “decreases,” and for the general point it’s irrelevant that condoms aren’t 100% effective. Few things are. In terms of public health, significant reduction is just fine. In terms of individuals — your kids for example — well, anything worth doing is worth taking some risks to do, and a whole lot of people, obviously, think sex is worth doing. So if you’re not out there campaigning against skydiving or high school football or collegiate boxing, don’t speak out too vociferously about the failure rate of condoms.

The contribution of unprotected sex to disturbingly high rates of abortion is profoundly important because a fair number of people, including powerful and influential people, judge abortion to be a variety of murder. Now add to that conclusion the observation that unwanted pregnancies are the major cause of abortion, and note further that sexually mature, uncastrated and unspayed humans will “to it” (copulate) whatever the laws may happen to be (Measure for Measure 2.1).

         The logic of seeing abortion as murder, or close to murder, leads to seeing widespread abortion as the moral equivalent of mass murder, a conclusion that justifies extreme measures “to stop the slaughter.”

         If it is to the shame of the Allies in World War II that they didn’t bomb the Nazi death camps — and it is — then what is to be said about those who would compromise on abortion in our time? Should we not, instead, praise those who bomb abortion clinics.

Get the point? And to that point add back that epidemic AIDS is a continuing threat in Africa and residual AIDS is still an incipient threat in the developed world. Less horrific STDs are a also significant issue of public health, and there is a long and justified tradition of allowing even extreme restrictions of individual freedom — e.g., quarantine for infectious diseases — when necessary to protect public health.

         So: (1) STDs threaten public health. And (2) The abortion rate is too high, period, and as a philosophically vexed and festering political issue — a morally charged issue with deep roots and radical implications — abortion is a constant threat to social peace.

         Both threats can be reduced, and as a practical matter harm reduction and risk reduction are the best we can do, and condoms are useful for reducing STDs and reducing unwanted pregnancies.

         Condoms also give sexually mature human males control over our reproduction and propagandizing for the use of condoms reminds the many occasionally forgetful dick-heads out there that contraception is (also) a male responsibility.

         So it is very important to encourage condom usage, and one way to encourage using condoms is to make it cool and, if possible, just “the way things are done” (in this case, many kinds of sex).

         Images of condoms on porn stars — and maybe some dialog — can get across that message. Real men, the message goes, can get it up and keep it up with a condom on. Real women can get their men up and keep them up and sometimes help get that condom on in interesting and really sexy ways. Real women put out for real men, i.e., real men wearing condoms.

And if there’s an “ageist” message as well — impotent old men avoid condoms, and old couples needn’t bother — well, this old man would be willing to put up with that. (Old farts still control the government and economy so we can be magnanimous about some teasing [and there’s money for rich old men investing in Viagra/Trojan cross-marketing …].)

         I’d also recommend condom pushing with amateur porn. If exhibitionists with decent bodies and delusions of talent want to upload to a porn site, they can demonstrate that whatever weird-ass sh*t they’re doing won’t spread a disease or get someone pregnant who doesn’t want to be pregnant.

Regulating amateur film-making is even more problematic than with the pros, but I would hope that Measure B would pressure porn sites to make clear that every medium has rules for “Standards and Practices” and that responsible pornos — classy, professional looking pornos — feature guys with condoms.

         “Because that’s the way it’s done.” That’s the message you want: condoms should become fashionable and then unremarkable, like not spitting on the floor, or even in a spittoon.

         Or at least that’s the way it should be done until STDs go the way of smallpox and polio and until we get effective contraception for males and females rather more elegant that rubbers.

         Until people are fertile only when they desire to reproduce, until the human population is a whole lot healthier than we are today — until then, guys, “Wrap that Willy!”

         So two cheers to the good voters of LA County for drafting porn stars as role models for condom use.

         Maybe just one cheer: the whole celebrity “role model” idea is bad. But make that one rousing cheer: slowing the spread of STDs, reducing the number of abortions, and teaching guys to act responsibly overbalances a lot of bad.

Perrier, Pubes, Condoms, Morēs, & Morality (10 Feb. 2013)

"Manners Are Small Morals"

             I didn't put "spittoons" in my title here, because it's a somewhat long word and a word that might in itself turn away some readers; also, in combination with "pubes," it might attract readers for a different kind of writing than this essay.

            I want to start out with spittoons, though, and the fact that you probably have never seen one outside a Western.

            I'm old enough to remember spittoons in a gym locker-room in Chicago in the 1950s, and a friend of my youth tells me he saw some as recently as the 1970s: in an old-fashioned Chicago pool hall. He wasn't sure if the 1970s spittoons were actually used, or were just traditional decor. The ones in the locker-room were used — and I won't go into details about how I'm sure of that. (Hint: Emptying them was obviously not something the janitors like to do.)

            What's significant here is that I won't go into details because the details disgust me and very likely would disgust you, even a macho guy "you." Within a century or so, spittoons have gone from a sign of increased civilization — a way to avoid spitting on the street — to just gross.

            Part of that change was motivated by concerns for health and hygiene, and enforcement of health regulations, but mostly it was a change in "morés," in social standards and customs.

            I've written before about the power of fads and fashion, and I'm going to reinforce that idea here, but looking more at the up-side.    Especially as multiple-antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis becomes an increasing health hazard, it becomes increasingly a good thing that most Americans no longer casually spit on the street, or even in spittoons — and, mostly, that change in behavior came from a change in morés, in customs, social standards, "manners."

            A couple more items of evidence: more in terms of what people do than what they don't do, with continuing emphasis on guy behavior but bringing in (very crucially) you gals.

            While having my car serviced in a recall, I went into the Parts Department to check out costs for installing fog lights and noticed that they had a refrigerated display with beverages to purchase. So far so familiar: the gas stations I grew up with often had Coca Cola machines. However, the featured item in this Parts Department in 2013 was Perrier Water.

            Trust me, when I was growing up, guys at the gas station who wouldn't shell out a nickel for a Coke, drank the gas station water out of a hose, or (as part of the creeping socialism of the 1950s) from a water fountain. That a trucker checking out mudguards at the Parts Department might drink water from a little green bottle, and pay for the privilege, is a tribute to the power of changing fashions, and to the power of advertisers and marketers to change those fashions.

            Now, moving closer to, uh, home, let us consider the pubic hair of my title.

            I grew up with the folklore about guys' playing nasty honeymoon tricks on their friends, with the nastiest trick getting the groom drunk at his stag party, then (de)pantsing him and shaving his balls. Really, really nasty and perverse friends — the real weirdoes — would shave the guy from waist to thighs, so he'd look prepubescent (not that they'd know the word) and ridiculous when his bride saw him naked.

            As The Simpson's Nelson Muntz would say, "Ha-ha!"

            A quick check of my local porn site (which seems to be in Holland) indicates that a lot of guys have no problem with shaved balls or what may be full-body shaving, with a couple movie comedies' indicting guys' doing the pubic part by themselves to themselves — have the shaving done by a really close and trusted friend.

            And there are women who go way beyond shaving.

            Jeff Foxworthy and I don't agree on a lot of things anymore, but we do agree that if Bikini waxing is ever forced on people, Amnesty International would be sending investigators — and women pay to have it done!

            Even more weirdly and permanently people of both sexes are getting pierced and tattooed — and posting videos of themselves performing naked on the Internet. I'm talking about more or less normal, or at least non-pathological people, who are institutionalized if at all on college campuses and maybe the occasional barracks. I'm talking about people painfully marked, performing private acts to an international public, with faces visible and school colors up so identifying the performers is pretty straightforward even before The Powers That Be start buying genital-recognition software.

            Okay, I'm kidding a bit here but dead serious about how standards can change quickly and how strongly behavior can be modified: piercing, waxing, and tattooing are painful. I joked once that next would come scarification and branding, and, goll-dang, you can get it done in Los Angeles by people reviewed on Yelp!

            People are enduring serious pain in places and ways I want to think about even less than spittoons.

            These changes occurred in less than a generation, and they are major changes in individual behavior and social standards.

            So there is hope for more positive shifts.

            Smoking tobacco is already becoming rare, and chewing and spitting tobacco even rarer. With more social pressure, ashtrays can go the way of spittoons, and smoking in public the way of spitting in public.

            If fads and fashions can get guys to shave their pubes to look like a child or porn star (or gay body-builder?), you can get guys regularly and consistently into condoms when they're lucky enough to find some sex. And until there are more elegant means of birth-control and sex relatively safe from STDs, those condoms are important for public health.

            O, tempera; O, morés! indeed; but we can go with that. People don't change much — not most of us individually, definitely not humans as a species — but our behavior can change.

            Steven Pinker goes over 800 pages on The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011), showing as much as anything how terribly grossly horrible human beings can be; but he also demonstrates his point that we can do better and are doing better.

            Read Pinker on the earnest topic of decreasing violence, and note that he also discusses manners.

            We can't change much, but we can do better. Look around you and note the absence of spittoons. Watch an old movie and note how many people were smoking cigarettes then and how few now. Consider the utter weirdness of what people do to their bodies, the images they put up on porn sites — and have some hope that, among other improvements, we can reduce the number of unwanted, unplanned pregnancies — and abortions — and reduce the occurrence of sexually-transmitted diseases.


            Never get a pretty much smoking-free California (or wherever)? Never get guys to see condoms as cool? Maybe, but it's worth a try. "Manners are small morals" and some achievable changes in morés are imperatives of commonsense, responsibility, and morality.