Actors making pornographic movies in Los Angeles will be required to use condoms while filming, under a new law signed by the city mayor.

The new regulation has been welcomed by health officials but pornography industry leaders say it could force them to abandon the city.

LA’s San Fernando Valley is considered the capital of the multibillion-dollar US adult film industry.

Correspondents say it is not yet clear how the new law will be enforced.

The LA-based Aids Healthcare Foundation welcomed the move saying it was crucial in protecting adult film actors from HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The foundation, which has campaigned for the measure for six years, said it would now seek similar condom requirement elsewhere in the US.

“The city of Los Angeles has done the right thing. They’ve done the right thing for the performers,” said foundation president Michael Weinstein.

He said his group would also be vigilant in keeping track of where porn producers might move to.

Several of the industry’s biggest adult filmmakers have said they might consider moving just outside city boundaries.

An article up at Salon today invalidates this, with prominent women within the ‘community’, including women described as ‘sex educators’ only now (after almost a decade in one woman’s case) standing up and talking about the abuse they experienced within the ‘scene’.

[Maggie Mayhem,] 27-year-old sex educator and fetish model has never before publicly shared the story of her sexual assault, but the purpose of this evening’s event, a “consent culture” fundraiser, is so that she can start telling it, again and again. Her mission, along with fellow activist and sex worker Kitty Stryker, is to raise awareness about what they say is widespread abuse within the BDSM community and a tendency for players to either turn a blind eye or actively cover it up. They’ve developed a workshop meant to combat the problem and want to take it on the road.

We’re talking about real abuse here, not the “consensual non-consent” that the scene is built around, as Mayhem’s story of her first assault makes clear. As an 18-year-old freshmen and member of a kinky student club at the University of California, Berkeley, Mayhem helped raise money to bring a prominent BDSM educator to campus for a workshop. Afterward, he singled her out for a private “play date” and she was flattered. “I thought this was the best person I could start to learn from,” she says.

The scene that they negotiated was “fantastic,” Mayhem says, but then things took a turn. “I found myself tied up and unable to get away when that individual decided that he was going to have sex with me,” she says, tears welling in her eyes, “even though we’d specifically negotiated against it, even though I was saying that it needed to stop, and even though he was not wearing a condom at the time.”

For the most part, she kept the experience to herself, but on the rare occasions when she did tell people in the community about it, she says, “I got one response … which was people saying [things like], ‘I don’t do drama. This is a respected person in the community. I’m very sorry that you had a miscommunication during your scene that made it not very fun for you, but I don’t want to hear about it.’”

As she pushed deeper into the scene, trying to put this experience behind her, she had countless more encounters where her boundaries were blatantly ignored. As she gained experience, she started to talk more confidently and openly about these experiences – but, again, she got the “I don’t do drama” line. At the same time, she realized that such abuse was prevalent: “It started to look more like a systemic issue,” she says. As Stryker wrote last year in an essay for Good Vibrations magazine, ” I have yet to meet a female submissive who hasn’t had some sort of sexual assault happen to her.”

I never found the whole ‘culture of consent’ thing convincing, and suspected it was more about protecting male sadists from outside interference than anything else, and that goes double for a BDSM porn set. The article also covers how women feel under pressure not to use their safe words:

The problem spans from unwanted overtures to rape, say Mayhem and Stryker. “When I start to think of the number of times I have been cajoled, pressured, or forced into sex that I did not want when I came into ‘the BDSM community’, I can’t actually count them,” Stryker wrote in Good Vibrations’ magazine. “As I reflected on the number of times I’ve … been pressured into a situation where saying ‘no’ was either not respected or not an option, or said that I did not want a certain kind of toy used on me which was then used, I’m kind of horrified.”

Beyond black-and-white cases of rape, there is a cultural disdain for safe words, they say. “When I was a submissive,” says Stryker, now a dominant in both her personal and professional life, “I felt the pressure to not safe word because I felt like that made you a bad submissive.” That’s because she witnessed submissives who used their safe word being criticized as “difficult.” At the “consent culture” event, Stryker asks the audience, “Is it the fault of the submissive who didn’t safe word when they should have or is it the fault of the dominant who didn’t notice that their submissive didn’t safe word [when they should have] or is it the fault, as I think it is, of the community that makes it complicated?”

So, within this so-called ‘culture of consent’ women are under constant pressure and bullying to allow their boundaries to be crossed, and to not complain about it afterwards, regardless of how abusive or traumatising they found it.

The pressure on women within the ‘scene’ to keep quiet may be higher than that on those outside it, as they risk making their ‘community’** look bad to the outside world. Men within the BDSM ‘scene’ will know this and use it to their advantage, it may be even be easier for men within the ‘scene’ to be abusive, because they have a whole ‘community’ shoring up the illusion of ‘safety’.

Also, as women who are seen to actively choose a ‘deviant’ lifestyle (how genuinely free any such choice is under patriarchy is a question for another blog post), they are unlikely to get much sympathy or help from the mainstream, male dominated world – not that many women do, but if very few women manage to be, in Andrea Dworkin’s words, ‘clean enough’ to be raped (as opposed to being dumb sluts who asked for it and wanted it really), then no woman who is part of the BDSM ‘scene’ ever will be.

We know the kind of pressure women are put under on a porn set, BDSM porn is often held up as ‘different’ because of BDSM’s so-called ‘culture of consent’. The evidence of the Salon article suggests there is exactly the same kind of pressure on women within the ‘scene’ as there is outside it – to conform, to do what you’re told, to keep quiet about abuse – so why should we believe a porn set (where there is the extra pressure of the need to perform in order to get paid) is any different?

The ‘counter culture’ of the BDSM ‘scene’ looks exactly the same as the male dominated mainstream. It engages in exactly the same victim blaming (and, as in the male dominated mainstream, it uses a woman to do the victim blaming):

One critic, Janet Hardy[***], author of several popular BDSM books, including “The New Bottoming Book,” tells me, “My general thoughts are that it is tremendously important to build a safe word culture but that bottoms have to hold up their share of that responsibility,” she says. “A bottom who refuses to safeword when he or she has actually withdrawn consent has just turned me into a rapist or assailant without my consent, and that is not OK.”

Hardy, co-author of the bible on polyamory, “The Ethical Slut,” doesn’t deny that sexual assault is a problem in the community, but she takes issue with arguments about the social pressure to not safeword. It has “some of the flavor of the kind of victimhood that we see from some second wave feminists,” she says, “and I don’t want to get too deep into this because I’m going to get myself into trouble, but you know where I’m going with this.”

There is a distinct ‘what about the poor men’ flavour to this victim blaming, even if it’s a woman casting herself as an ‘accidental’ rapist who is the real victim here – how can the poor men avoid being rapists if women don’t take responsibility for not being raped, and ‘refuse’ to make it clear that they are being raped?

Hardy is also going for a shaming and silencing approach, by comparing the women who do speak out to “some second wave feminists”, ie anyone who speaks out can be ridiculed as in some way ‘anti-sex’.

The simple fact of the matter is that men within the BDSM ‘community’ are exactly the same as the men outside it, they will do whatever they think they can get away with, then blame the woman herself for not saying ‘no’ clearly enough; and if a man is really clever, he’ll attack the woman he raped for ‘miscommunicating’ and ‘forcing’ him to be a rapist.

I imagine these women will take a massive amount of abuse from within their so-called ‘community’ for speaking out, we should be grateful to them and applaud them for having the courage to do so.

* Let’s put aside for the moment that erotising dominance, submission and violence is profoundly anti-feminist in and of itself, and how condescending the ‘vanilla’ label is, implying that women outside the BDSM ‘scene’ are unable and unwilling to actively negotiate sexual activity and are being raped without even knowing it.

** The biggest mistake any woman can make is to think she is part of any genuine community with men, where her interests will be weighted equally with those of men. This goes for any type of community, sexual, religious, cultural, political. The men (and most of the women, who will stand by the men to protect their own position within the community) will conspire together to cover up the abuse of women and children, and any dissenters will be cast out.

*** I read this amusing description of Janet Hardy recently:

“Janet Hardy, famous among neanderthal kinksters for her vanity press, submits an essay about how she’s been living as a biological woman in a relationship with one biological man for a good long while and why that’s queer. Longtime followers of the kink community’s vanity publishing will recall that she did something similar when she wrote The Ethical Slut and went on to live the very same monogamous, heterosexual, suburban life described above. If Janet Hardy has taught us anything it’s that all it takes to be queer and polyamorous is to be a straight monogamous person.”

Pornography was always available for those who sought it out; the difference is that in the 21st century pornography is as ubiquitous as religion once was. Its sadomasochistic stock in trade is still the same. No sexual revolution will happen until the role of penetration as a mechanism of domination is obliterated, until it makes no sense to snarl at anyone: “Get fucked”, until “fucked” does not mean “ruined”.

From Germaine Greer’s review of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala

MPs will debate a controversial bill [today] calling for teenage girls to be given lessons in sexual abstinence.

The bill, proposed by Nadine Dorries, the Conservative MP for Mid Bedfordshire, would require schools to offer extra sex education classes to girls aged 13 to 16 and for these lessons to include advice on “the benefits of abstinence”.

[...]

The bill has elicited considerable criticism from politicians in all three of the main political parties.

Dan Rogerson, co-chair of the Lib Dems education and family backbench committee and an MP for North Cornwall, said the bill would result in girls being given a “dire warning about their future prospects”.

“To single out girls is at best unhelpful and at worst damaging,” he said. He said boys and girls needed to be given high quality advice on all aspects of relationships.

Niki Molnar, chairman of Conservative Women, which has at least 4,000 members, said boys needed to be included in classes on sex and relationships to ensure that they learned to respect women.

[...]

The British Humanist Association (BHA) said the bill had so far been supported predominantly by socially conservative Christians and had little chance of succeeding.

However, Naomi Phillips, head of public affairs at the BHA, said it was “yet another attempt by a lobby on the religious right to promote and impose on others, a narrow, unshared and potentially damaging perspective regarding sex, sexual health and abortion rights”.

“All children and young people have a right to high quality, comprehensive and objective sex and relationships education in all schools, including ‘faith’ schools, which would and should equip young people – both boys and girls – with the information and skills to say no to sexual activity if that is what they choose.”

Dorries has also campaigned to reduce the time during a pregnancy when an abortion can take place from 24 to 21 weeks.

Darinka Aleksic, campaign co-ordinator for Abortion Rights, said the bill served to further Dorries’ “moral agenda, which involves restricting abortion and teaching teenage girls that they, unlike boys, must save themselves for marriage”.

Full article here.

Row for Freedom – the team of five women who are rowing the Atlantic in order to raise money for ECPAT UK – have moved into fifth place in what has been described as ‘the world’s toughest rowing race’.

The women, none of whom had experience of rowing at sea before, have made amazing progress since departing from the Canary Islands at the beginning of December, and now have less than 500 miles remaining.

After more than a month on the ocean, battling fatigue, 30ft waves and seasickness, Row for Freedom looks on target to set two new world records – the fastest crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by an all-female crew and the first five woman team to row any ocean in the world – helping to raise the profile of ECPAT UK and our work on child trafficking.

Out of 17 teams that entered the race, only 11 remain – with others having to withdraw or be rescued due to difficulties.

Nonetheless, the Row for Freedom team are determined to raise awareness of the plight of child victims of trafficking. In particular, they want to garner support for ECPAT UK’s campaign call for a system of guardianship for child victims.

Read more about it on ECPAT UK’s website and their Facebook campaigns page, and please consider donating to this cause if you can.

WARNING, CONTAINS CONTENT THAT MAY BE TRIGGERING OR OTHERWISE TRAUMATISING

Obviously, it is also not safe for work.

I think it’s important to show this video, as it shows the ‘working’ conditions in the mainstream of the LA porn industry. This is not something hidden away where nobody knows about it, this is the norm of a massive global industry producing the mainstream of heterosexual pornography. Sex industry advocates like to pretend that it’s just the occasional ‘bad apple’, and any way, any abuse that does occur is no different to any other workplace exploitation, this video shows that it isn’t.

It also needs to be emphasised that, with out such abusive ‘work place’ conditions, it would be impossible to make mainstream heterosexual pornography. Such pornography is the record of abuse, the fact that the woman gets paid for it at the end is irrelevant.

We do not see the torture inflicted on one girl for trying to flee her captors, but we see the tears of her fellow slaves forced to watch. We see the iron bar tossed on to the cellar floor when the punishment is over, and we know what has happened.

The Whistleblower spares you little. It is a film about that most depraved of crimes: trafficking women for enslaved sex, rape and even murder.

As a dramatised portrayal of reality, however, The Whistleblower is “a day at the beach compared to what happened in real life”, says its director, Larysa Kondracki. “We show what is just about permissible to show. We couldn’t possibly include the three-week desensitisation period, when they burn the girls in particular places. We couldn’t really capture the hopelessness of life these women are subjected to.”

Starring Rachel Weisz, The Whistleblower, released tomorrow on DVD, is the most searing drama-documentary of recent years and has won many prizes. But more important than the accolades is that everything in the film is true. The film deals with enslavement and rape in Bosnia, not during wartime 20 years ago but during the peace. Worse, not only were the enslaved women’s “clients” soldiers and police officers – so too were the traffickers, protected at the top of the United Nations operation in Bosnia.

[...]

Speaking to the Observer last week, [former peacekeeper] Bolkovac said: “The thing that stood out about these cases in Bosnia, and cases that have been reported in other [UN] mission areas, is … that police and humanitarian workers were frequently involved in not only the facilitation of forced sexual abuse, and the use of children and young women in brothels, but in many instances became involved in the trade by racketeering, bribery and outright falsifying of documents as part of a broader criminal syndicate.”

Bolkovac volunteered for Bosnia’s peacekeeping force in the late 1990s, working on domestic abuse cases, which brought her into contact with the leading UN officer for gender issues, Madeleine Rees, played by Vanessa Redgrave in the film.

“I went to work with large numbers of women who had been the victims of rape during the war,” said Rees. “But I ended up working as much with women who were being trafficked and raped by soldiers and police officers sent to keep the peace.” Bolkovac uncovered a network of brothels and bars at which kidnapped women were enslaved to “service” peacekeepers. “This was a difficult time in my life,” said Bolkovac. “Not being able to know who to trust when you are working with police officers and UN officials … It was clear that the protection of the ‘good old boys’ club’ was a first priority.”

[...]

“Countries get rated by the US Trafficking in Persons report on their records in dealing with trafficking,” said Rees, “for which you need to show results. If you don’t prosecute or repatriate enough people, your rating is downgraded, thereby your financial support. So when there were raids, the girls would be shipped home to Ukraine or wherever, probably to be retrafficked. It was a repatriation factory, run by people who had an anti-immigration approach, and didn’t want women to try to get into western Europe – no focus on the system or rights of the women. Our approach, by contrast, was slow and beginning to work, so it had to be killed off.”

Full article here.

Endangered Bodies is a global and local initiative to fight the culture of body anxiety, body hatred and fear that is pervading all parts of our society.

This month we are starting a campaign to expose the role of the diet industry in de-stabilising women and girls’ appetites and desires. We believe that eating disorders and the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ are merely more visible extremes of a much bigger, everyday phenomena: that we are accepting fear and hatred of our own bodies like gravity, that we are accepting ‘I am not good enough’ as a fact.

In the past weeks we have once again been swamped with headlines announcing an obesity crisis and we have seen news stories with the message that children may be taken away from their parents if the kids’ BMIs are deemed offensive or threatening. This ‘crisis’ is constructed from research funded by the industries that can make money from it, such as pharmaceutical and diet industries.

THESE INDUSTRIES ARE MAKING OUR BODIES THEIR BUSINESS

The name ‘porcupine’ comes from the phrase “porn is a prickly issue”, which I think is brilliant and inventive! If you are on Facebook, go and like them; this is an important campaign, as young people particularly (and young men especially) are very likely to feel isolated and afraid of social ostracism if they speak up about there concerns over pornography. Peer pressure is so strong at that age, and as Porcupine’s accompanying website Pleasure Vs Profit says, “the porn industry manipulates a natural curiosity about sex to sell a narrow, joyless and harmful version of sexuality.” Young people really, urgently need and deserve better.