L.A.'s Insane War on the Porn Industry

Requiring adult film stars to wear condoms is bad for business-and for pleasure.

OK boys, strap on your rubbers, it's raining nonsense.

The Los Angeles City Council voted 9-1 to require male porn actors to wrap their rascals and wear condoms when they're shooting. And when they're filming.

The move is being closely watched by other filth hamlets looking to "protect" their citizenry from disease, pregnancy, and profit, and will ultimately force this long-standing pillar of entertainment away from L.A.'s safe and welcoming bosom.

Pornography is not real life. It's neither instructional nor realistic and neither end has ever been the purpose of good buggery videos. Porn is supposed to transport you to a naughty, secret garden where your privates are free to do as they wish in the confines of your own sinful clutches. You should be free from moral distraction when you've got a fistful of the one you love.

Seeing a bratwurst wrapped in red latex? It's fine for a public service announcement in the food-preparation industry, but it's a real mood killer when you've taken matters into your own hands. The last thing you want to think about (other than gangrenous dying kittens) is how Indiana Bones is safe from Ginger Lynn's diseased temple of poon. It kills the moment! Porn actors are generously endowed, ready at the drop of a kumquat, with pristine, chancre-free knobs and buttons. A condom screams disease. Worse still, it triggers the evolutionary mechanism for disgust, and I don't know if you've tried rolling in the hay while sniffing bad lunchmeat, but it blocks your business from further arousal.

Worse than the emotional scars and misfirings of your Speedo's contents, the lucrative adult industry will find a home away from the hubris-and-hibiscus-scented streets of L.A., and maybe that's why the only dissenting vote came from San Fernando Valley councilman Michael Englander. Given that the valley is the epicenter of the industry, Englander probably has a few turns as a fluffer on his resume for all we know.

No judgments! The porn industry has treated the Valley and greater L.A. well for decades—lube sales alone have funded many an after-school program in Van Nuys. For a city with an ongoing budget deficit and a pension crisis that will make Deep Throat look like a Disney movie, I wouldn't be in a rush to chase out of one of Los Angeles' longest-lasting success stories.

If destroying fantasy, generating disgust, and killing jobs (and payroll taxes!) weren't reasons enough to rethink the ban, chew on this: Requiring condoms on male adult performers may well create a false sense of health and safety. Latter-day Long Dong Silvers will be perceived as having cleaner wieners and they'll then go out and ring the bells of whomever will have them when they're off duty (unless the city amends the ordinance requiring said studs to register their weapons whenever they're in use, on or off set). That will conceivably spread hepatitis A through Z; herpes simplex, complex, and multiplex; and worse to a number of falsely lulled receptacles.

The condom nonsense is an example of the hostile business environment that consumes the great state of California like a mega-dose of chlamydia. It is a worthless distraction that will never have the intended effect of sterilizing an industry that already has every reason to keep its participants' naughty bits clean enough to eat off of. If actors do wear state-mandated prophylactics, porn sales will suffer, and jobs will be lost. And just what do you think idled porn stars, too broke to buy rubbers by the barrel full, are going to do to while away the dull, boring hours between collecting unemployment checks?

Kennedy is host of 98.7 FM's Music in the Morning in Los Angeles and has an emotional allergy to latex.