Porn matters

Thanks to everyone inside and outside the business who has weighed in on the entry on Lara Roxx, "Let them eat HIV," both in the public comments (currently at 48, most of them substantive) and via your private emails.

I think the enormous amount of attention the HIV scare has given the porn industry in the mainstream press means something may happen in terms of government regulation. It will be determined partly by the public conversation about this issue, and I hope the conversation can be as useful and honest as the contributions to that comments thread. (I won't hold my breath.)

Some further thoughts of mine...

When I think about what the possible result could be in terms of legislation or other rules, two main characteristics of any action seem desirable:

1) It should allow pornographers and their audience the maximum possible freedom to express themselves.

2) It should be good for sex workers.

Frankly, I doubt that either one of these goals interests the general public very much. The pornographer's right to expression doesn't rank very high on the average person's list of priorities (even if buying the latest porn DVD does). But pornographers' rights do matter. To paraphrase Larry Flynt in a debate I documented for Beliefnet a while back, if they control your desires, they control you. The stakes are high.

But sex workers' rights matter, too. And the stakes for sex workers are literally life and death. It's pretty clear these two parties' rights--pornographers' and sex workers'--are in conflict. Any action, I hope, will try to strike a balance that respects both.

It has crossed my mind to do a documentary on this subject. I am imagining interviewing both sex workers and porn producers (as well as others), creating my own doc, and then releasing everything--the movie and the raw footage--with a Creative Commons license. That way, anyone who disagreed with the point of view of my doc could use the same interviews to make their own doc.

Interviewees could be free of the fear that their words were going to be twisted and used against them. Because they would have the right to use their interview, too--as well as anything else in the movie. Porn producers who fear that I am biased in favor of sex workers and against them (I am, but I believe I have the ability to be fair) would know that they could make their own "answer doc" without asking my permission to use the same footage I did.

And the folks who would be interested in remixing the footage do have access to the necessary video equipment and skills. It could be a Creative Commons project with a realistic chance of being remixed. (In contrast, nobody's done much yet with the open-source Nothing So Strange footage--I think people just don't know what to do with it. Hell, I don't know what they're supposed to do with it.)

Not that I need yet another project on my plate. I already have way too many. I'm supposed to be finishing a script polish right now that I've been procrastinating on (hi, Josh!). These are just some idle thoughts, and my blog is where I dump my idle thoughts. Lucky you.

Related here at BFW:

"Let them eat HIV"

"Sex worker story"

"Creative Commons features Nothing So Strange"