LOS ANGELES — Adult performer Lorelei Lee explains today in Cosmopolitan.com why mandating condoms in porn productions won't work.
Lee has been a staunch advocate against several legislative proposals that would regulate adult filmmaking in California, and currently she is campaigning against a 2016 ballot initiative that would “essentially create a ban on the sale of non-condom pornography throughout California.”
The Cosmopolitan piece, titled “Why I Lobbied Against Requiring Condoms in Porn,” offers her stance why the initiative, as well as others backed by its sponsor, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, ignores how sex workers feel about mandatory usage of prophylactics during shoots.
“Condoms break, condoms cause chafing. Under those conditions, that can create an abrasion that can increase your risk of STI transmission,” she wrote in her essay. “A condom is not an ideal tool for the work that we're doing.
“Right now performers are the only ones who know how condoms work on set. No one who makes these laws is coming to our sets and watching what happens.”
Lee, a veteran of the adult film industry now going into her 15th year, recently received industry kudos for her tireless efforts in the fight against mandatory condom legislation, which included attending and speaking at several hearings in Sacramento. In January, at the FSC Awards in conjunction with industry trade conference XBIZ 360, Lee received the FSC’s Woman of the Year award for those efforts.
In the Cosmopolitan essay, Lee said that she will continue the fight against regulatory measures, such as the California Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act, that put a crimp on porn production.
If enacted, that law “would create the potential for anyone to bring a lawsuit just based on seeing a porn film without seeing a condom used in it,” she wrote.
“It's so broad and so horrifying. What I'm really scared of is that people are so afraid to talk about porn, they're so afraid to think about the work we do as actual work, that they'll ignore what's happening,” she wrote. “We're all trying to work together to fight against these kinds of laws and create some public awareness.”