Forbes: Making porn stars wear condoms will lead to more AIDS

Freakonomics, what hast thou wrought? Evidently, now anyone with a half-baked, counter-intuitive proposal can get a platform in the mainstream media. 

This week, as public-health groups called for legislation that would require porn stars to wear condoms in their movies, the porn industry got a little amicus curiae brief from an unlikely ally, one universally opposed to such no-fun liberal do-gooderism: FORBES MAGAZINE. Presumably, horny billionaires everywhere raised a hearty hear, hear: first the government comes between CEOs and their executive compensation, now they want to put a firewall between Sasha Gray's snatch and some dude's come. This is how the death panels start.

In a column headed "How mandating condoms in adult films will put the industry more at risk," Forbes.com columnist Alexandre Padilla argues that Trojan-ing porn's cocks will actually increase the spread of AIDS in the porn biz. He argues that in order to enforce a statwide ban on riding bareback, the state OSHA statutes would require that adult-film studios classify porn stars as employees, as opposed to freelance contractors. And that, Padilla argues, would in turn trigger the state's existing anti-discrimination laws, which prevent an employer from requiring employees to take an HIV test -- and also prevent an employer from "discriminating" against employees on the basis of HIV-positive status. 

To translate between the lines: Forbes hates anti-discrimination laws, which infringe on the inalienable rights of white guys to hire lots of other white guys, to watch real porn without condoms! -- and this was a clever way of surfacing the ideological contradictions of various progressive programs aimed at protecting the disenfranchised. 

Touche, Forbes. But, um, we're pretty sure the OSHA loophole could be closed with a well-placed addendum, and Forbes's procedural sleight-of-hand obscures the wider benefit of the bill, which is to use porn to sway the mating habits of porn-watching young people. 

//www.forbes.com/2009/12/07/entertainment-pornography-condoms-opinions-contributors-alexandre-padilla.html