An interesting aspect of HIV awareness is that it helps you in understanding how people are. Thanks to the feedback you receive from those you address, you can understand something about the way they are. Let's take as an example the issue of unprotected sex in porn: porn workers - who produce, direct, act, ... in a porn movie - are aware about what safe sex is (and many prefer it), but movies showing bare sex are still a huge trend.

Nearly a month ago the Free Speech Coalition announced that one of their LA-based performers had tested positive for HIV and that all filming would be suspended while they try to determine if anyone else in their talent pool had been exposed to the virus. No need to say how useless this measure is, everybody there is aware that STDs are a danger and that periodical HIV tests are fundamental just to start treatment asap in case you get a positive result. No matter what they can use as an excuse, safe sex is the only way actors have to stay HIV-negative. Besides, the use of condoms is mandatory for all the porn movies produced in LA, after the approval of Measure B last year.

Is the pressure from law, society and activists enough for porn industry to change direction? No. Ged Kenslea, spokesperson for the Aids Healthcare Foundation, reviewed a representative sample of straight porn films and found over 90% are still condom free. Porn is a business, so money is what counts the most: if the audience asked for safe sex, the porn industry would cover the set of every movie in condoms, but, according to CNN, when the industry experimented with condom use over a decade ago after another HIV outbreak, revenues declined by 30%.

Porn workers can be considered, in a way, as sex workers, even managers, producers, not only the actors. The point is that a sex worker in Bangkok, in Dar es Salaam, or along a highway in Italy probably needs an education concerning HIV and AIDS while it's more likely that a porn worker from LA already knows what HIV/AIDS is. When you see somebody doing something dangerous, being aware of the danger, you can draw some conclusions: is s/he being brave? An idiot? Superficial? Desperate? Probably all these things together.

Porn workers dealing, at any level, with unprotected sex are all part of a system that soon or later will collapse: it simply can't continue this way forever and eventually the actors are going to pay the higher price. It's very sad to write this, there's nothing worse than seeing bad things happening and not being able to prevent them. Activists can't do much except to keep promoting safe sex, hoping that this apparently high request for bare sex in porn will eventually lower. Other than that, nobody can force anybody in practicing safe sex: as we see here, neither can the law.