Slipping the condom on

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I've been reading Wendy McElroy's A Woman's Right to Pornography, which is a book that asks questions about pornography concerning feminism and traces both the free speech pornography movement and the feminist movement and their connections and differences. (Feminist meaning information about contraceptives, laws against domestic violence and rape, access to health care, abortion, and the ERA.) Of course, I'm tying everything right back into porny fic writing.

A discussion which has interested me since I started writing fic is sex safe and the lack of it in fic. I came from space fandoms, Star Trek and Babylon 5, where in the future we like to assume that everyone can have sex without consequences. Then I moved to RPF where STDs weren't a worry, but pregnancy was, so usually there was a mention of the woman being on the pill. Next I started reading and writing a bunch in the Buffyverse where the main pairings had vampires who have cold dead seed and are STD (and other disease) free. Now I'm also reading fandoms such as due South, SGA, House, and Veronica Mars that are set now and have all those consequences of pregnancies and STDs, yet writers still don't have their characters use condoms.

In the book, McElroy attends a pornography convention and chats with industry people, trying to determine mostly how the female stars of video pornography are treated. Mostly, she talks to producers and stars of heterosexual (or pseudo-lesbian) porn, but during a big gathering and porn awards night notices that the only person wearing an AIDS ribbon was a producer of gay porn. Asking him why he's the only one with a ribbon leads into a comment on condoms in gay vs. heterosexual porn.

"[H]e explained how gay porn had pioneered condom use within the industry. Every gay shoot, he insisted, had a big bowl of condoms that the actors were required to use. Grimacing, he said that producers of [heterosexual] porn didn't even want to hear about condoms because they claimed, 'The audience doesn't want to see them.' Every discussion I had with straight producers confirmed this" (p. 36).

This led me back to fandom's resistance to condoms. Generally, fanfiction is considered/assumed to largely be written by heterosexual women who are in some sort of long term relationship (or teenager heterosexual female virgins) which falls into an interesting correlation with heterosexual porn. Yes, straight video porn is aimed at straight men; however, I see the same unsexy justification for leaving condoms out of fanfic porn. Not to mention that fanfic is often seen as the female equivalent of video porn. Of course, I've never seen any correlation between the sexuality of the writer and the use of condoms in his/her fic. But there's definitely a heterosexual bias in fandom and I wonder if that makes the correlation of lack of condom use.

So flist, what do you think? Why does your human/human fic in present times not include condoms? Why does the majority of NC17 fic not concern itself with safe sex?

ETA: No Glove, No Love - A Multi-Fandom Safe Sex Ficathon and Challenge

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