There is such a thing as ethical porn (and we need more of it).

I visit one of the world’s busiest porn sites. Pornhub has 2.4 million visitors per hour, almost 6,000 visitors per second.

On the homepage I see bondage. Group sex. Mutual orgasms. Nylon fetish. Public sex.

The only consistency in this smorgasbord of choice? No condoms. Anywhere.

That was set to change. Porn sex was set to become a lot safer. But it didn’t. A ballot proposition in California, USA, for the mandatory use of condoms by porn stars was rejected on Tuesday.

It was a step towards “ethical porn”. A move not only designed to enhance safety and sexual health in actors, but also to encourage safe sex in consumers. It was opposed because industry members saw it as “harmful to the industry”. The ballot’s final margin was 54-46 per cent.

It seems like a missed opportunity.

Porn is more accessible than ever before. Men and women can ‘get off’ in nine minutes (the average time an users spend on porn sites) and they can do this to any material they’re after, likely for free. Only a few mouse clicks are needed.

The options are more diverse… (I’m not venturing any deeper into Pornhub. You get the drift.)

And people are making the most of it. Data from the American Psychological Association shows rates of porn consumption range between 50 per cent and 99 per cent among men, and 30 per cent and 86 per cent among women.

That’s a lot of eyeballs that could have been watching safe porn. Ethical porn. Porn with condoms.

In the US, 2014 saw reported cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis rise to the highest levels since 2006. In Australia, STIs and blood-borne viruses also hit near-decade highs, and STIs in women aged 40-59 doubled between 2004 and 2010.

Most terrifying, however, is that diagnosed cases of HIV in Australia increased by 10 per cent in 2012 and are still rising.

Why? Because we’re not using condoms. 39 per cent of Australians students surveyed in 2013 only used condoms “sometimes”, and 13 per cent never use them.

Porn seems like an opportunity for education in this area. To teach men and women that pleasure during sex is just as achievable with a condom, that “stopping” foreplay to put on a condom is possible and can still be sexy.

If porn stars can do it, why shouldn’t I?

At the same time the vast majority of the adult population is watching porn, we are also complaining. Complaining porn gives young men unrealistic expectations of women and sex. Complaining that porn does not portray women’s sexual pleasure and freedom as equal to men’s. Complaining that STIs are on the rise because safe sex has been lost somewhere in the 1990’s.

We could use porn as a vehicle to undo some of the damage that the industry, in its traditional form, has done.We could use porn to show that a woman’s pleasure is just as important as a man’s. That consensual, mutually pleasurable, safe sex should be the only type of sex you get off on.

(Remembering, some of the ‘darkest’ kink can still be consensual, mutually pleasurable and safe.)

I’m disappointed that the law in California did not get passed. It’s a missed opportunity for improving our sexual understanding and keeping us safe while doing so. Hopefully it will be the first of many, more successful, ballots for change in an industry that, really does, have so much potential.