Friday, April 24, 2009

The Kink.com Wars, Round II

This just in from my home city – the California Employment Training Panel nixes Kink.com technical staff's right to participate in free Bay Area Video Coalition technical training, something available to multimedia employees working for a wide range of for-profit and non-profit employers. The stimulus for this was a request for information by SF Weekly columnist Matt Smith, the process of which tipped off the state that Cybernet was a porn company, and apparently Cal ETP has rules against funding adult-sector employees.

However the real scandal came when Smith, far from contrite about having just deprived a number of multimedia workers of further job training, wrote a rather nasty hit piece in his SF Weekly column. Using none other than Melissa Farley as his only source for the article, he is quite pleased to have stopped "torture porn" company Kink.com from receiving supposed taxpayer funding. He then goes on to revive Melissa Farley's rather sickening comparison between Kink.com and Abu Ghraib and the accusation that they pay poor desperate models to be abused. Topped off by the usual platitude found in so much anti-porn writing these days that Kink.com "passes itself off as hip".

Violet Blue has the full story here:
On Wednesday, SF Weekly's Matt Smith took his torture porn fantasies beyond the realm of safe, sane and consensual to gloat over how his actions caused Kink.com to get screwed out of legitimately earmarked BAVC job training funds, threatening a community training program that Smith, himself, has benefited from to the tune of 184 hours.

Here's the situation: Smith recently submitted an inquiry about Kink.com to the California Entertainment Training Program (ETP). He received a response from the ETP's general counsel, which said, in part:

"Since learning about Kink.com through your Public Records Act request, ETP has informed BAVC that it will no longer reimburse the cost of training the employees of Cybernet."

and then removed Kink from the list of subsidized applicants, kicking Kink out of the nonprofit Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).

As tempting as it is to immediately scapegoat Smith for this, you can't -- after all, all he did is submit a public records request. It's not as though he attempted to incite a harmful scandal simply for the purpose of writing about it.

It's Smith's actions following his request that are deserving of scrutiny. The resulting article, "Whipped and Gagged," is infused with (unrepentant) and sensational anti-porn bias, with accusations that Kink is soaking up taxpayer dollars to create "torture based pornography" and "depicting sexualized torture". Despite the one-sided commentary and airtime Smith devoted to local anti-porn feminist Melissa Farley's two-year-old comments repulsively comparing Kink's product to Abu Ghraib, he certainly knew his way around Kink's websites and content enough to frill up the Fox News-style hit piece.

According to BAVC's Director of Training and resources, Mindy Aronoff, Smith more than nonconsensually screwed the pooch with his biased reporting. Aronoff stated, "Mr. Smith's lazy attempt to jump on the "bad government spending" bandwagon is dangerous in its disregard for this bigger picture and the economic realities of our state. His questions of government spending and censorship are an unfortunate case of reactionary sensationalism that could threaten the ETP program at BAVC."

[Read more]
Another rather yellow aspect to Smith's journalism is the issue of "taxpayer funding". His spin is that taxpayer dollars are being used to fund the production of porn. First, the taxpayer dollars he mentions are a specific payroll tax that all employers in the State of California pay into, Kink.com included. This payroll tax goes to specifically fund employee training programs through various local projects, among them the Bay Area Video Coalition, who in turn provide training for employees to upgrade their skills. Until recently, multimedia employees of Cybernet (the umbrella company behind Kink, that also includes some non-porn production work) received this subsidized training the same as any other SF multimedia worker.

Some Background

For many years, San Francisco (by which I mean the city proper and not the whole Bay Area) has been a town with only one major daily newspaper (the San Francisco Chronicle), but with two competing "alt weeklies", The Bay Guardian and SF Weekly. Bay Guardian is a local independent paper, has its roots in the 1960s, and is definitely leftist in its editorial leanings. Its articles are often politically slanted, but also, they wear their politics on their sleeve and you at least know where they're coming from. SF Weekly is part of the Village Voice/New Times Media chain, has a more liberal-to-centrist slant, at least superficially has less "spin" in its articles, but like many centrist news sources, often has real problems with hidden bias. Matt Smith has been the paper's main columnist on local politics and he quite openly has an axe to grind against the progressive faction in SF politics. The two papers have been at war with each other for over ten years, with the Guardian having recently successfully won a lawsuit against SF Weekly over undercutting practices used in getting advertisers.

As far as sexual politics go, over the last few years, the Guardian has leaned sex-poz (like the majority of the SF progressive community) and even sponsors the Sex SF blog. SF Weekly originally was also characterized by the relaxed attitude toward sexual politics characteristic of this area, but several years ago, took a decidedly different slant. In 2006 it ran an article bashing Cake parties (and borrowing heavily on Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs), followed soon after by another article by the same author bashing Maxine Doogan's fight against the SF "john's school" program. In 2008, the paper was a major source of opposition to to prostitution decriminalization initiative Proposition K. The have been quite outspoken through all of this in their opposition to sex worker rights activism, and frequently quote Melissa Farley as their go-to source for the bottom line about the sex industry. Smith's latest column simply continues in this unfortunate tradition.

For all its sex industry- and sex-poz-bashing, it is notable that SF Weekly, like Bay Guardian, runs back page ads for strip clubs and massage parlors, as well as escort classifieds.

A Heartening Response

The silver lining to this situation is that the response to the article over the last few days has been overwhelming negative, with more than a few people taking specific aim at the use of Melissa Farley as the article's source. The comments thread for article is up to over 60 comments, almost entirely anti-Smith. A number of (mostly) local bloggers have also weighed in taking Smith to task. In addition to Violet Blue's takedown of the article in SF Appeal, SFist, Sex SF, The Sword, Carnal Nation, and even the Reason magazine blog have since taken a smack at this piece. (Addendum: whippedandgagged.blogspot.com just launched to track other articles and posts responding to the article and controversy.)

My (main) response from the comments thread:
Unfortunately, it seems that Matt Smith and SF Weekly has allowed itself to become a mouthpiece for the cranky and crank-ish neoconservative feminism of Melissa Farley. First with its jingoistic anti-Prop K stance last year and now with the rhetoric displayed in the article.

To my mind, the relevant question about CETP is whether its being used as a form of corporate welfare or whether its truly a jobs-creation program. If its the former, then I don't think either Kink.com or, say, KRON should be getting that subsidy.

However, if it is genuinely a job-training program in multimedia, then it should make no difference whether the employee is going off to a well-paying job for a design firm or a porn company. (And lets get away from the red herring that this has anything to do with forcing the poor into porn modeling – we are talking about production-end jobs here.) You have moral problems with pornography? Well, too bad, a lot of people have moral problems with advertising (pick up a copy of Adbusters sometime) and I don't see a call for ending government funding for training to enter that industry. And your "first amendment expert" aside (who was using what was already a bad piece of legislation – the NEA attack on Karen Finley – as a defense of this), I really don't think its the government's business to channel trainees into one form of media over another, especially in a way that constitutes blatant viewpoint discrimination.

The absolute low point of this article is the inflammatory language calling Kink.com "torture porn" and repeating Melissa Farley's disgusting comparison between Kink.com and Abu Ghraib (rhetoric that really dishonors the victims of Abu Ghraib). Farley-esque rhetoric about "giving people money if they'll agree to being on camera while being stripped, bound, impaled, beaten, and shocked" is pure nonsense. Kink.com films people practicing BDSM and many of the models for that company are local "players" from that same scene. Last I checked, BDSM was already something some people consensually seek out, in fact, its not unknown for someone to pay some of the advertisers in the back pages your newspaper to do *to them* some of the very things that are depicted on Kink.com. Ironic, that.
An unfortunate response was made by one particular article commentator (who also seems to be connected with an anonymous flyer circulated around the Castro) demanding the article be dropped and Smith be pressured to retract the article. This call, of course, is hugely self-contradictory from a free speech standpoint and seems to have no support beyond the original commentator who circulated it. (And fact a few people on this side of the fence, myself among them, specifically have denounced it.) Nonetheless, Matt Smith has latched onto this comment and spun it into a "pornographers are trying to censor me" post on his blog. This, apparently is his only response to the whole controversy.

4/25: This just in – Mz Berlin, an SF fetish model who has done a lot of work for Kink.com has challenged Matt Smith to an open dialogue/debate and he apparently has accepted. What form this will take – blog, print media, or live public debate is still not clear.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Marilyn Chambers, 1952–2009

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Friday, April 3, 2009

Two Significant FTW's From AVN: Mark Kernes on "Sexting", And Adelia From Digital Playground on College Censorship

With all respect to the Iowa Supreme Court for the most progressive decision this side of Brown vs. Board of Education in Topeka, I found two articles today that really give me some hope for this world.

First off, there is the irrepressible Mark Kernes over at AVN, who just released a column that basically smashes the debate about teen "sexting" and cuts through the bullshit arguments for censorship thereof. Snippage:
There is a growing segment of society that is creating pornography involving children. Children in underwear. Children partially or completely nude. Children having sex with other children.

That growing segment of society is ... children.

The first reports of "sexting" have been making the news pretty consistently recently, and while adult companies have been providing cellphone downloads of adult content for at least five years, the concept has only now captured the mainstream public's imagination because a growing number of those doing the sexting are minors. Kids in Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah have all been busted for it. And there's even been one suicide reportedly traced to "sexting remorse."

MySpace, Facebook and other personal contact sites have found that an increasing number of minor teens - 54% , by one study - have been discussing sex, drugs and posting sexually explicit images to their pages. Sexting, because it's a bit newer - the first news reports of it surfaced in 2005, though a pair of underage teens were busted in '04 in Florida for emailing photos of each other having sex - hasn't attracted quite as many followers; just 20% of 13- to 19-year-olds , according to a survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which sadly includes legal sexters with the underage ones.

[...]

Conservative writer (and anti-porn activist) Maggie Gallagher posed what may be the most important question on this subject in a recent Townhall.com column - and in the process, admitted something that conservatives spend their entire careers trying to deny: "Right now we have a decision to make: Is underage porn (these aren't really children) a crime or not? If so, how do we treat girls and boys who engage in it 'for fun' and not for profit?"

First, the admission: "these aren't really children." Aren't they? The law says they are. Various religions have long claimed that kids are too "innocent" to think of doing such things. As for the "crime": When it comes to "adult porn," using a performer who is 17 years, 11 months, 30 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes old gets you busted, but if the producer waits one more minute to shoot her, she's perfectly legal. That's clearly insane.

If there's one thing that this "sexting" brouhaha ought to teach us, it's that "18" is even less of a magic number now than it's ever been. Kids don't suddenly become sexual at the stroke of midnight on their eighteenth birthday. They become sexual when their bodies start producing estradiol (in girls) and testosterone (in boys), and when something called the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) starts pulsing from the hypothalamus area of their brains. For girls, that can be as young as 9; boys take a year or so longer. The kids may be unclear what to do when that happens (gosh, thanks, abstinence-only education!) but they'll figure it out soon enough. That's why sex is an instinct, not a learned behavior. Nobody had to teach the first humanoids how to mate; they figured it out quite easily for themselves, and even though modern humans' instincts have atrophied, they still procreate well enough to (over)run the whole fucking planet.

It's this instinct that the Deeply Religious deny, even as they themselves produce families with ten or 15 kids. They know that sex is so pleasurable that unless they invent a God to decree that sex can take place only between certain people of a certain age (and gender) under certain conditions, it would be (is!) humanity's favorite pastime ... and then who'd milk the cows and build the widgets?

(Emphasis added by me .)

The full column by Kernes can be found here.

Quick shoutout to Vicky Vette: What's that you say about raising the age of eligibility in porn?? How will that work when we already have 15 and 16 year olds who probably know more about sex and making sex flicks through "sexting" than most 25 year olds??

FTW #2 is also from AVN, but on a similar but different subject....here, the big controversy is over an aborted screening of the feature porn flick Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge at the University of Maryland-College Park due to objections from right-wingers and fundie conservatives.

Yesterday (Thursday), CNN's Prime News took on the controversy, featuring the state senator (Andrew Harris who threatened to cancel state funding for the college unless they canceled the screening, and Adelia, the marketing director for Digital Playground, the production company for Pirates 2.

Considering that the moderator of the "debate" happened to be a right-winger, Adelia might have felt double teamed...but it must not have deterred her from doing some serious damage, according to this roundup from AVN:

CHATSWORTH, Calif. — Digital Playground marketing director Adella appeared Thursday evening on CNN's "Prime News" to discuss the controversy surrounding a canceled student screening of Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Right-wing anchor Mike Galanos moderated the face-off between Adella and state Sen. Andrew Harris, the GOP politician who pressured the school into canceling the show by threatening to deny state funds to any school showing a porn flick outside of a classroom setting.

Galanos made his position clear when he proclaimed that X-rated movies are worse than crack cocaine. He leaned heavily on the argument that porn is "addictive" and "ruins lives" of innocent viewers.

Harris compared watching porn to smoking cigarettes. If smoking is banned on a campus where porn is screened, then the school's priorities are clearly askew, Harris argued.

Adella handled this hysterical blast of outraged rhetoric with pointed out that contrary to the knee-jerk attitude that porn degrades women, Pirates II does not cater to fantasies of degradation.She went on to mention that the movie is the product of a female-operated company.

Adella also pointed out that neither of her ideological opponents had seen the movie, making their arguments a clear case of contempt prior to investigation. Galanos dismissed this argument by claiming that he'd "seen the trailer".

"I had a great time on CNN and relished the opportunity to engage in a discussion with those responsible for censoring consenting adults," Adella said. "It was empowering to educate the senator on the modern era of adult entertainment, including female owned and operated studios, female viewers, and the need to embrace sex.

[full story here]

More folk like Adelia would only be a good thing.