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.

The other Melissa Farley

When googling "Melissa Farley" before, I'd noticed that the top hit, and the domain name MelissaFarley.com, is for a Philadelphia photographer of the same name as everybody's favorite San Francisco anti-vice crusader. I'd never looked at the other Farley's photos until now, and I must say, I'm pleasantly surprised by how unlike in spirit the photos by the other Farley are from her namesake.


I'm reminded a bit of the doppelganger-naming of Jeff Stryker, one having been a top gay porn star and the other once-Director of the National Commission on AIDS. Except, I those two I don't see as polar opposites. I could almost picture a panel on safer sex featuring the two of them. The two Farley's, on the other hand, seem worlds apart. (Which, in the case of photographer Farley, is defintiely a good thing.)

As a fan of erotic art and of photography in general (and a sometimes-photographer, myself), I'm definitely impressed by the other Farley's work. Its an aesthetic I sometimes wish more porn would match. (Then again, as somebody who actually likes looking at sex acts in all their glory, I also understand the functional necessity of high-key lighting.)

Upcoming online forum on sex work, trafficking, and human rights

For Immediate Release

Contact:
Elizabeth Wood
Phone: provided upon request
Email: elizabeth (at) sexinthepublicsquare (dot) org
Co-founder, SexInThePublicSquare.org
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Nassau Community College

Sex In The Public Square Presents:
Sex Work, Trafficking, and Human Rights: A Public Forum

New York, February 20, 2008 — Ten prominent sex worker advocates, writers, researchers will be publicly discussing the issues of sex work and trafficking from a human rights and harm reduction perspective, February 25 - March 3, on SexInThePublicSquare.org. The week-long online conversation will conclude with a summary statement on March 3, International Sex Worker Rights Day.

Sex work and trafficking are two issues that must be discussed as distinct yet intersecting, and we've invited some of the smartest sex worker advocates we know to help sort out the complexities. "This forum is not about debating whether or not we should be using a harm reduction and human rights approach instead of the more mainstream abolitionist and prohibitionist approach to sex work," explains Elizabeth Wood, co-founder of Sex In The Public Square and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Nassau Community College. "Instead our goal is to create a space for nuanced exploration of the human rights and harm reduction approach so that we can use it more persuasively."

Wood explains: "The human rights and harm reduction approach seeks to reduce the dangers that sex workers face and to stop human rights abuses involved in the movement of labor across borders, a movement which occurs in the service of so many industries. We want people to be able to learn about this perspective, and to develop and refine it, without having to dilute that conversation by debating the legitimacy of sex work."

Questions and themes include:

Defining our terms: Is the way that we define "porn" clear? "Prostitution"? "Sex work" in general? What happens when we say "porn" and mean all sexually explicit imagery made for the purpose of generating arousal and others hear "porn" as indicating just the "bad stuff" while reserving "erotica" for everything they find acceptable? When we say sex work is it clear what kinds of jobs we're including?

Understanding our differences: How do inequalities of race, class and gender affect the sex worker rights movement? Are we effective in organizing across those differences?

Identifying common ground: What are the areas of agreement between the abolitionist/prohibitionist perspective and the human rights/harm reduction perspective? For example, we all agree that forced labor is wrong. We all agree that nonconsensual sex is wrong. Is it a helpful strategic move to by highlighting our areas of agreement and then demonstrating why a harm reduction/human rights perspective is better suited to addressing those shared concerns, or are we better served by distancing ourselves from the abolition/prohibition-oriented thinkers?

Evaluating research: What do we think of the actual research generated by prominent abolitionist/prohibitionist scholars like Melissa Farley, Gail Dines, and Robert Jensen? Can we comment on the methods they use to generate the data on which they base their analysis, and then can we comment on the logic of their conclusions based on the data they have?

Framing the issues: What are our biggest frustrations with the way that the human rights/harm reduction perspective is characterized by the abolitionist/prohibitionist folks? How can we effectively respond to or reframe this misrepresentations? What happens when "I oppose human trafficking" becomes a political shield that deflects focus away from issues of migration, labor and human rights?

Exploring broader economic questions: How does the demand for cheap labor undermine human rights-based solutions to exploitation in all industries, including the sex industry?

Confirmed participants include:

• Melissa Gira is a co-founder of the sex worker blog Bound, Not Gagged, the editor of Sexerati.com, and reports on sex for Gawker Media's Valleywag.
• Chris Hall is co-founder of Sex In The Public Square and also writes the blog Literate Perversions.
• Kerwin Kay has written about the history and present of male street prostitution, and about the politics of sex trafficking. He has been active in the sex workers rights movement for some 10 years. He also edited the anthology Male Lust: Pleasure, Power and Transformation (Haworth Press, 2000) and is finishing a Ph.D. in American Studies at NYU.
• Anthony Kennerson blogs on race, class, gender, politics and culture at SmackDog Chronicles, and is a regular contributor to the Blog for Pro-Porn Activism.
• Antonia Levy co-chaired the international "Sex Work Matters: Beyond Divides" conference in 2006 and the 2nd Annual Feminist Pedagogy Conference in 2007. She teaches at Brooklyn College, Queens College, and is finishing her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center at CUNY.
• Audacia Ray is the author of Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads and Cashing In On Internet Sexploration (Seal Press, 2007), and the writer/producer/director of The Bi Apple. She blogs at WakingVixen.com hosts and edits Live Girl Review and was longtime executive editor of $pread Magazine
• Amber Rhea is a sex worker advocate, blogger, and organizer of the Sex 2.0 conference on feminism, sexuality and social media, and co-founder of the Georgia Podcast Network. Her blog is Being Amber Rhea.
• Ren is a sex worker advocate, a stripper, Internet porn performer, swinger, gonzo fan, BDSM tourist, blogger, history buff, feminist expatriate who blogs at Renegade Evolution. She is a founder of the Blog for Pro-Porn Activism and a contributor to Bound, Not Gagged and Sex Workers Outreach Project - East.
• Stacey Swimme has worked in the sex industry for 10 years. She is a vocal sex worker advocate and is a founding member of Desiree Alliance and Sex Workers Outreach Project USA.
• Elizabeth Wood is co-founder of Sex In The Public Square, and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Nassau Community College. She has written about gender, power and interaction in strip clubs, about labor organization at the Lusty Lady Theater, and she blogs regularly about sex and society.

To read or participate in the forum log on to http://sexinthepublicsquare.org

For more information contact Elizabeth Wood at elizabeth (at) sexinthepublicsquare (dot) org.

Melissa Farley's latest + Bound Not Gagged blog-in, 9/17

We only occasionally blog about non-porn sex work topics here, but this is simply a matter of focus on issues around porn. Other issues around sex work are important to pay attention to as well, though, and the issue of whether its OK to produce commercial porn using real human beings ultimately rests on the issue of whether its OK to pay for sex at all. The latter is coming under increasing attack, as illustrated by the publicity surrounding the release of a new report on Nevada prostitution.

Melissa Farley, Nevada Brothels, and the effect on the legal sex work debate

Recently, radical feminist anti-prostitution activist Melissa Farley published a report called "Prostitution and trafficking in Nevada: making the connections". Many readers are probably familiar with Farley's "research", since it is often used as a stick to beat proponents of any kind of legal sex work over the head with, whether that's legal prostitution, stripping, or porn modeling. The story goes that sex work is inherently a horrible form of abuse and that "90%" of all sex workers show symptoms of post-traumatic stress, want to leave prostitution, but are prevented from doing so by drug addiction, economic desperation, or some pimp basically keeping them as a coerced sex slave. These data were gathered mainly from urban street prostitutes and from very marginalized prostitutes in developing countries, but the findings are generalized to be applicable to women in any and all situations of sex work.

Farley's study of Nevada brothel prostitutes claims similar findings as for her earlier findings about street prostitutes, this time claiming a figure of "81%" (of a total sample of 45 brothel prostitutes) who want to leave prostitution, most of whom are supposedly prevented from doing so. This has been quite a coup for Farley, because she now has been able to claim that even in a controlled, legal setting, she still has been able to find damning evidence against the effects of prostitution. The report has gotten an enormous amount of attention in the press, most notably in a series of op-eds by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who seems to have bought completely into Farley's views on sex work. (Herbert's columns get a much-needed fisking in this post at Sexinthepublicsquare.) These columns, as well as a similar op-ed by Guardian columnist and dyed-in-the-wool radfem Julie Bindel, have gotten a lot of circulation around the liberal and feminist blogosphere, and a lot of people who were more or less on the fence on the issue have now come out against legalization of prostitution, for greater enforcement and penalties against customers, in other words, for the so-called "Swedish Model" of prostitution law. In an ironic turn, Bitch PhD even came out for the Swedish Model in a column on none other than Suicide Girls, a site that, while not exactly entailing prostitution, does entail a mild form of sex work that radfems like Farley would ultimately like to see penalized as employing prostitution. (Not to mention the exploitative reputation of SuicideGirls even among many of us on the pro-porn side.)

As the above example illustrates, I have yet to see many liberals or moderate feminists fully advocate the criminalization of strip-club customers or porn producers, or even make the connections about how their newly hardline stance on prostitution might ultimately implicate areas of sex work they consume or are otherwise involved in. Such implications are quite clearly on the long term agenda of anti-porn abolitionists, however, as the Captive Daughters report I blogged about last month makes clear. The fact that many of the leading sex work abolitionist individuals and organizations have their roots in the 1980s feminist anti-porn movement is no coincidence. The prostitution anti-legalization argument is getting some support now even among relative "liberals", and its only a matter of time before such arguments will be employed against porn and stripping.

Farley's methods

Just how reliable Farley's findings actually are is an open question. Admittedly, I have not seen a copy of Farley's Nevada prostitution report. (Basically, its a self-published thing by Farley – there is no electronic copy to download and an OCLC search does not show it to be deposited in any libraries. One has to buy a hard copy from her in order to even see the thing.) Farley states (in a September 7th TV interview on the LV news program "Face to Face") that she uses the same methodology as she did for her earlier studies, so presumably, many of the same criticisms of her methodology in those studies applies here. To quote from the Ronald Weitzer (2005) critique of Farley's methodology:

What about Farley’s own research procedures? Much is left opaque. In one study, Farley and Barkan (1998) interviewed street prostitutes in San Francisco. No indication is given of the breadth or diversity of their sample, or the method of approaching people on the street....No information is provided as to how these locations were selected, or whether alternative locations were rejected for some reason....Finally, though Farley lists the topics covered in the interviews, none of the actual questions is presented. It is especially important to know the exact wording of questions, especially on this topic, because question wording may skew the answers.

Farley reports (in the "Methods" sections of her various papers, for example, here) that she uses a combination of "structured interviews" and questionnaires to elicit information from her subjects. However, the raw findings are not reported, but rather, Farley distillation of those findings. Thus, when we are confronted with statements like "92 percent stated that they wanted to leave prostitution" (an answer that's open to some interpretation, in any event), we have no idea exactly what question or questions were asked and whether there this was subject to interpretation by Farley. Nor do we have any idea as to how Farley chooses her interview subjects. The findings may or may not be valid, but there's a lack of transparency in her methods that casts doubt upon them. And in the case of Farley's Nevada report, the fact that the thing is self-published would seem to indicate that there's been no independent peer-review of this study, a fact that does not speak well for it.

(I also recommend having a look at this recent comment (scroll down) by Jill Brenneman regarding her experiences with Farley back when she was still in the radical feminist camp. The comments on how Farley would elicit information and coach ex-prostitutes on their statements are very illuminating.)

One method of evaluating Farley's findings is simply to compare them to the findings of other researchers who have done similar work. As it happens, other researchers have had entry into Nevada's legal brothels and paint a picture a much more nuanced (if not entirely rosy) picture of Nevada brothel work. Notably, Kate Hausbeck and Barbara Brents have published a number of journal on the topic and are in the process of coming out with a book of their own on the topic, "The State of Sex: The Nevada Brothel Industry". (Brents also states in the above-mentioned "Face to Face" program that she strongly disagrees with Farley's conclusions, based on her own 10 years of research in Nevada borthels. The full interview with Brents from September 5th is no longer up on the Face to Face site, unfortuntately.) Also, Alexa Albert, who recently published an ethnography titled "Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women".

That Farley seems to have a knack for coming up with a litany of horrors not reported by other researchers, combined with the lack of transparency in her methodology raises questions as to how much Farley's findings represent the ugly truth about prostitution and how much, as has been shttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifaid about Margaret Mead, is a talent for finding what she wants to find.

(Update, 9/17: Barabara Brents, one of the above-mentioned authors, has reviewed Farley's book here. Sure enough, it suffers from the same lack of methodological transparency as her earlier papers, and "presents none of the elements contained in social scientific peer reviewed research.")

Some responses

The "Nevada Model" of legal, controlled brothels has never been a popular one among sex worker's rights activists, as it places far to much power in the hands of brothel owners and corrupt local law enforcement, provides only limited protections for sex workers while limiting their freedom of movement and disempowering them in other ways. According to Alexa Albert, the brothel system has not succeeded in getting pimps out of the equation, and in the past, the brothels even required the women to have pimps as a condition of employment. (Farley's accusations go beyond anything claimed to date by other authors, however, claiming that brothel prostitutes are literally prevented from quitting and leaving if they so choose.) And, in any event, the legal brothel system is largely irrelevant in the larger context of Nevada prostitution, since it in no way legalizes prostitution where it actually takes place, namely, in Nevada's cities, particularly Las Vegas.

Nonetheless, Farley's study is being used as propaganda not for reforming the Nevada system and other poorly regulated forms of legal prostitution, but for paternalistic Swedish-style laws, that, while in theory decriminalizing sex work, nonetheless make it much more difficult for sex workers who are there by choice to actually make a living and at the same time, increasingly criminalizes sex industry customers, even those involved in entirely non-violent, consensual transactions.

So where are the voices of sex workers, especially Nevada ones, in this debate? Largely shut out of it, except as reported by academics and social workers who claim to speak for them. However, the sex worker blog Bound Not Gagged is planning a response this coming Monday evening, 9/17, starting at 6PM EST, which will be a response to Farley and the abolitionists in general. I encourage everybody to check it out, and contribute information if you have it.

Also, Ronald Weitzer came out with an absolutely excellent paper this month in the journal "Politics & Society". The paper is called "The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade". It describes the sex trafficking issue as one that, while having a basis in reality, clearly has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. The extent of sex trafficking is exaggerated and sex work as a whole is conflated with it. Sex workers are being cast universally as unmitigated victims, while customers are entirely demonized, and all of this being done to advance the political agenda of a particular set of moral entrepreneurs, in this case an alliance of religious conservatives and radical feminists. The paper also exposes many of the myths and exaggerated claims of the prostitution abolitionist movement. Highly recommended, needless to say.