Kink.com Slammed For Being Kinky

Kink.com is a responsible, tax-paying corporation that works to better the Bay Area community, employing many Bay Area residents. But because they also happen to produce porn, they've been banned from a state-funded training program.

Specifically, the California Employment Training Panel, which provides subsidies for training to make in-state corporations more competitive on a national scale. For years, Kink had used the program to provide its employees with video and multimedia training—but alas, they've now been cut off from this training.

What happened? It seems that a certain writer for the San Francisco Weekly decided to investigate why the state of California was subsidizing "torture porn"—and in the process, set off a chain of events that left Kink.com out in the cold. You can read the whole story over on the SF Weekly's website—but be warned, it's peppered with lots of poor reporting, judgmental talk about alternative sexuality, and, well, more poor reporting (though antiporn sources are quoted discussing the obvious abuse of Kink.com's models, not one of the models is quoted discussing his or her experience). A few sample quotes, just to give you a taste:

Riedel denies the victimization charge. "Most of our models have been around longer than the down economy," he said. "We go through an extensive interview process to make sure they're okay with this. We don't like working with models that aren't into this. If it's not consensual, it doesn't work."

San Francisco clinical psychologist Melissa Farley doesn't buy that. In 2007, she posted on her antipornography Web site, Traffick Jamming, the famous photograph of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner alongside a photograph she says came from Kink.com of a shackled, blindfolded woman apparently being poked with a cattle prod. "In this economy, this is something women would rather not do, but they feel they have to," she said. "This is a form of economic coercion. But people would rather not think of it that way. People think of it as a matter of rights, rather than ask the question, 'Should people have a right not to do this?'"

The company has passed itself off in articles in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, 7x7, and other publications as a hip, if esoteric, high-tech media startup. Yet its business plan is more medieval than modern, consisting, as it does, of giving people money if they'll agree to being on camera while being stripped, bound, impaled, beaten, and shocked.

Ah, fair and balanced journalism.

· Whipped and Gagged (sfweekly.com)
· See also: SF Weekly's Matt Smith Screws Kink.com: Unfair, Unbalanced, Malfeasant Journalism (sfappeal.com)
· Thumbnail: Mika Tan on Fucking Machines (fuckingmachines.com, via Ask Jolene)