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In a piece that SFBG's Tim Redmond has already called "remarkable for its prudishness," SF Weekly's Matt Smith has written an indictment this week against S&M porn producers Kink.com for being able to send their video editors to state-funded classes at the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC). Why? Because kinky shit grosses him out and he feels taxpayers shouldn't be funding the training of Kink's workers, despite their being employees of a legitimate, taxpaying California business.
To wit: "California taxpayers have paid $46,791 so that employees of the San Francisco pornographer Kink.com might produce more perfect web-based depictions of motorized dildo impalements on www.fuckingmachines.com..."
Smith was a whistle-blower, essentially, submitting an inquiry to the state's Employment Training Panel, which provides funding to the BAVC, letting them know that Kink's parent company Cybernet Entertainment LLC was in the business of "torture-based pornography." The state quickly responded and got Kink's employees kicked off the roster of BAVC's classes. Smith even goes so far as to invoke the 1998 Supreme Court case National Endowment for the Arts vs. Finley, which stemmed from the late 80s conservative brouhaha over "obscenity" in NEA-funded artworks started by one Jessie Helms. That's a hellava model to follow, Matt!
Kink, in turn, has vowed to fight to get this subsidy back for its employees, saying that they are "training San Francisco's workforce for the film and televison industry" and that some of their former employees have gone on to win awards at film festivals.
The original piece is here. You can read Redmond's brief diatribe here, and The Sword (NSFW) has weighed in angrily as well.
UPDATE: Violet Blue has also thrown in her three cents and called Smith's piece "malfeasant journalism."
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that's funny, because they don't seem to have a problem with "adult advertising" funding their rag.
WTF? Someone at the SFBG needs to hack Matt's work computer and find his secret stash of midget porn.
WTF? Redmond (surprise!) didn't read Matt's article carefully, and I don't think you did, either. It started out as drollery, and nowhere does the article offer any "indictment."
Smith aims for droll, but it usually turns into an ululation about how awful San Francisco progressives are, or that the City isn't more family-friendly. I've been picking up SF Weekly out of habit since it was Calendar, and have recently started to ask myself why. I used to read SFW because there once was a chance of coming across a well-written article or column. I've been very disappointed on that front for the last few years, and this is a perfect excuse to cut back on what has become pointless reading.
(Not to say that I'm a huge fan of the BG, because in terms of quality it's pretty much the same sausage filling of scrub writers and hooker ads, but with the casing twisted counter-clockwise. The difference is that BG's political biases are pretty self-evident, while I have to consciously decode SFW's.)
There are times when Matt sounds like he wants to turn SF into Phoenix-on-the-bay, which makes me think that he'd be a lot happier in San Diego. Leave the grownups alone, we're busy.
Twsf, did you miss the part where Smith was so eager to find out how much BAVC training money was going to porn industry employees that he wrote a letter that got that funding cut off?
True, he goes on to ask "Does the state's refusal to train porn-makers violate constitutional free-speech guarantees?"... but only after he himself wrote a letter that was guaranteed to provoke that refusal. Smith isn't stupid; I'm sure he knew what he was doing, and either wanted the money to be cut off or just didn't care. If he just wanted to raise a free-speech question and encourage the state to reconsider its policy, there wouldn't have been any need to find out that dollar amount; that only makes sense in the context of a manufactured outrage piece - "Look, they're using your tax dollars for porn!"
It was a contemptuous, thoughtless piece that's had a concrete bad effect on people's livelihoods. Telling people to lighten up about it is equally contemptuous and thoughtless.
I'd call Smith's flabbergasted attitude and his calling Kink's work "medieval" a fairly prudish indictment of a perfectly legal enterprise. This starts to tread into territory about what an individual considers "obscene," which isn't an argument we should be having in liberal San Francisco.
Matt's a swell guy. Just thought I'd add that.
Carry on.
He has a way of being a little too clueless and fragile. He has good pieces once in a while, but most of it reads a little too Andy Rooney.
Not so much, according to people who work with him.
You mean like Brock used to?
Porn is the reason why I turned 18.
The definition of "prude" has become pretty wide if you can be labeled such for not wanting *public* money spent on S&M porn.
Careful with your loose rhetoric, BenW. The public money isn't funding S&M porn, it is funding video editing training classes which are open to all Bay Area employees of all taxpaying enterprises. One company shouldn't be excluded because you or Matt Smith disapproves of their product on moral grounds.
Kink.com provides jobs, cleans up the immediate neighborhood it surrounds, pays badly needed taxes to the city coffers, and is a valuable asset to my community.
They took a boondoggle/eyesore that's been empty for as long as I've been alive and turned it into something useful and (yes) emblematic of the broader city.
They're not only qualified for the money, they deserve it.
With a cherry on top.
totally agree. except, i really hope videos of people pissing on each other isn't emblematic of san francisco.
This might be "remarkable for its prudishness" of me, but could you give people a heads-up that The Sword is "NSFW"? Not all of us are familiar with that particular blog and its purview.
Normally it's not a big issue for me personally, but I clicked on the link right before someone came in to talk to me about something and when they left I noticed that on my monitor the entire time was a couple banner ads full of dudes getting ass-fucked.
This is like something out of an old-timey three-camera sitcom, by cracky! that is funny!
Yeah, my eyes bugged out and I did a triple-take and everything
good reason to switch to firefox with adblock.... no naughty bits when checked the link.
I love the part in the article where a therapist says that no woman actually wants to engage in this lurid activity and that they only do it for money cause times are tough..
This mental giant clearly has never spoken to a sub, or a domme for that matter. Oh yes, CLEARLY subbing is totally coerced, and no woman has EVER wanted to be in porn.
God, I could cry. It is really silly to try to de-legitimize some sex act as a hard times last resort. There are so many people who are on the submissive end of certain sexual practices who never get filmed, and they may never want to because they do it for their own pleasure and not someone else's. Except maybe their domme's. DUR...
All that aside, read the comments wisitor and generic left. They hit the nail on the head.
I stopped reading SFWeekly a while back. Who takes the garbage seriously anyway except maybe Peskin when he stopped funding SF Symphony after SFWeekly complained about the money it was receiving from the city. I hope SFBG prevails in getting all the money its due from SFWeekly.
The point here should be about the employees who benefit from this program, not the company that employs them. My partner is an editor for a gay porn company who has ambitions beyond his current position, and having access to classes and certification through this program is part of what will help him fulfill those ambitions and get out of the porn industry. Cutting Kink.com out of this program will in no way affect their business, but it will have a real effect on the people who work for them.
Actually, I recall that Dan Savage plugged [link=http://www.fuckingmachines.com]www.fuckingmachines.com[/link] in his Sf Weekly column a while back. Do we see an editorial reversal on the fucking machine issue now that the Weekly is owned by VVM? God. I remember when the Villiage Voice would have been all for fucking machines. That, in turn, shows how old I am.
It's a syndicated column. Savage's employer is The Stranger, a Seattle weekly.
Chris Hall just wrote on this @ CarnalNation
http://carnalnation.com/content/5685/10/sf-weekly-does-hit-job-kinkcoms-training-funds
A manual trackback from my blog:
Pro-Porn Activism: The Kink.com Wars, Round II
I also give some background on the SF alt weekly wars and SF Weekly's rather unfortunate pattern of prudishness in sexual politics over the last few years.
hmm could this be a qui tam (whistleblower) action if the Employment Training Panel is federally funded (in whole or part)? I'm not a lawyer though -- just a wonderer.
Problem is not just the lost government funding, but also the tone of the article that was deliberately designed for maximum shock effect.
We are angry at the comparison with Abu Graib torturers, or claims that all submissive models are forced into being "electrocuted and impaled".
Safe, sane and consensual - Matt Smith and Melissa Farley (Matt's "authority" on bdsm, who he neglected to mention is a violent anti-porn activist, arrested 13 times for destruction of property) completely ignore this part of bdsm, painting us as a bunch of violent, abusive rapers and torturers, or, on the receiving side, a bunch of victimized losers who can't feed themselves any other way.
His response was just as sneering. Instead of an intelligent response, he had simply repeated the misinformation about funding (it comes from employer taxes, including Kink.com, NOT general taxpayer funds), and had singled out one comment out of a hundred, claiming that "liberals" are trying to destroy the Free Speech right by boycotting the paper.
Kinda ironic, considering that he defended government's right to pick and choose who to fund - no different from public's right to choose not to pay his salary.
The ongoing updates on debate and links to current articles and posts are here - feel free to put in your .2 wherever appropriate (look at the bottom for updates):
http://blog.lovings.com/20090422/whipped-and-gagged-not/