That NYT Magazine Feature About Pornography

It’s a long article, very pornography triumphant, full of jokey puns. Below are a few quotes pulled from the piece, with a bit of commentary. From the very first paragraph introducing “trim” and “boyish” pornographer Peter Acworth:

He had already worked for Baring Brothers in London and was on track to do analytical research on Wall Street.

Okay, we get it, “Baring Brothers.” Later:

It has long been noted that the San Fernando Valley is increasingly populated by strait-laced corporate managers and not by the oily, medallion-wearing men we once assumed. But succeeding on the Web, or simply surviving its escalating demands, has required more sophisticated entrepreneurial types. With the Internet pushing porn discreetly into the homes of conventional consumers, making it more a part of everyday life and less seedy-seeming, the industry has been better able than ever to attract that sort of employee. That is, as pornography becomes a more mainstream product, it becomes an equally mainstream career. If anything, Kink may be an exaggerated example of just how ordinary pornographers will get, despite the wince-inducing grisliness of its content, which even by porn-industry standards is morbidly eccentric.

So Kink.com is helping to “mainstream” content with “wince-inducing grisliness.” But the company’s employees seem to be strait laced, ivy league educated corporate types, so nothing to worry about here. Let’s see what those sophisticated entrepreneurs are up to:

… They were filming an update for the site Men In Pain. It would feature two players billed as Wild Bill and Claire Adams. Adams, who is 25, gave up on a philosophy degree to become a bondage rigger. (Last year, she tied up the actor Peter Sarsgaard for a bondage-themed spread in Vanity Fair.) She wore a fishnet top and a miniature barbell through each nipple.

She laid her leather jacket over a concrete slab, and she and Bill sat down, nuzzling. Then she looked into the camera and, very cordially, spoke:”I’m Claire Adams.”“And I’m Wild Bill.”“And welcome to a very special Men In Pain update.”Just like that, like the opener of some fireside holiday special. They interviewed each other. She asked if there was anything she shouldn’t do, any ground rules.”I don’t like my ears being slapped,”he said.

I think the choice to highlight the filming of a “Men In Pain” episode was an extremely instrumental and deceptive one, to obscure any imbalance that might exist between the number of productions focused on inflicting pain on women, versus the number featuring tied up and subordinated men. Somehow the author neglects to address any gender disparities among the Kink employees or within the Kink content. He doesn’t seem to have much interest in interviewing many “models” either, especially not out of earshot of company management. Now more about Acworth’s ascension through the porn hierarchy:

Initially, his instinct proved sound. But shortly after he moved to San Francisco to leap full time into the lavish free-for-all of online porn, Hogtied’s sales leveled off. Similar sites, often featuring the same licensed photographs, littered the Web. So Acworth started producing his own content in his spare bedroom. He would tether models to a homemade wooden scaffold, set up a tripod and film himself busily whipping, spanking and tickling them with various implements : all the while clicking still photos with a remote. He wore a black mask and called himself Peter Rogers in case he decided to abandon the stagnating business and return to Columbia.

That is one of the paragraphs I had the most trouble wrapping my mind around. We are supposed to believe that women went into his “spare bedroom” and allowed themselves to be tied up and whipped by a photographer wore a mask, and used a false name? Because he is so darned charming and trustworthy?

Later that afternoon, waiting for Wild Bill to be fitted with a gag, Cohen told me that a disproportionate number of Kink employees, himself included, graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz.”And that’s funny,”he said, because he felt the faculty there was trapped in a very 1970s, antiporn mind-set. Another, more recent Santa Cruz grad overheard our conversation and disagreed. The two debated it. Cohen told her that all of his professors had read way too much Andrea Dworkin.”Everything there is like a Marxist-feminist analysis,”he said dismissively.

Soon, with Wild Bill tied to his column again, Adams coiled leather twine around his testicles and cinched it tautly to the back of a wooden chair, some feet away. She crouched and flicked him with her finger, hard. I saw Cohen turn away, wrenching his face in what looked like the empathetic cringe men make. But it wasn’t. He was yawning.

No enthusiastically pro-porn article would be complete without some derogatory reference to Andrea Dworkin of course. And yet in the very next paragraph, the author reveals that a Kink employee’s reaction to one person inflicting pain on another is to yawn. Exposure to a lot of pornography has made him numb to the obvious suffering of another person, just as Andrea Dworkin asserted it would.

Kink’s required pre- and post-scene interviews, like the one I watched Wild Bill and Adams tape, for example, are meant to break the fourth wall, assuring audiences that, as in real-life B.D.S.M. play, everything is negotiated in advance and rooted in a certain etiquette and trust : that everyone is friends. The company actually requires that each model be shown smiling during the segments.

Earlier in the piece the author inserted this parenthetical: “(There are rarely story lines in Kink’s porn, and acting is discouraged.)” Acting is discouraged, but each model is required to smile. But that isn’t acting or anything.

Three days after the shoot, 60 Mission residents protested in front of the armory. While some gladly denounced the filth they had seen, or merely imagined, on Kink’s Web sites, the protesters as a whole seemed to believe, officially at least, that not being O.K. with porn was somehow politically incorrect.

“We’re not making moral judgments against pornography,”one woman said over a megaphone as the rain started. Another assured me,”We’re not a bunch of conservative reactionaries.”They just didn’t want Kink in their neighborhood : not near several community-outreach centers and schools. Even Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, in a statement sharing the neighbors’ general concerns, added the caveat,”While not wanting to be prudish. . . .”

Those paragraphs seem to encapsulate the thesis and purpose of the entire article. Most everyone is fine with pornography, and BDSM pornography deserves the shelter of this broad umbrella of cultural approval.

Surprisingly, the commingling of pain and sex, the very core of Kink’s business, has long been unnerving within even the porn industry itself. For decades, the conventional wisdom among mainstream porn producers was that mixing the two, specifically showing bondage and intercourse simultaneously, might invite an obscenity prosecution.”People assumed that it was in the federal obscenity statute, that there was some specification about bondage and penetration,”says I. S. Levine, a k a Ernest Greene, longtime video director and screenwriter in the San Fernando Valley.”It just became one of these things everybody believed.”Bondage, he adds, was typically only shown in films without any visible penetration and sometimes hardly any nudity. Even Kink waited until 2005 before daring to show a man having intercourse with a bound woman.

This self-imposed prohibition likely stemmed from the Meese Commission, the attorney general’s controversial report on pornography released in 1986. The commission determined that some women were forced to perform in porn : particularly”in the fringe areas of bondage [and] sadomasochism”: and questioned how people could know whether a given S-and-M scene was or wasn’t documenting actual rape.”Obviously we are not dealing with people that can act, so they can’t act the pain,”one law-enforcement agent testified. (Last month, a Brooklyn federal court found a man guilty of sex trafficking and forced labor when a female”slave”testified that S-and-M acts he filmed and posted online were not consensual.)

“Obviously we are not dealing with people that can act…” one nameless law-enforcement agent testified? Obviously we are supposed to dislike her/him and therefore dismiss her/his remarks. Now read that last sentence a couple of times and ask yourself why it is cabined within parentheticals, and why no further substantive details are provided.

…In the Reagan era, federal attorneys often had a video from a Southern California porn studio sent to places like Tulsa or Birmingham and prosecuted the company when it arrived. Thus they could lock in a far-more-conservative community standard than that of Los Angeles. But it has always been unclear what community standard applies to the Web. Moreover, while the Reagan administration fervidly prosecuted pornographers, the Internet sprung up smack in the middle of the Clinton years, a relatively tranquil time for legitimate adult businesses.

Now the author wheels out the trope about how Republicans and people in the Bible Belt hate porn, but Democrats and people on the coasts love it. Any actual statistics? Any studiers or case names to back up the obscenity prosecution claims? Any analysis of the fact that not many people had Internet access during the Reagan Administration, and that WWW access didn’t become widespread until the “Clinton years”? When “Girls Gone Wild” CEO Joe Francis was held accountable for filming underage girls, an article in The Nation painted this as some sort of unhinged obscenity prosecution by a right wing Christian who “tried unsuccessfully to force nude art-class models to wear bikinis.” Conflating arrests for actual wrongdoing with dire threats to the First Amendment is a fairly common rhetorical tactic. Still, you’d think there might be one or two New York Times Magazine editors who would realize that there is actual objective, verifiable historical data about obscenity prosecutions that could be referenced here. Why wasn’t it?

Like many companies, Kink has also developed a list of”shooting rules.”It bars things Acworth finds distasteful or dangerous, including crying, urination, blood and needle play,”forcing models to put their heads down the toilet,”filming anyone who is drunk or high and electroshocks above the waist : except in certain cases, like when using”nipple clamps where the nipple completes the circuit.”Several industry people told me that Kink is known for treating its models courteously and professionally.”They are very ethical,”says Mark Spiegler, a porn talent manager, “which is not the norm in this business, either.”

I’m sure that Spiegler, a man who makes his living off the earnings of “porn models,” is being entirely honest here and not at all self-serving, despite the fact that he has every incentive to lie, and to flatter Acworth. Now as an antidote, a few words from a truth-telling (not being sarcastic, I think he’s absolutely correct) lawyer:

Cambria, the attorney, says he sees pornographers of all stripes producing material now that they wouldn’t have touched eight or nine years ago.”Maybe many years with no consequences emboldened them,”he told me.”But it may very well have educated the public too, and that plays into the community-standard test.”The longer something is out in the open, and the more you see average people enjoying it,”the more you say, ‘Well, this is a part of America,’ “he explained.”Familiarity leads to acceptance.”

Which of course is what Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and other feminists have long asserted.

–Ann Bartow

NB: A post about the San Francisco Chronicle’s love letter to Kink.com is accessible here. Also, there is a recent IBTP post about pornography with a long comments thread here.