SF Weekly’s Matt Smith Screws Kink.com: Unfair, Unbalanced, Malfeasant Journalism

Self-portrait goofing around with Peter Acworth.

Things exploded here in San Francisco this week with Kink.com when two things happened: one, Kink got kicked out of a local state funded, nonprofit job enhancement training program — BAVC. I know a couple readers here not only have attended BAVC, but also have taught there, and are friends of mine, and have gone on to great careers in film making and film teaching at art colleges across the nation. Kink was totally eligible to have their employees take classes there with state funds — as are almost all California businesses despite what products the businesses produce.

The fucked up kicker was that they got kicked out thanks to a total douchebag who writes for local paper SF Weekly — and then Mr. Matt Smith not only gleefully bragged about his role in getting Kink denied continuation of their rightful benefits (that they too pay taxes for) — Smith took the opportunity to make it a very ugly piece of writing (that he got paid for, ahem) and wrote all kinds of fucked up shit about Kink torturing women, making terror porn, and generally demonizing porn, the people who make it and people who make, love and enjoy BDSM.

So I did a little research, a lot of interviews (quotes from Lorelei Lee, BAVC and Peter Acworth for instance), and kindly directed Mr. Smith to grab his ankles at around 8:00 AM. Not in the way we enjoy. At the moment, he’s gone completely hysterical on the Weekly’s blog. And I’m not done with him yet.

Please read and find all relevant links in SF Weekly’s Matt Smith Screws Kink.com: Unfair, Unbalanced, Malfeasant Journalism, snip:

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, right? 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 biasm 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 at BAVC 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.”

While what Smith has to say about Kink’s product doesn’t surprise me — a man is entitled to his own opinion. What is harder to forgive is to see opinion conflated with media coverage in a weekly whose holdings are out of state, with actual harm inflicted on local businesses (and nonprofits) under the guise of journalistic reporting. (…read more, sfappeal.com)

Mr. Smith, the Princess will see you now.

Updates: The SF Appeal piece broke this one wide open. A source at Kink tells me that the story was on the 6 o’clock news last night and KTVU paid a visit to the Armory (writeup here). It’s also been picked up all over the place, like The Rumpus, Reason Magazine, Pro Porn Activism, Huffington Post (where we learn “The Bay Guardian reached out to Matt Smith for an interview regarding his article, which Smith denied.”). Thanks everyone for your support!