Porn palace in San Francisco houses just another startup

San Francisco's Kink.com operates just like any other startup — young folks everywhere, DJ booth in the break room, plucky office vibe — except there's way more ass-fucking. That's the story from inside The Armory, the imposing 200,000-sq. ft. "castle" at Mission and 14th Streets. The Armory's dungeonlike interior is the base of operations for CEO Peter Acworth's fetish-porn production company. What began as a shy British boy's experiments — building "fucking machines" and getting girls from Craigslist to ride them — has bloomed into a business that allowed him to buy his own playland for $14.5 million. Kink.com is the cover story for this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian. If you're not up to speed on the whole fucking-machine scene, here's a one-minute SFW text primer: More »

'Times' Mag: Bondage, With Benefits

And so the erotic sphere has been colonized once and for all. In perhaps the most profoundly unsexy thing ever to appear in the New York Times magazine — and we're talking here about a publication that employs William Safire and Deborah Solomon — Jon Mooallem today profiles Peter Acworth, a former Wall Street analyst now responsible for "arguably the country's most successful fetish porn company, Kink.com — a fast-growing suite of 10 S-and-M and bondage-themed Web sites." Big revelation? The 70-odd jobs there are pretty much as banal as yours:

Everyone at the company works 10 to 6. Matt Williams, who directs both Hogtied and the hard-hitting girl-on-girl wrestling site Ultimate Surrender, told me: "I like this because when eight hours are done, I'm done. I go home [to the suburbs and a kid], and my job doesn't follow me." ...[Marketing VP Reena] Patel acknowledged the image of pornographers as "a bunch of sleazy guys that are drunk all day." "I probably had some of the same misconceptions," she said. "But we have 401(k) plans."

As they say, never too early to be thinking about retirement, especially when being "suspended from the ceiling...like a hairy spider" is involved in the job. More »