<![CDATA[Gawker: peter acworth]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: peter acworth]]> http://gawker.com/tag/peteracworth http://gawker.com/tag/peteracworth <![CDATA[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:

  • "On first glance inside, the place is almost disappointingly tame." Watching porn performers and support staff breeze around prepping for a shoot, in flip-flops and ponytails, is probably the only breakout fetish genre yet to have a site devoted to it. Kink actually did produce a behind-the-scenes show, BehindKink.com. The name was prone to misunderstanding.
  • "The models aren't actors." Don't kid yourself — anyone paid-to-play for a camera is performing, even if the end product is billed as "reality." Even if the actors involved have that same kind of sex off the clock. Despite the Bay Area's fetish for overdocumentation, very few people have an actual fetish for the camera itself. You want to watch a performance, even if you also want to believe the folks on screen "really are having a good time." Call it Porno's Paradox.
  • "Kinky.com: Following the Web 2.0 trend of user-based content, Kinky.com will allow members and models to maintain user profiles, interact with one another on message boards, blog, and even date." It sounds like the obligatory social network that even less-ambitious porn companies feel oblige to hitch to their content wagons. At best, it'll give members a way to connect in person and live out the scenes they could previously only see on pay-per-view. Why sit home and poke when you can yes yes we know, we're done with that joke, too. Plus like we'd imply you shouldn't get laid for free.
]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5054348&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA['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.But still, what life experiences these Kink workers have! No, I don't mean the basic stuff like getting "tied to a column and flogged" or wrapping "coiled leather twine around [your] testicles," but rather those precious intangibles only a hyper-talented HR force, out for the social as well as corporate good, could spot. Things like patriotism:
A young woman who calls herself Cat Rich told me that she volunteered as a civilian nurse in Iraq after graduation but wound up back in Indiana selling cars; she is now Kink's events coordinator.
And initiative:
A Harvard alum in Kink's marketing department worked in restaurants after moving to San Francisco and got his first adult-industry job after searching for the word "fun" on Craigslist.
Of course, in the end, merit matters most of all and thus, Kink seems to be aggressively positioning itself as the Goldman Sachs of bourgeois B.D.S.M:
By early February, a fraction of the basement had been readied for a first official shoot. 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.
Obviously, the "philosophy degree" in question had to have been of the Anglo-American analytic variety, right? Hard to read Rawls without a nipple barbell or two... —Jon A Disciplined Business [NYTM]]]> http://gawker.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=256196&view=rss&microfeed=true