Table Of Content7
BDSM and Transgression 2.0
The Case of Kink.com
GRANT KIEN
This ChapTer uses a case study of BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Submission,
Sadism, Masochism) to discuss some effects of contemporary media
on notions of sexual transgression. The study employs a classic critical
cultural studies analysis of the popular online porn site Kink.com, and
an informational depth interview I conducted with its founder and CEO,
Peter Ackworth, in October 2010. Through a historiography of BDSM I
illustrate the evolution of a subculture of subversive erotic practices closely
related to the evolution of the Internet. Our civilization drives technology
to ever greater feats, resulting in both intended and accidental changes
to our environment and culture. As I have pointed out in previous work
(Kien 2009), an intended change of the rapid seamless convergence of
mobile and networked technologies into our everyday experiences, for
instance, suggests that the concept of a separate virtual and physical reality,
once taken for granted, is rapidly becoming nonsensical. The effect of
this is the ontological impossibility of maintaining a separation of worlds
and consequences. This impossibility seems to manifest quite noticeably
in terms of erotic aesthetics and performativity, in which the everyday
consumption and performance of kinky erotics over the past two decades
appears to correlate with an online commodification and proliferation of
kinky pornography. In this context, new rules and norms are established
even while old cultural forms, including norms and mores, get remediated
into new technological formats and performative scripts. I suggest that
transgressions are one of the surest and clearest ways to identify what those
rules, norms, and mores are, as they in theory cause the entire system to
ripple with the effort to explain, contain, or co-opt them.
Researching BDSM and its relation to Internet technology has revealed
the development of a transgressive global community and subculture
through online coordination over the past twenty years. Along the
way, numerous aspects of this subculture have become intentionally
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mainstreamed through the very same medium that enabled its inception.
This mainstreaming process seems to involve at least three steps: first,
the steady commodification of what began as a derelict virtual commons
populated by deviants; second, the enclosure of virtual spaces that were
considered “profane” until their appropriation by capitalism; and third,
the legitimation of certain erotic practices, many of which, until recently,
were considered perverse and even symptomatic of mental illnesses. The
development of Kink.com as a prominent corporate entity exemplifies
these steps in both the nurturing and capitalist appropriation of a
subculture: in its rise to online dominance in BDSM pornography, as an
advocate for the acceptance of BDSM by mainstream society, and in its
corresponding growth as a formidable physical communal presence in
the city of San Francisco. In effect, Kink.com has developed into a node
centering a particular network assemblage of peoples, technologies, and
practices within what I suggest is a neotribally defined BDSM community.
McLuhan (1995) described the phenomenon of “neo-tribalism” as a tribal
formation structured through the use of electronic media. While Maffesoli
(1996) is often referred to as introducting the term to sociological parlance,
Bauman’s (1998) rendering of McLuhan’s original idea on a global
scale is the notion at play in this analysis. Through its commodification
and mainstreaming of previously transgressive erotic practices coalescing
around the exchange of erotic aesthetics, Kink.com thus exemplifies the
perfect smudging of virtual and physical environments into a singularized
reality.
performing Transgression
To ground this discussion, I shall begin with the obvious statement
that transgression is always cultural in nature, even in the juridical
sense of breaking the law. Transgression is, then, the appearance of
violating cultural norms. Drawing from Carey’s (1989) ritual model of
communication and Nightingale’s (2003) description of audience–text
relationships, my analysis assumes that moral codes are scripted within a
sociocultural symbolic order that then gets enacted—or, in the language of
symbolic interactionism, performed—in the material world. As new media
formats are created and popularized, old scripts become remediated into
new formats, and new scripts specific to the new medium may also erupt
from interactions with and around the technology. For example, the repur-
posing and improvisation with texts such as Star Trek by Trekkies, or The
Rocky Horror Picture Show by active audience members, demonstrate the
eruption of new scripts specific to particular media and content. Changes
in representations of sexuality throughout the twentieth century show that
sexuality as a performative script has been excessively malleable in terms
of its moral symbolic (and hence material/enacted) form. This process has
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of course been discussed at length by Foucault (1977), but it is important
to consider that even within the past few decades, masturbation has been
transformed from a sexual perversion to an indication of sexual health
in popular discourses of sexuality. In this chapter, I focus on phenomena
of sexual deviance including discourses and practices of perversion, kink,
and sexual fetish. The relatively recent emergence of what is known as
the BDSM community, comprising practitioners of these three and a few
other categories of sexual deviance, provides a rare opportunity to study
the correlation of the development of a new media platform in relation to
changes in social norms. A historical dependency of BDSM on the Internet
as a community-forming and discursive tool has been documented in
various ways, which makes the examination of BDSM an important case
study in coming to understand transgression in a web 2.0 world.
What is a “2.0 World” and a “2.0 Condition”?
Throughout this chapter, I use the term “2.0 world” to refer to our present
digital globally networked civilization, in which people and our global
media apparatus seemingly ubiquitously interconnect us, and we share
content with one another on a global scale. The “2.0 condition” is such
that time is typically experienced as instant and always accessible, and space
is often experienced as an inconsequential barrier, especially since the 2.0
experience is rooted in aesthetics. Previous research I have conducted on
this condition (see Kien 2010) has demonstrated that the global media
apparatus in its current incarnation depends a great deal on the appro-
priation of user-generated content to keep the media system generating
economic value. In the work presented here, the capitalist appropriation
of user-generated cultural norms, values, logics, and practices are the issue.
One unmistakable finding of this study is that in the case of Kink.com,
many pre-web 2.0 sexual transgressions which used to be kept private (i.e.
kept out of mainstream/popular media) and discussed only in terms of
medical illness have, in a 2.0 media condition, been commoditized and
widely distributed to a global market, while others continue to languish in
a standing reserve of deviance. Marketed thus, some new world transgres-
sions remain consistent with the past definition of sexual transgression:
the sudden shocking revelation of sexual practices that are generally
not discussed in a positive light and are kept hidden from public view.
The question is, then, what remains hidden from view and why? Rather
than a simple break with mainstream morality by isolated individuals, I
suggest the commodification of BDSM effects a sophisticated moral system
achieved through the remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1998) of tastes
and values entrenched in consumerist, quasi-psychological categorizations
of individual sexual tastes. My research on BDSM and Kink.com reveals
that in a 2.0 world, the content is not the main issue in this practice of
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consumer society identity building. Rather, the building of one’s personal
brand of sexual expression within the broader rubric of sexual identity,
in which BDSM represents a catalog of extreme signifying styles and
practices, is emphasized through the open, freely circulating signifiers
available through the Internet. Thus, transgression in terms of online
erotic aesthetics is that which cannot be successfully commoditized and
brought to market as a desired exchange commodity. Rather, such human
practices get assigned to a purgatory of negative speculation and used as a
comparative “dark side” of the sanctioned (through successful commoditi-
zation) aesthetic representation of the BDSM community until such time
that they can be called forth to be aesthetically appropriated and success-
fully commoditized for mass consumption.
It is of course the case that virtual world activities have physical world
implications, for which consumers of pornography in general are quite
grateful as it aids in satisfying a basic physical need. Beyond the sensational
experience of consuming BDSM porn, however, I contend that this media
condition contributes to a panoptic system of policed sexuality (Foucault
1979, 1990), in which many mainstream consumers further entrench
distance between their consumption of porn and practices of BDSM in
the physical world. In a post-networked world, our newest transgressions
remain based on a rather timeless principle: the hiding of certain practices
from social condemnation. In the case of Kink.com, certain erotic practices
are kept from the moral judgment of consumers by simply refusing to
enter them into the arena for discussion. It is important to recognize that
however familiar and ancient the principle of social concealment may
be, evolutions in digital media both make new methods of constructing
transgression possible and at the same time reveal the arbitrariness (and
conceptual fragility) of all things codified as transgressions.
For Carey (1989), successful communication as culture occurs when a
shared sense of community is formed through communicative practices.
Extrapolating from this understanding, breaks with a sense of ritual
and shared community may signal transgressions in society. That is to
say, whereas communal recognition and identification with individuals’
practices as normal and consistent with the dominating symbolic order
signify belonging, failure of a community to recognize and identify with
individuals’ practices as normal signifies transgression. For Stuart Hall
(2003), a failure to have meaningful discourse between the sending and
receiving parties in discursive formations can happen in a number of ways,
but to qualify as a transgression in the way I am using the term, there must
be the invocation of an oppositional reading. That is, the receiving party
must adequately understand the intended meaning in order to reject (i.e.
transgress, behave contrary to) the message, rather than just reject it based
upon unintelligibility. This is clearly the case with BDSM and Kink.com.
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Kink.com and the bDsM subcultural Community
The invention of BDSM is firmly rooted in a discursive community of
people who sought one another out to share their ideas and everyday
erotic practices that transgress the cultural norm. At the same time, these
people have been keenly aware of how their everyday erotic practices—
their transgressions—have kept them from sharing a sense of community
with mainstream society. Hence, as read through Hebdige (1979), a trans-
gressive subculture formed by appropriating and subverting the codes of
mainstream culture, thereby challenging mainstream taken-for-granted
understandings of sexual and erotic normalcy. Peter Ackworth describes
himself and Kink.com as part of the BDSM community, and an advocate
for the understanding and acceptance of kink in mainstream culture. This
shared sense of community is most visibly reflected in the production side
of Ackworth’s business, as his talent pool and many production personnel
are drawn from the San Francisco and broader BDSM community of which
he has personally been a member for many years. As part of his personal
credo, Ackworth has been a long-time advocate for the broader acceptance
of BDSM, and has not been hesitant to build this into part of the mission
of his business. In our interview, he described plans for community
outreach that included his envisioning of an educational program (KinkU.
com), and he mentioned that he has given financial and in-kind assis-
tance in various forms over the years to kinky community organizations.
Meanwhile, it stands to reason that beyond the social benefit, Kink.com
has a vested interest in the mainstreaming of BDSM, as it is both a way
to expand the BDSM pornography market and build a solid alliance of
popular support should there ever come a moralistic legal challenge to the
business. However, in terms of business practice, Kink.com seems to make
a committed effort to show what goes on behind the scenes and behind the
boardroom doors of the company. For example, pre- and post-shoot inter-
views with the models are included in every video package to show a spirit
of consensual erotic fun, and their portal includes a website of behind-
the-scenes content. When I asked Ackworth (2010) about his commitment
of resources to these non-profit-generating aspects of his business, he
reiterated his personal commitment to demystify the process of Kink.com’s
BDSM porn production and his goal of a broader acceptance of BDSM by
mainstream society.
Moreover, I suggest that it is an oppositional understanding of the
signifying order of sexuality that motivates BDSM subcultural community
members to apprehend—in a sense, to confiscate—the signifiers of erotic
deviance. In as much as one might attempt to uniformly generalize motiva-
tions of a subculture, the goal is to displace the dominant reading of
BDSM practices as negative and abnormal with the subculture’s preferred
reading. But within the BDSM community proper, the result is tension and
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struggle between various structures of meaning (which inform individual
opinions) held by the numerous different people who comprise the
community. As actor-network theorists have pointed out, it isn’t an issue
of which translation of everyday practice is correct, but rather which has
the strongest network of alliances that allows it to dominate the discussion
(Latour 1988). However, in pornography, this is seldom an issue, as it is
often the most taken-for-granted assumptions about transgressions that
enable their commoditization. Hence, for Kink.com, the decision is fairly
easy to settle, as it is the alliance of consumer with commodity that directs
which transgressions become commodified and which become reified
as undesirable and relegated to a psychologically or morally determined
categorical container until such time that they might find a more sympa-
thetic consumer base that allows them to be taken to market.
Moving forward from these two theoretical premises, the following
pages demonstrate the process of how the above-described elements work
together to create a new formation of erotic transgression in a -2.0 world.
After a quick clarification of terminology and context, I will discuss the
medium and what is unique about the channel of delivery for Kink.com’s
content. Next, I will consider the content and what may or may not be
different about it in light of the technological changes in the medium.
Finally, I will speculate on some of the theoretical implications of social
interactions around the medium. While the case study at the center of
this analysis is the highly successful commercial porn website Kink.com
and its founder Peter Ackworth, its sociocultural role can only realistically
be understood when contextualized among community-based web and
physical presences such as Fetlife.com, the San Francisco Society of Janus,
San Francisco’s weekly Bondage a Go Go event, and the San Francisco
Citadel BDSM playspace.
The invention of bDsM online
The invention of the acronym BDSM is tied directly to the evolution of
Internet technology. There are very few print sources from which to glean
a timeline of its development as a concept and a community of practice.1
However, numerous online sources corroborate a popular understanding
of BDSM’s origin and development into a subcultural lexicon forged by
an online community.2 The letters BDSM themselves represent the erotic
practices of bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism
and masochism. However, BDSM as a communal scene and subculture
also appropriates the erotic terms “kink,” “fetish,” and “perversion.” For
the purposes of this chapter, the term “kink” refers to what many might
consider uncommon acts that bring erotic gratification to the practitioner.
“Fetish” refers to the erotic desire and use of objects, including objectified
(i.e. fetishized) peoples. “Perversion” refers to any type of eroticism that
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lays outside the purview of mainstream erotic practices (which are labeled
“vanilla” by those in the BDSM scene). Although definitions and interpre-
tations of what BDSM properly signifies have been struggled over within
the community, and indeed continue to be a subject of ongoing discussion,
what is significant to understand here is that this amalgamation of erotic
practices and the eruption of the signifier “BDSM” occurs at a specific
technological moment in history.
According to various sources, in the late 1980s and early 1990s self-
identified kinky people and practitioners of S&M began to connect with one
another anonymously on the Internet (see Shadow 2002; TheMunch.org
2007; Wiseman 2003). For the first time, enabled by Internet technology,
people around the globe (mainly in the USA) whose sexual practices were
considered “abnormal” and “perverse” were able to find one another in
common purpose with relatively little risk to their everyday lives. Within
a matter of a few short years, an online subculture had formed around
practices which were until that point largely kept secret and isolated, or
part of a derelict and often dangerous street scene. As Jay Wiseman (1999)
describes:
SM was a lot more taboo and widely condemned than it is now. The SM
“community”—such as it was—was much smaller and more underground than
it is now, and the different groups tended to be smaller and more isolated than
they are now. We didn’t know as much as we do now, and what knowledge did
exist was harder to find—other than by personal trial and error. Almost all of
the books, clubs, and so forth that exist today didn’t exist back then. The main
“teaching” of the time was that being interested in SM wasn’t in and of itself
proof that someone was seriously mentally ill.
As individuals began to recognize that they were in fact not alone in their
so-called deviance, communities centered on kinks and fetishes sprung up,
and BDSM as a sanctioned and policed set of practices between consenting
adults began to institutionalize. The key discussion boards at the time
were the Usenet newsgroups alt.sex-bondage, alt.sex.beastiality, and alt.
sex-stories. This was not uncontested; the alt.sex groups hosted by the
University of Waterloo, for instance, were shut down in 1994 3 as they were
judged to violate the criminal code of Canada.4
It is important to note here that what became the BDSM community in
the 1990s and into the present owes considerable homage to the Leather
movement as part of the Queer Nation struggle. The important role of
the Queer Leather community is often overlooked in the casual telling of
BDSM history, even in spite of the fact that it is the Leather flag that BDSM
practitioners eventually adopted as their own. Although Kink.com includes
at least five exclusively gay porn sites and frequently flies the Leather flag
above its studio and office site, the SF Armory, Ackworth expressed his
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The Case of Kink.com 125
surprise when I informed him of the origin of the flag during our face-
to-face discussion. Thus here we have an indication of one of the first
remediations of a pre-2.0 oppression: the erasure of queer history.
While queer voices have been an important part of the BDSM community
throughout its evolution, BDSM as a practice is often represented in
the mainstream as an unproblematized heteronormative power erotics
practiced between loving, often married, heterosexual couples, discon-
nected from the political struggles of oppressed peoples. Bisexuality
and “heteroflexibility” are commonly expressed identities in the BDSM
community, and homosexuality is an important identity within the BDSM
scene, though less common than hetero.5 However, acknowledgment
of the pre-Internet struggles, battles, and gains of the Queer Leather
community on behalf of kinksters and fetishists is important and signifi-
cantly underrepresented. In Leather bars and dungeons in cities such as
New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the “Old Guard” established
many of the practices, rules, and protocols that, along with fantasy novels
such as the anonymously published The Story of O (1954),6 would later
become the foundational texts of the burgeoning BDSM community. The
Leather community and the BDSM community continue in the present
to exist side by side, sharing a flag, duplicating numerous practices, and
often intermingling at events such as the annual Folsom Street Fair in San
Francisco. However, Queer Leather culture remains its own distinct gay
identity, with its own bars and gay events that, while often not exclusive, are
clearly different from the hetero-dominated BDSM community.
Encouraged by discussions on the Alt.sex newsgroup and other forms
of anonymous discussion, kinksters in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay
area decided to take things a step further and meet up in person. What
began as a small gathering of like-minded people munching on burgers
at a local restaurant (the Flames coffee shop in Santa Clara, CA) over
the course of a few years became institutionalized as a regular meeting
dubbed a “Munch” (at Kirk’s Steakhouse in Palo Alto, CA). Within a short
time, munches were happening throughout the U.S.A. and even in other
nations, and the global online community of kinky people began to assert
itself in physical space. By the mid-1990s, kink was out of the closet to those
who sought it out, and had become a subcultural lifestyle choice for many
people. This time frame also saw some important technological leaps that
made it possible for mainstream society to access these subcultural forms.
In the mid-1990s, three technological advances radically changed the
range of choices for the construction of sexual subjectivity and erotic
aesthetic consumer options available to mainstream society: the compressed
image file format, the invention of the World Wide Web, and advances in
the adoption and use of the Internet as a point of sale.7 The development
of the compressed image format significantly sped up the time it took to
transfer picture files over the Internet, reducing the transfer time from
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hours to minutes, and eventually, seconds. Coupled with the invention of
the Internet browser which enabled viewing of graphics within web pages,
web users were able to view and share images relatively easily online. Within
a couple of years, the invention of compressed video file formats made
the same phenomenon possible with video. The creation of the World
Wide Web made it possible for users around the globe to easily navigate
from website to website, significantly deterritorializing the cyberspace
experience. Content became geographically unbordered, and in a new
phase of McLuhan’s “global village” (1995) users gained access to cultural
spectacles that had previously been unavailable or off limits. Finally, the
commercialization of the Internet effectively put a point of sale in every
home that had Internet access and a credit card. Able to shop in the
privacy of their own homes, many consumers began to take advantage of
the opportunity to discreetly explore their sexual desires, acquiring images
and videos that appealed to their erotic appetites.8 Pornography exploded
online, and in many respects pioneered numerous important develop-
ments in online marketing and Internet business practices. One of the early
Internet entrepreneurs to recognize the opportunity the Internet offered
in the pornography business was the aforementioned Peter Ackworth.
Ackworth describes his own entry into the online world of kinky
pornography as a business decision inspired by stories he had heard of
other people who were making money by putting porn online, guided
by his own erotic taste. He started out much like most others in that
time period, scanning and mounting borrowed images on his website
without much regard for copyright issues. His site, Hogtied.com, grew in
popularity. As his business developed, he found that he needed a continual
supply of fresh content that couldn’t be found elsewhere to maintain his
community of repeat customers and build his web traffic. His solution to
the problem was to move from Europe to San Francisco, set up a studio
in a rented apartment, recruit female models and actors from the local
kink and sex worker scene, and shoot still and video footage of himself
interacting with the women he hired. For many years, Ackworth was the
sole employee of what would develop into one of the world’s largest kinky
pornography businesses. Ackworth’s career as a pornographer has spanned
the maturation of the Internet over the past fifteen years, constructing his
Kink.com enterprise through the establishment of numerous online porn
sites. All the while, he has been an active participant in the San Francisco
kinky scene, and has cultivated an audience of consumers of kinky porn
that interact both through the consumption of his website’s pornography
and through user forums. In the present day, web communities such as
Tribe.com and, more popularly, Fetlife.com, have arisen to replace the
void left by the early newsgroup forums and continue to unite kinksters
and fetishists on a global scale. Ackworth and many of his employees and
models may easily be found on such social networking sites. Meanwhile,
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The Case of Kink.com 127
kinky dating sites such as Bondage.com, Alt.com, Collarme.com, and
numerous others connect individuals with compatible erotic tastes.
naughty Content: a new Type of old script
If we were to determine innocence by measures of naivety and good inten-
tions, we might conclude that there are many innocent people. However,
Durham and Kellner (2006) point out that there are no “innocent” texts.
All cultural artifacts—textual, performative, and material—are laden with
meaning, values, biases, and messages. This means that in spite of any
intentions of their originators, all cultural artifacts participate in advancing
relations of power and subordination. Prejudices like class, gender, race,
sexuality, abelism, age, etc. are encoded within our artifacts and messages,
as it is culture and history rather than any one person’s intentions that
constructs our structures of learned meanings. Culture thus constitutes a
set of discourses, stories, images, spectacles, cultural forms, and practices
which generate meaning, identities, and political effects.
As Ackworth described to me, early Internet pornographers often began
their businesses through remediation of old images, by simply scanning
pictures and mounting them online. Along with these images also came the
remediation of narratives. To make it possible to acquire a constant supply
of original content and thereby build his consumer base, he set up a studio
in his apartment and began to produce film and video content for his first
porn website, Hogtied.com. At that time, he did everything from the coding
on the website to the filming and shooting to setting up and interacting
on camera with the models in the scenes he was shooting. It was literally
a one-person business, as the models worked on a shoot-by-shoot contract
basis. When I asked where the ideas for his early pornographic scenes came
from, he described his early work as the re-enactment of scenes he’d seen in
magazines, and in particular House of Milan (aka HOM, Inc.). It is perhaps
not surprising then that his first website, Hogtied.com, closely resembled
the name and themes of the HOM publication Hogtie. The reproduction
of scenes from these and other texts such as the aforementioned Story of O
and Laura Antoniou’s Marketplace series continue to figure prominently in
Kink.com productions in the present. This is evidenced by both a review of
their online library of content and perhaps more tellingly in the creation
of Kink.com’s “Upper Floor,” which is both a set and functioning BDSM
party room fashioned after a room described in The Story of O. Kink.com
also follows a very narrative formula in its productions traditional in most
pornography, typically ending the onscreen play with an (male) orgasm
(aka “money shot”). Hence, the case of Kink.com clearly illustrates Bolter
and Grusin’s (1998) concept of remediation (i.e. the content of any new
medium is the old medium it replaces), and the reproduction of aesthetic
codes of deviance and power-erotics. Interestingly, Ackworth described the
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