SAN FRANCISCO – A reporter investigating why Kink.com has been recieving state subsidies to help educate staffers how to shoot and edit video ended up tipping off the agency responsible for providing those funds, which then cut off the subsidies to the Bay Area producer of alternative sexual content.
In an article posted to SFWeekly.com today provocatively titled, “Whipped and Gagged: Is government spending obscene? Well, it paid to train S&M filmmakers,” writer Matt Smith recounts how his request to see state public records in order to find out how much money “Californians had been paying to train workers of [Kink.com corporate parent] Cybernet Entertainment LLC,” resulted in the company losing state funds it had been receiving for three years.
“I received a letter from ETP general counsel Maureen Reilly, who said the government had been unaware that Cybernet was in the business of narrowcasting videos depicting sexualized torture,” Smith wrote.
The employees had been receiving their training through Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), a Mission nonprofit that provides classes in video and multimedia technology. Reilly took immediate action.
“By long-standing policy, ETP does not fund training in the adult entertainment industry,” she replied to Smith. “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.”
Kink.com COO Daniel Riedel told Smith the company had been using the money to subsidize training to educate staffers in video shooting and editing, Photoshop and other multimedia skills. “The fact we got cut off abruptly right after you requested those documents is unfortunate, especially with the economy the way it is and everything else that’s been going on,” he said.
Kink.com is not the first adult company to receive state training subsidies. “The California Employment Training Panel’s policy of denying education subsidies to pornographers came about a few years ago, when an employee recognized a major video porn producer among employers on its list,” Smith writes. “In response, agency officials struggled to come up with a policy that would placate conservatives and porn haters and neutralize First Amendment advocates. Officials fretted ‘about pirating of products and victimization of workers in media services,’ according to the minutes of a June 2006 panel meeting.”
In 2008, after years of indecision, the panel declared a “moratorium” on subsidizing the training of adult entertainment employees, and announced a policy that categorizes the adult industry as its “lowest funding priority,” despite the fact that denied companies and employees pay into payroll taxes, and that the skills learned by the employees can be utilized at any other similar job for the benefit of any California-based company.
Kink.com says it will fight to keep the subsidies. Reidel and BAVC managers plan to prepare a presentation for the next ETP meeting, where they will request a repeal of its previous decision to cut off training subsidies to Kink.com.
More on this story as it develops.
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