Tuesday, February 12th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
Social media is alive today with news of Kink.com founder Peter Acworth’s arrest for cocaine possession, as reported in Gawker yesterday:
Acworth, 42, was arrested at 8:24 p.m. on February 1st and charged with one count of cocaine possession and one count of delaying arrest, according to Albie Esparaza, a San Francisco Police Department Public-Information Officer. Police were initially sent to Kink.com’s massive, $14.5 million studio/dungeon in the old San Francisco Armory at 1800 Mission St. after a concerned citizen reported seeing a video online of men firing guns inside the premises, Esparaza said. Joshua Carlberg, 40, was also arrested and charged with delaying arrest.
“Basically it stemmed from social media,” Esparaza said. “Someone posted a video online and this person reported it to the police, and they located an indoor shooting range, sort of a makeshift.” Esparaza said police did not find enough evidence for fire-arms-related charges, though the investigation is still open. It’s unclear what video spurred the investigation, or what fetish it might have spoken to. One Kink performer I talked to said that for all the weird stuff Kink puts out, he’d never heard of videos involving live firearms. Acworth is typically fastidious about keeping his torture porn this side of the law, the performer said.
I basically have two thoughts about this report.
First, the use of the phrase “torture porn” makes me doubt the impartiality of this reporter. “Torture porn” is a highly-specialized, heavily-loaded attack phrase. It’s used chiefly by anti-porn activists. It’s never used by BDSM performers. Nobody in the commercial porn world uses the word “torture”, not least because it’s commercial death (credit card billers will yank your processing if you use it to describe your porn product). I find it highly unlikely that a Kink.com performer uttered those words unless there was an axe being heavily ground. So if the reporter (Adrian Chen) chose to put his own judgmental phrase into the mouth of a source presented as basically neutral, how far can the rest of the story be trusted?
Second, finding a shooting range in the SF Armory building (so named because it is in fact a former National Guard armory) probably didn’t take crack police work. In fact, they could have Googled it:
