State Drops Its Stimulus for S&M Video Production

PUBLIC INFORMATION/FREE PRESS -- Nationally the question last week seemed to be which is worse: torturing or releasing records confirming it was done.  In San Francisco the question seems to be which is worse: a government subsidy for a torture porn producer, or publicizing the record confirming it was given.  But both disclosures' critics abhor the T-word.

As noted on Reason.com, Matt Smith of the SF Weekly recently reported that California's Employment Training Panel (ETP)  was providing state-subsidized training to employees of Cybernet Entertainment LLC.  The subsidy is from the California Employment Training Panel (ETP), "an agency set up to make state businesses more competitive with foreign and out-of-state ones by paying contractors who train in-state workers. Cybernet's business, says Reason, is "high-quality, fetish porn videos."

According to another report, Cybernet insists

it is a legitimate tax-paying operation that should receive the same treatment from the state as any other business.

“We are a legal business in the state of California,” said Daniel Riedel, Kink.com’s Chief Operating Officer. “ We follow all of the state of California laws.“

For three years Kink.com's employees have benefited from the state-funded training program, which provided money to allow its employees to take classes at a nearby organization, the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).

“BAVC was giving us training for post-production skills,”said Riedel. He says the program allowed his employees “to learn more about using tools like Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop -- tools of the trade that anyone would use in any production environment.”

Riedel says his employees were learning how to edit, shoot video, work with lighting and more. But after the San Francisco Weekly newspaper made inquiries to the state panel that oversees the funding, that training came to an abrupt halt.

In a letter to BAVC, the employment training panel said it has a long-standing policy that the adult entertainment industry is the lowest possible funding priority, and that it was not aware that Kink.com—under its legal business name Cybernet Entertainment—was an adult web business. The state program is funded through California business taxes.

The funding cutoff led to some interesting disagreement among attorneys as to whether this amounted to censorship forbidden by the First Amendment, Smith learned.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, says the government might be straying into a legal gray area. "I think a fair reading of Supreme Court decisions in this area would support the view that government can't deny all funding to companies while allowing it to others, because the discrimination is based on the expressive content that the companies produce," he said.

Ashutosh Bhagwat, professor of constitutional law at UC Hastings College of the Law, was less certain. "The true answer is: The law in this area is a mess," he said. "The government has some discretion in choosing what speech it wants to fund, but not always. There's a potential constitutional issue there."

Calvin Massey, also a Hastings professor of constitutional law, says that's wrong: Constitutionally speaking, the government may refuse training for pornographers if it so pleases. "My reaction is that there's nothing unconstitutional about refusing to provide governmental subsidies in the pornography industry," he said. "They're still permitted to engage in that expression. They just don't get a governmental subsidy. The government is free to make choices about how it spends its money. Simply because it chooses not to subsidize expression, or training for expression, doesn't mean [government officials have] done anything that's not within their rights."

Indeed, in 1998's National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress enjoys wide latitude when setting spending priorities that may affect certain forms of expression. And in 1990's Rust v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment was not violated by a U.S. regulation that said family planning clinics could receive federal money as long as they didn't discuss abortion. "The court said, 'The government is free to subsidize speech it likes, and free to refuse to subsidize speech with which it disagrees,'" Massey said.

More remarkable was the protest reaction reported by SF Weekly shortly thereafter, and what it was about.

Interestingly, commenters didn't object to any stated opinion in the Matt Smith opinion column. Rather, a running theme was that this piece of news—and one would have to seriously misunderstand journalism to think government-sponsored S&M porn isn't capital-N news—should have been suppressed to further the cause of free expression.

This is a pretty perverse posture for members of a porn industry wont to hide behind the First Amendment. But I'm told perverse postures are standard fare at Kink.com's Old Armory headquarters.

More enticing still, a commenter masked by the riotous moniker "Free Speech" announced that torture-porn aficionados and their fellow travelers will launch an actual pro-government-secrecy protest movement this weekend, putting up posters, organizing a boycott, and demanding an apology from SF Weekly for publishing information about the state porn subsidy.

Meanwhile, some of the more obvious questions remain unanswered.  Perhaps the most obvious: Why does porn video production need a state subsidy; is the market dwindling?

Comments

[Iamcuriousblue]

Actually, Matt Smith contentions are just spin. Funds did not go directly to Kink.com. However, Kink.com technical staff did avail themselves of funded classes through the Bay Area Video Coalition, paid for by a state fund drawn from payroll taxes – taxes, I might add, that are paid by Kink.com just like any other employer.

And, yes, I do think its discriminatory to say that certain multimedia workers cannot take advantage of technical training available to other multimedia workers just because some people might happen to have objections to the content they produce with those skills. What kind of slippery slope does that set up?

If you want to denounce the program as a whole as corporate welfare, be my guest. But if the program really does ultimately benefit the *workers* for those companies, then as far as I'm concerned, using such funds to train Kink.com's staff is no more objectionable than funding the training of Lucasfilm employees.

[Webmistress]

One single comment out of hundreds calls for the removal of the article - true to form, Matt Smith has singled that one.

The rest of us simply expressed our outrage over the repeatedly misrepresented (it's NOT taxpayer's money - it comes from the funds all companies including Kink.com pay into), and malicious article.

Matt Smith has set out to create a slanted article worthy of a tabloid. For that purpose, he used hate language ("torture porn") and questionable "authority" (Melissa Farley is a known anti-porn activist that has been arrested numerous times during her crusades, a fact he also neglected to mention).

When the local community responded, he replied in a sneering, insulting way, repeating misinformation from the article and cherry-picking the single objectionable comment. While I do believe that the article shouldn't be removed, his claim of Free Speech protection is ironic to say the least - if the government has the right to pick and choose who to fund, we readers certainly have the choice not to pay Matt's salary.

Again, the community outrage was not over Kink.com's loss of funding (though we have feelings about that too). It was about being put in the same category as Abu Graib torturers and/or victims, pathologized and dismissed.

Please read the comments, not just the articles. You can find daily updates on this wide ranging debate with a collection of links to various articles and blogs here: http://alturl.com/36xj