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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/magazine/29kink.t.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
NY Times may want to know who you are before you can read the article.
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The New York Times
April 29, 2007
A Disciplined Business
By JON MOOALLEM
Peter Acworth is 36 and trim, with a pale, boyish face. He grew up in the English Midlands, the son of a sculptor and a former Jesuit priest, and came to the United States in 1996 to get a Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He had already worked for Baring Brothers in London and was on track to do analytical research on Wall Street. Then, after his first year, he read in a British tabloid about a fireman who sold pornographic pictures on the Internet. “He had made a quarter of a million pounds over a short period doing nothing very clever at all,” Acworth told me not long ago, pointing to the clipping framed in his office in downtown San Francisco. “So I basically just ripped off that idea.”
Acworth has since built what is 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, each updated weekly with a new half-hour or hour video segment. Kink has 60,000 subscribers; access to each site costs about $30 a month. Acworth founded Kink’s first site, Hogtied, while still at Columbia. He purchased licensed digital photographs for content, many of which were simply old bondage-magazine spreads, torn out and scanned. Almost immediately, Hogtied made several hundred dollars a day — then, with a few ads in place, more than a thousand. In 1998, Acworth dropped out of grad school and moved to San Francisco, which he had always regarded as the world’s “fetish capital,” to run Hogtied full time. His mother worried that the lifestyle of a self-employed Web master might get lonely.
At the time, online porn was still an unruly if lucrative amateur hour. With the big companies of the San Fernando Valley — the center of pornographic video production — moving online sluggishly, if at all, a disparate crowd of upstarts was getting rich quickly. But just as quickly, the disarray of those early days soon constricted into a fiercely competitive, $3-billion-a-year American industry. “You can’t just throw up an adult Web site and watch the dollars roll in anymore,” says Kathee Brewer, editor of the trade magazine AVN Online, which covers the online adult industry. Many of the sites that have lasted, she adds, were founded, like Kink, by serious-minded, tech-oriented entrepreneurs working outside the influence of the porn establishment.
It has long been noted that the San Fernando Valley is increasingly populated by strait-laced corporate managers and not by the oily, medallion-wearing men we once assumed. But succeeding on the Web, or simply surviving its escalating demands, has required more sophisticated entrepreneurial types. With the Internet pushing porn discreetly into the homes of conventional consumers, making it more a part of everyday life and less seedy-seeming, the industry has been better able than ever to attract that sort of employee. That is, as pornography becomes a more mainstream product, it becomes an equally mainstream career. If anything, Kink may be an exaggerated example of just how ordinary pornographers will get, despite the wince-inducing grisliness of its content, which even by porn-industry standards is morbidly eccentric.
Talking with Kink’s 70 employees, the majority of whom are in their 20s or 30s, it would seem that porn has become just another career that creative people latch onto in the fog following college — years spent meandering between unpaid internships and dispiriting corporations, lashed with debt. 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. 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. A cameraman, one of several employees with film degrees, was not only laid off in the dot-com bust but also found himself owing $14,000 in a perplexing stock-option scheme gone sour. “I promised myself I would never work at a dot-com again, but here I am,” he said, and “it feels very much like the blissful dot-com days before the crash.” There are weekly catered lunches, a health plan stretching to vision insurance and, even harder to come by, a pervasive feeling of usefulness. Reena Patel, Kink’s vice president for marketing, who has an M.B.A. and previously worked at Merrill Lynch, told me, “I actually apply my education to this job.”
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, and my job doesn’t follow me.” Williams used to shoot for a smaller, more sinister-seeming S-and-M site that is now shut down. He lives in the suburbs and has a ****. “My wife and I watch ‘American Idol,’ ” he said, as if to show how average he is.
It was a recurring theme. 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.”
A few weeks after Patel and I first spoke, Kink incited a minor media blitz by purchasing, for $14.5 million, the State Armory and Arsenal in San Francisco as its new offices and studios. The armory, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is a 200,000-square-foot, brick, castlelike colossus in the Mission District. It had been abandoned by its only tenant, the National Guard, in the mid-’70s. After 30 years of disuse, its underground horse stables and ballroom; officers’ quarters, pool and banks of urinals; hockey-arena-like drill court with 70-foot ceilings and stadium seating — all of it — had attained a look of palatial depravity. It was the exact aesthetic Acworth and his directors had been struggling for so long to build from scratch. At the time the deed transferred in December, the basement pumps had shut off, and the creek that rushes through the armory subbasement had filled the old shooting range with several feet of water. Acworth was ecstatic. He imagined models waist-deep, with helmets and headlamps, or someone suspended over the waterline in a cage. “It could be very cinematic,” he told me.
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.
She laid her leather jacket over a concrete slab, and she and Bill sat down, nuzzling. Then she looked into the camera and, very cordially, spoke: “I’m Claire Adams.” “And I’m Wild Bill.” “And welcome to a very special Men In Pain update.” Just like that, like the opener of some fireside holiday special. They interviewed each other. She asked if there was anything she shouldn’t do, any ground rules. “I don’t like my ears being slapped,” he said.
They started on an old stage in the armory gymnasium, rundown to the point of missing its floorboards entirely and gathering trash — a Coke case, a poster advertising youth boxing classes once held here — in the underpinnings. There, Wild Bill was tied to a column and flogged. (There are rarely story lines in Kink’s porn, and acting is discouraged.) His crotch was slapped. Later, in the boiler room, he would be kicked and suspended from the ceiling on his back, like a hairy spider. In between takes, after Wild Bill mentioned getting a little back pain, Adams would adjust the cat’s-cradle of ropes.
ven as ****, Acworth told me, he liked seeing people bound. “I would get an erection while watching a cowboy-and-Indian movie where somebody was getting tied up,” he said, “which I didn’t really understand.” For a long time, he experimented by tying up himself, alone; he was shy and didn’t have a girlfriend until his 20s. It seemed natural that when starting Kink, he would gear his company toward the subculture around consensual sex play involving bondage, discipline, domination, submission and sadomasochism — the B.D.S.M. community. It was a way to indulge his own fetish but also a shrewd business decision. With a bondage site, Acworth told me, he knew what the customer wanted.
Initially, his instinct proved sound. But shortly after he moved to San Francisco to leap full time into the lavish free-for-all of online porn, Hogtied’s sales leveled off. Similar sites, often featuring the same licensed photographs, littered the Web. So Acworth started producing his own content in his spare bedroom. He would tether models to a homemade wooden scaffold, set up a tripod and film himself busily whipping, spanking and tickling them with various implements — all the while clicking still photos with a remote. He wore a black mask and called himself Peter Rogers in case he decided to abandon the stagnating business and return to Columbia.
The ways online porn was created, marketed and sold were beginning to be reinvented. Or, rather, they were finally being properly invented. Even by 1999, search engines like Yahoo were harder to outsmart, and Acworth’s tricks for getting Hogtied ranked highly no longer worked. He followed the lead of bigger porn sites, recruiting vast networks of “affiliates” to lure traffic to Kink’s sites with smartly placed ads, galleries of free samples, spam or other means. The industry’s first affiliates were hobbyists, amateur connoisseurs collecting their favorite online porn in galleries or directing others toward it in newsgroups. Today it’s a competitive industry in its own right, with self-employed, stay-at-home entrepreneurs using a variety of increasingly sophisticated advertising tools. Companies like Kink or Naughty America — another prominent suite of porn sites with far more conventional content (errant secretaries, hair-twirling co-eds) — now work with invisible sales forces of tens of thousands of affiliates.
But in those early years, with credit-card numbers circulating among unscrupulous Web masters and affiliates, various frauds proliferated. Prime among them was “credit-card banging,” whereby a person subscribing to one site might find he has been charged for a slew of others. For their part, customers found that they could easily repudiate charges they had authorized; Internet porn involved no physical delivery, and card companies, apt to take the nice suburban husband’s word over the pornographer’s, frequently issued chargebacks.
Such headaches were not limited to porn. But porn was one of the few things being rampantly bought and sold online, and the financial sector, which hadn’t yet worked out a viable system for e-commerce, scrambled to develop one on the fly. Many banks and credit-card companies, including American Express, refused to deal with porn; others steadily introduced stiffer regulations and fees for high-risk industries. A site with more than 2.5 percent of its purchases charged back could be subject to closer oversight and penalties; eventually, its merchant account, and thus its ability to process credit cards, might be revoked. Soon, the standard allowable chargeback ratio lowered to 1 percent. Third-party billing companies stepped in to process the charges through their own merchant accounts, but they routinely take 15 percent or more of each transaction. (Paypal, which charged as little as 2.9 percent, ceased dealing with porn in 2002.) For the typical, sloppy amateur — the lackluster guy with a digital camera and some lady friends — billing suddenly became a nightmare. “And without billing, it just don’t work,” says Gary Kremen, who founded both the porn site Sex.com and the dating site Match.com in the mid-’90s. “Because what are you going to do, send money in the mail?”
Kink has managed to retain its own merchant account, a rarity in the business. Acworth claims its chargebacks have always been minimal, in part because of the company’s own meticulousness but also, perhaps, because of the nature of its customers. “People that buy our content are people that are genuinely into the fetish,” he says. A B.D.S.M. enthusiast may spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on S-and-M paraphernalia or to attend fetish festivals like the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. “I think it probably tends to be a somewhat more refined clientele,” Acworth suggests. According to Scott Rabinowitz of Traffic Dude, an advertising consultant for the adult industry, high-quality niche sites have always been more profitable and attractive to affiliates. Narrowly targeted sites generally get a far higher percentage of their Web traffic subscribing. They also keep those customers longer; while most companies retain the average customer for less than three months, Rabinowitz suspects an average Kink subscriber stays at least three times as long. In fact, much of the industry has learned to be as specialized as Kink was from the start, with catch-all pornographic “megasites” making way for smaller, formulaic ones like My Friend’s Hot Mom or Chunky Angels. Meanwhile, Acworth’s second site was dedicated entirely to women having sex with large and distressingly elaborate machines. Another features water torture. Thus Kink seems to have survived all of these various shake-ups not only on Acworth’s business sense but his kinkiness.
By now, real success and longevity online require both technological skill and a certain fiduciary seriousness. Acworth put Kink’s stellar benefits in place partly so he could steal top-flight people away from mainstream corporations. In the Bay Area, Rabinowitz says, the dot-com bust fed an entirely new class of talent into porn: “Middle-food-chain technical players could come over and create pivotal roles for themselves.”
I met several dot-com era castoffs who were entrenched in Kink’s I.T. department and another, Paco Cohen, loading a crate of neatly cataloged riding crops and nipple pincers onto a truck the morning of the first armory shoot. Cohen, who was wearing blue-tinted glasses and a windbreaker with Colonel Sanders’s head embroidered on the breast, was a project manager for an AT&T affiliate in the area for four years. (“Baby-sitting for adults” is how he explained the job.) One day, he watched 700 people get laid off. Then he was told that his new boss was someone he had never heard of who worked in New Jersey. “I stayed there for two years just waiting to be laid off, and that was when I started hating it,” he said.
Later that afternoon, waiting for Wild Bill to be fitted with a gag, Cohen told me that a disproportionate number of Kink employees, himself included, graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz. “And that’s funny,” he said, because he felt the faculty there was trapped in a very 1970s, antiporn mind-set. Another, more recent Santa Cruz grad overheard our conversation and disagreed. The two debated it. Cohen told her that all of his professors had read way too much Andrea Dworkin. “Everything there is like a Marxist-feminist analysis,” he said dismissively.
Soon, with Wild Bill tied to his column again, Adams coiled leather twine around his testicles and cinched it tautly to the back of a wooden chair, some feet away. She crouched and flicked him with her finger, hard. I saw Cohen turn away, wrenching his face in what looked like the empathetic cringe men make. But it wasn’t. He was yawning.
Three days after the shoot, 60 Mission residents protested in front of the armory. While some gladly denounced the filth they had seen, or merely imagined, on Kink’s Web sites, the protesters as a whole seemed to believe, officially at least, that not being O.K. with porn was somehow politically incorrect.
“We’re not making moral judgments against pornography,” one woman said over a megaphone as the rain started. Another assured me, “We’re not a bunch of conservative reactionaries.” They just didn’t want Kink in their neighborhood — not near several community-outreach centers and schools. Even Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, in a statement sharing the neighbors’ general concerns, added the caveat, “While not wanting to be prudish. . . .”
Their frustration stemmed from deeper issues. Roberto Hernández, a Mission native, told me that the neighborhood “has been a train wreck” since the spate of evictions, largely of Latinos, during the dot-com boom. Its problems are legion — drugs, prostitution, vandalism — especially in the shadow of the derelict armory. “We’ve made numerous attempts as a community to get something positive into the building,” Hernández said. (Neighbors also helped quash various proposals including one for luxury condos.) It seemed as if some in the beleaguered community had come to view the armory as a 200,000-square-foot storehouse of infinite promise. Now, regardless of how unfeasible turning it into affordable housing or a recreation center actually was, there was no chance at all. The previous owner sold it discreetly, without any neighborhood input.
The protesters handed out placards. One read, “No Dead End Jobs,” and among Kink employees who heard about it the next day, this seemed to sting the most. Pamela O’Tey, one of two people in Kink’s accounting department, said that with her last employer, a large coffee corporation, she did auditing — period. “So I have to be appreciative of a company that is superwilling to teach you whatever you want to know,” she said. O’Tey hadn’t let Kink’s critics get to her. She understood their wariness; she has two young sons herself and is president of her P.T.A. “But today,” she told me later, “is the first day I felt like I might cry.”
As the protesters began chanting, “Shut Them Down,” the staff of a youth-services center gathered under umbrellas. The Mission is working to keep its **** out of prostitution and away from violence, they said. Kink, which they saw as standing for both, would now negate that work. The sad thing, one woman told me, is that a job at Kink “is probably a better opportunity than we can offer them. I’m sure they pay good. I’m sure it’s not slave wages there.”
While the rally continued, a few television crews were quietly lured through a side door to meet with Acworth. He looked anxious, silhouetted in the mammoth drill court. The instant he gleaned a reporter’s question, he would interrupt and, very hurriedly, sputter out the things he had been trying to communicate to his new neighbors: Kink’s impact could only be positive, he said. He would plant trees and light up the building, warding off the junkies and prostitutes; clean the graffiti and fix the windows; bring jobs to the city by renting the drill court as a sound stage for Hollywood films. As he frequently did, he invited any and all neighbors to visit the company and see what goes on there for themselves.
Acworth wanted to be outside communicating with the protesters, not hiding in his fortress. “If my message is that I’m available, I should be out there,” he said again to his staff, who had discouraged it. He fidgeted. He turned to the last camera crew, packing its gear, and asked: “What do you guys think? Do you think I should go outside?” Everyone said no, politely. Acworth fidgeted some more.
In a way, the armory, the titanic building itself, embodies the circumstances of porn these days: it is an exceedingly conspicuous presence in the community but also thoroughly sealed off and opaque. Kink could have tried to slip into the building innocuously, preserving that arrangement, yet Acworth seems bent on doing the opposite: he wants, very visibly and proactively, to be a good neighbor. (The week after the protest, he wrote an op-ed article for The San Francisco Chronicle, re-extending his open invitation to visitors.) Since the sale, he has been committed to making the armory’s two-foot-thick walls as transparent as possible — and B.D.S.M. along with it.
While Acworth clearly enjoys retelling Kink’s materialistic creation myth — the fireman article, the laughably easy money — he also describes the company as having a certain social mission. Too often, he told me, B.D.S.M. is conflated with **** or abuse. He realized early on that building a respectable company devoted to the fetish could help “demystify” it. People who felt conflicted about their kinkiness, as he once had, “would realize they’re not alone and, in fact, that there’s a big world of people that are into this stuff and that it can be done in a safe and respectful way. Loving partners can do this to each other.” Kink’s required pre- and post-scene interviews, like the one I watched Wild Bill and Adams tape, for example, are meant to break the fourth wall, assuring audiences that, as in real-life B.D.S.M. play, everything is negotiated in advance and rooted in a certain etiquette and trust — that everyone is friends. The company actually requires that each model be shown smiling during the segments.
Surprisingly, the commingling of pain and sex, the very core of Kink’s business, has long been unnerving within even the porn industry itself. For decades, the conventional wisdom among mainstream porn producers was that mixing the two, specifically showing bondage and intercourse simultaneously, might invite an obscenity prosecution. “People assumed that it was in the federal obscenity statute, that there was some specification about bondage and penetration,” says I. S. Levine, a k a Ernest Greene, longtime video director and screenwriter in the San Fernando Valley. “It just became one of these things everybody believed.” Bondage, he adds, was typically only shown in films without any visible penetration and sometimes hardly any nudity. Even Kink waited until 2005 before daring to show a man having intercourse with a bound woman.
This self-imposed prohibition likely stemmed from the Meese Commission, the attorney general’s controversial report on pornography released in 1986. The commission determined that some women were **** to perform in porn — particularly “in the fringe areas of bondage [and] sadomasochism” — and questioned how people could know whether a given S-and-M scene was or wasn’t documenting actual ****. “Obviously we are not dealing with people that can act, so they can’t act the pain,” one law-enforcement agent testified. (Last month, a Brooklyn federal court found a man guilty of sex trafficking and **** labor when a female “slave” testified that S-and-M acts he filmed and posted online were not consensual.)
Twenty years later, the subject of violent pornography’s effects on its audience is still debated. (Psychologists generally understand “violent pornography” as depictions of ****, coercion or some extreme imbalance of power; the term doesn’t specifically, or even necessarily, include B.D.S.M. porn.) Neil Malamuth, a U.C.L.A. psychologist, explains that the actual findings are nuanced enough to displease both sides of the political spectrum: heavy consumption of violent pornography is one of several risk factors that, working together, can increase the likelihood of sexual aggression in some men. The ambiguity of the research, according to Paul Cambria, an attorney who has represented the industry for 25 years, leaves pornography coupling sex to any depictions of violence potentially harder to defend.
According to the United States Supreme Court, one measure of obscenity is whether an average adult in the community would deem it obscene. In the Reagan era, federal attorneys often had a video from a Southern California porn studio sent to places like Tulsa or Birmingham and prosecuted the company when it arrived. Thus they could lock in a far-more-conservative community standard than that of Los Angeles. But it has always been unclear what community standard applies to the Web. Moreover, while the Reagan administration fervidly prosecuted pornographers, the Internet sprung up smack in the middle of the Clinton years, a relatively tranquil time for legitimate adult businesses.
Nevertheless, Levine says, the Web masters who first challenged the industry’s reticence about S-and-M weren’t seasoned pornographers accustomed to calculating such risks in the first place. They were “lifestylers” like Acworth and his directors, merely recreating what they saw all the time in underground clubs. “They set out to do what is natural to them,” Levine says, “and the roof didn’t fall in.”
Acworth, in fact, seems to police his content simply by the values of the B.D.S.M. community, laboring to make its playful, consensual spirit transparent. Given the ultimate subjectivity of obscenity law, he told me, he can only rely on his own comfort level. Like many companies, Kink has also developed a list of “shooting rules.” It bars things Acworth finds distasteful or dangerous, including crying, urination, blood and needle play, “**** models to put their heads down the toilet,” filming anyone who is drunk or high and electroshocks above the waist — except in certain cases, like when using “nipple clamps where the nipple completes the circuit.” Several industry people told me that Kink is known for treating its models courteously and professionally. “They are very ethical,” says Mark Spiegler, a porn talent manager, “which is not the norm in this business, either.”
Though President George W. Bush signaled he would renew vigorous obscenity prosecutions, the Justice Department never got around to any significant crackdown. Fetish sites like Kink carried on confidently and grew. At the same time, an unprecedented volume of porn has spurred producers to distinguish themselves with more extreme content — and, as that becomes commoditized and omnipresent, still more extreme stuff. By now, even the biggest DVD companies have gradually followed the lead of sites like Kink into S-and-M-themed or other edgy content. Levine directed “Jenna Loves Pain,” an S-and-M film for one of the industry’s largest studios, starring Jenna Jameson, one of the world’s most famous porn stars. Its tagline: “Look Who’s Learning the Ropes.”
Cambria, the attorney, says he sees pornographers of all stripes producing material now that they wouldn’t have touched eight or nine years ago. “Maybe many years with no consequences emboldened them,” he told me. “But it may very well have educated the public too, and that plays into the community-standard test.” The longer something is out in the open, and the more you see average people enjoying it, “the more you say, ‘Well, this is a part of America,’ ” he explained. “Familiarity leads to acceptance.”
The porn business, in short, has a community standard of its own. What starts on the fringes works its way to the center. And this affects all of us since, more and more, the center of porn culture has converged with the fringes of popular culture. But Kink’s purchase of the armory represents a quirky quantum leap in the process Cambria describes: taking a real-life fetish traditionally relegated to underground clubs and the ethereal back channels of the Web and moving it directly into a brick-and-mortar landmark in the middle of a city — unabashedly, with the conviction that both it and porn can belong there.
For those who feel that B.D.S.M. porn, or any porn, is toxic and reprehensible, the fact that at least some of it is being produced by thoughtful, educated young people might only be more troubling — a sign of how deep into respectable society it has reached. Then Cambria’s point would be more terrifying still: as such material stitches itself more tightly into the mainstream, through both its consumers and its producers, it strengthens its own legality. It makes itself unobscene.
But Acworth, for his part, seems to find hope in some of the developments of the last decade, signs that some unfortunate misunderstandings are being righted. I asked him what he would think if one day he could walk into Wal-Mart and find racks of constrictive leather corsets. “I think it would be great,” he said. Though at that point, he added, in a world so awash with kinkiness: “I’ll probably stop making money. But I won’t mind that. A life goal will have been completed.”
Early one morning in late February, a group of predominately Latino parents from a nearby elementary school and their principal arrived at the armory. They had taken Kink up on its offer of a tour.
Mothers hoisted their strollers in teams of two as Lisset Barcellos, Kink’s longtime executive producer, invited them down the central staircase. Speaking in Spanish, Barcellos led them through the basement, refurbished considerably in the month since that first shoot. On the fourth floor, she took them past a freshly painted medical set with a table of surgical tools and gynecological chair. This is where crews keep their supplies, she explained at one point, opening a prop crate with a drawer marked “Vibrators/Insertables.” Acworth, looking as if he just woke up, darted ahead of the tour, switching on lights, trying to be helpful.
Wild Bill and Claire Adams’s episode of Men in Pain would go online two days later. Kink was simultaneously opening several new sites and preparing an ambitious four-hour live feed of something called Device Bondage. (Its high-quality, streaming content would be lauded by the technology news site Cnet as an innovative way to stay ahead of the problem of piracy.) While opposition hadn’t died out in the Mission, the news coverage of it had, and the elementary-school group, for its part, seemed only faintly disgruntled, if at all. A few women asked to be warned the next time Kink had a party; the company had just been a host for 400 industry people, in town for the GayVN Awards, the so-called Oscars of gay porn. But someone also asked about holding school events in the armory.
The tour ended in the drill court. An enormous parade-float-like vehicle — built by Kink’s in-house carpenters and metalworkers for a recent arts festival — was parked in a far corner. It was made to look like an old Western saloon, with cactuses, bar stools and an upright piano. A poster advertised Peter Acworth for sheriff.+
Soon a dozen people had climbed onto the float, and Acworth took the driver’s seat. Suddenly he was piloting the women around the empty drill court in so many expansive loops — extremely fast, with a ****like impervious grin. After a while, he whirred his saloon to nearly the exact center of the arena. He parked. Behind him, the huddled mothers laughed. One, lowering her hips slightly, began to twirl her arm cavalierly over her head, as if working a lasso.
Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about designer dogs.
NY Times may want to know who you are before you can read the article.
Sorry but it is too long to post. Well...maybe not.
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The New York Times
April 29, 2007
A Disciplined Business
By JON MOOALLEM
Peter Acworth is 36 and trim, with a pale, boyish face. He grew up in the English Midlands, the son of a sculptor and a former Jesuit priest, and came to the United States in 1996 to get a Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He had already worked for Baring Brothers in London and was on track to do analytical research on Wall Street. Then, after his first year, he read in a British tabloid about a fireman who sold pornographic pictures on the Internet. “He had made a quarter of a million pounds over a short period doing nothing very clever at all,” Acworth told me not long ago, pointing to the clipping framed in his office in downtown San Francisco. “So I basically just ripped off that idea.”
Acworth has since built what is 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, each updated weekly with a new half-hour or hour video segment. Kink has 60,000 subscribers; access to each site costs about $30 a month. Acworth founded Kink’s first site, Hogtied, while still at Columbia. He purchased licensed digital photographs for content, many of which were simply old bondage-magazine spreads, torn out and scanned. Almost immediately, Hogtied made several hundred dollars a day — then, with a few ads in place, more than a thousand. In 1998, Acworth dropped out of grad school and moved to San Francisco, which he had always regarded as the world’s “fetish capital,” to run Hogtied full time. His mother worried that the lifestyle of a self-employed Web master might get lonely.
At the time, online porn was still an unruly if lucrative amateur hour. With the big companies of the San Fernando Valley — the center of pornographic video production — moving online sluggishly, if at all, a disparate crowd of upstarts was getting rich quickly. But just as quickly, the disarray of those early days soon constricted into a fiercely competitive, $3-billion-a-year American industry. “You can’t just throw up an adult Web site and watch the dollars roll in anymore,” says Kathee Brewer, editor of the trade magazine AVN Online, which covers the online adult industry. Many of the sites that have lasted, she adds, were founded, like Kink, by serious-minded, tech-oriented entrepreneurs working outside the influence of the porn establishment.
It has long been noted that the San Fernando Valley is increasingly populated by strait-laced corporate managers and not by the oily, medallion-wearing men we once assumed. But succeeding on the Web, or simply surviving its escalating demands, has required more sophisticated entrepreneurial types. With the Internet pushing porn discreetly into the homes of conventional consumers, making it more a part of everyday life and less seedy-seeming, the industry has been better able than ever to attract that sort of employee. That is, as pornography becomes a more mainstream product, it becomes an equally mainstream career. If anything, Kink may be an exaggerated example of just how ordinary pornographers will get, despite the wince-inducing grisliness of its content, which even by porn-industry standards is morbidly eccentric.
Talking with Kink’s 70 employees, the majority of whom are in their 20s or 30s, it would seem that porn has become just another career that creative people latch onto in the fog following college — years spent meandering between unpaid internships and dispiriting corporations, lashed with debt. 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. 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. A cameraman, one of several employees with film degrees, was not only laid off in the dot-com bust but also found himself owing $14,000 in a perplexing stock-option scheme gone sour. “I promised myself I would never work at a dot-com again, but here I am,” he said, and “it feels very much like the blissful dot-com days before the crash.” There are weekly catered lunches, a health plan stretching to vision insurance and, even harder to come by, a pervasive feeling of usefulness. Reena Patel, Kink’s vice president for marketing, who has an M.B.A. and previously worked at Merrill Lynch, told me, “I actually apply my education to this job.”
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, and my job doesn’t follow me.” Williams used to shoot for a smaller, more sinister-seeming S-and-M site that is now shut down. He lives in the suburbs and has a ****. “My wife and I watch ‘American Idol,’ ” he said, as if to show how average he is.
It was a recurring theme. 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.”
A few weeks after Patel and I first spoke, Kink incited a minor media blitz by purchasing, for $14.5 million, the State Armory and Arsenal in San Francisco as its new offices and studios. The armory, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is a 200,000-square-foot, brick, castlelike colossus in the Mission District. It had been abandoned by its only tenant, the National Guard, in the mid-’70s. After 30 years of disuse, its underground horse stables and ballroom; officers’ quarters, pool and banks of urinals; hockey-arena-like drill court with 70-foot ceilings and stadium seating — all of it — had attained a look of palatial depravity. It was the exact aesthetic Acworth and his directors had been struggling for so long to build from scratch. At the time the deed transferred in December, the basement pumps had shut off, and the creek that rushes through the armory subbasement had filled the old shooting range with several feet of water. Acworth was ecstatic. He imagined models waist-deep, with helmets and headlamps, or someone suspended over the waterline in a cage. “It could be very cinematic,” he told me.
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.
She laid her leather jacket over a concrete slab, and she and Bill sat down, nuzzling. Then she looked into the camera and, very cordially, spoke: “I’m Claire Adams.” “And I’m Wild Bill.” “And welcome to a very special Men In Pain update.” Just like that, like the opener of some fireside holiday special. They interviewed each other. She asked if there was anything she shouldn’t do, any ground rules. “I don’t like my ears being slapped,” he said.
They started on an old stage in the armory gymnasium, rundown to the point of missing its floorboards entirely and gathering trash — a Coke case, a poster advertising youth boxing classes once held here — in the underpinnings. There, Wild Bill was tied to a column and flogged. (There are rarely story lines in Kink’s porn, and acting is discouraged.) His crotch was slapped. Later, in the boiler room, he would be kicked and suspended from the ceiling on his back, like a hairy spider. In between takes, after Wild Bill mentioned getting a little back pain, Adams would adjust the cat’s-cradle of ropes.
ven as ****, Acworth told me, he liked seeing people bound. “I would get an erection while watching a cowboy-and-Indian movie where somebody was getting tied up,” he said, “which I didn’t really understand.” For a long time, he experimented by tying up himself, alone; he was shy and didn’t have a girlfriend until his 20s. It seemed natural that when starting Kink, he would gear his company toward the subculture around consensual sex play involving bondage, discipline, domination, submission and sadomasochism — the B.D.S.M. community. It was a way to indulge his own fetish but also a shrewd business decision. With a bondage site, Acworth told me, he knew what the customer wanted.
Initially, his instinct proved sound. But shortly after he moved to San Francisco to leap full time into the lavish free-for-all of online porn, Hogtied’s sales leveled off. Similar sites, often featuring the same licensed photographs, littered the Web. So Acworth started producing his own content in his spare bedroom. He would tether models to a homemade wooden scaffold, set up a tripod and film himself busily whipping, spanking and tickling them with various implements — all the while clicking still photos with a remote. He wore a black mask and called himself Peter Rogers in case he decided to abandon the stagnating business and return to Columbia.
The ways online porn was created, marketed and sold were beginning to be reinvented. Or, rather, they were finally being properly invented. Even by 1999, search engines like Yahoo were harder to outsmart, and Acworth’s tricks for getting Hogtied ranked highly no longer worked. He followed the lead of bigger porn sites, recruiting vast networks of “affiliates” to lure traffic to Kink’s sites with smartly placed ads, galleries of free samples, spam or other means. The industry’s first affiliates were hobbyists, amateur connoisseurs collecting their favorite online porn in galleries or directing others toward it in newsgroups. Today it’s a competitive industry in its own right, with self-employed, stay-at-home entrepreneurs using a variety of increasingly sophisticated advertising tools. Companies like Kink or Naughty America — another prominent suite of porn sites with far more conventional content (errant secretaries, hair-twirling co-eds) — now work with invisible sales forces of tens of thousands of affiliates.
But in those early years, with credit-card numbers circulating among unscrupulous Web masters and affiliates, various frauds proliferated. Prime among them was “credit-card banging,” whereby a person subscribing to one site might find he has been charged for a slew of others. For their part, customers found that they could easily repudiate charges they had authorized; Internet porn involved no physical delivery, and card companies, apt to take the nice suburban husband’s word over the pornographer’s, frequently issued chargebacks.
Such headaches were not limited to porn. But porn was one of the few things being rampantly bought and sold online, and the financial sector, which hadn’t yet worked out a viable system for e-commerce, scrambled to develop one on the fly. Many banks and credit-card companies, including American Express, refused to deal with porn; others steadily introduced stiffer regulations and fees for high-risk industries. A site with more than 2.5 percent of its purchases charged back could be subject to closer oversight and penalties; eventually, its merchant account, and thus its ability to process credit cards, might be revoked. Soon, the standard allowable chargeback ratio lowered to 1 percent. Third-party billing companies stepped in to process the charges through their own merchant accounts, but they routinely take 15 percent or more of each transaction. (Paypal, which charged as little as 2.9 percent, ceased dealing with porn in 2002.) For the typical, sloppy amateur — the lackluster guy with a digital camera and some lady friends — billing suddenly became a nightmare. “And without billing, it just don’t work,” says Gary Kremen, who founded both the porn site Sex.com and the dating site Match.com in the mid-’90s. “Because what are you going to do, send money in the mail?”
Kink has managed to retain its own merchant account, a rarity in the business. Acworth claims its chargebacks have always been minimal, in part because of the company’s own meticulousness but also, perhaps, because of the nature of its customers. “People that buy our content are people that are genuinely into the fetish,” he says. A B.D.S.M. enthusiast may spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on S-and-M paraphernalia or to attend fetish festivals like the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. “I think it probably tends to be a somewhat more refined clientele,” Acworth suggests. According to Scott Rabinowitz of Traffic Dude, an advertising consultant for the adult industry, high-quality niche sites have always been more profitable and attractive to affiliates. Narrowly targeted sites generally get a far higher percentage of their Web traffic subscribing. They also keep those customers longer; while most companies retain the average customer for less than three months, Rabinowitz suspects an average Kink subscriber stays at least three times as long. In fact, much of the industry has learned to be as specialized as Kink was from the start, with catch-all pornographic “megasites” making way for smaller, formulaic ones like My Friend’s Hot Mom or Chunky Angels. Meanwhile, Acworth’s second site was dedicated entirely to women having sex with large and distressingly elaborate machines. Another features water torture. Thus Kink seems to have survived all of these various shake-ups not only on Acworth’s business sense but his kinkiness.
By now, real success and longevity online require both technological skill and a certain fiduciary seriousness. Acworth put Kink’s stellar benefits in place partly so he could steal top-flight people away from mainstream corporations. In the Bay Area, Rabinowitz says, the dot-com bust fed an entirely new class of talent into porn: “Middle-food-chain technical players could come over and create pivotal roles for themselves.”
I met several dot-com era castoffs who were entrenched in Kink’s I.T. department and another, Paco Cohen, loading a crate of neatly cataloged riding crops and nipple pincers onto a truck the morning of the first armory shoot. Cohen, who was wearing blue-tinted glasses and a windbreaker with Colonel Sanders’s head embroidered on the breast, was a project manager for an AT&T affiliate in the area for four years. (“Baby-sitting for adults” is how he explained the job.) One day, he watched 700 people get laid off. Then he was told that his new boss was someone he had never heard of who worked in New Jersey. “I stayed there for two years just waiting to be laid off, and that was when I started hating it,” he said.
Later that afternoon, waiting for Wild Bill to be fitted with a gag, Cohen told me that a disproportionate number of Kink employees, himself included, graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz. “And that’s funny,” he said, because he felt the faculty there was trapped in a very 1970s, antiporn mind-set. Another, more recent Santa Cruz grad overheard our conversation and disagreed. The two debated it. Cohen told her that all of his professors had read way too much Andrea Dworkin. “Everything there is like a Marxist-feminist analysis,” he said dismissively.
Soon, with Wild Bill tied to his column again, Adams coiled leather twine around his testicles and cinched it tautly to the back of a wooden chair, some feet away. She crouched and flicked him with her finger, hard. I saw Cohen turn away, wrenching his face in what looked like the empathetic cringe men make. But it wasn’t. He was yawning.
Three days after the shoot, 60 Mission residents protested in front of the armory. While some gladly denounced the filth they had seen, or merely imagined, on Kink’s Web sites, the protesters as a whole seemed to believe, officially at least, that not being O.K. with porn was somehow politically incorrect.
“We’re not making moral judgments against pornography,” one woman said over a megaphone as the rain started. Another assured me, “We’re not a bunch of conservative reactionaries.” They just didn’t want Kink in their neighborhood — not near several community-outreach centers and schools. Even Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, in a statement sharing the neighbors’ general concerns, added the caveat, “While not wanting to be prudish. . . .”
Their frustration stemmed from deeper issues. Roberto Hernández, a Mission native, told me that the neighborhood “has been a train wreck” since the spate of evictions, largely of Latinos, during the dot-com boom. Its problems are legion — drugs, prostitution, vandalism — especially in the shadow of the derelict armory. “We’ve made numerous attempts as a community to get something positive into the building,” Hernández said. (Neighbors also helped quash various proposals including one for luxury condos.) It seemed as if some in the beleaguered community had come to view the armory as a 200,000-square-foot storehouse of infinite promise. Now, regardless of how unfeasible turning it into affordable housing or a recreation center actually was, there was no chance at all. The previous owner sold it discreetly, without any neighborhood input.
The protesters handed out placards. One read, “No Dead End Jobs,” and among Kink employees who heard about it the next day, this seemed to sting the most. Pamela O’Tey, one of two people in Kink’s accounting department, said that with her last employer, a large coffee corporation, she did auditing — period. “So I have to be appreciative of a company that is superwilling to teach you whatever you want to know,” she said. O’Tey hadn’t let Kink’s critics get to her. She understood their wariness; she has two young sons herself and is president of her P.T.A. “But today,” she told me later, “is the first day I felt like I might cry.”
As the protesters began chanting, “Shut Them Down,” the staff of a youth-services center gathered under umbrellas. The Mission is working to keep its **** out of prostitution and away from violence, they said. Kink, which they saw as standing for both, would now negate that work. The sad thing, one woman told me, is that a job at Kink “is probably a better opportunity than we can offer them. I’m sure they pay good. I’m sure it’s not slave wages there.”
While the rally continued, a few television crews were quietly lured through a side door to meet with Acworth. He looked anxious, silhouetted in the mammoth drill court. The instant he gleaned a reporter’s question, he would interrupt and, very hurriedly, sputter out the things he had been trying to communicate to his new neighbors: Kink’s impact could only be positive, he said. He would plant trees and light up the building, warding off the junkies and prostitutes; clean the graffiti and fix the windows; bring jobs to the city by renting the drill court as a sound stage for Hollywood films. As he frequently did, he invited any and all neighbors to visit the company and see what goes on there for themselves.
Acworth wanted to be outside communicating with the protesters, not hiding in his fortress. “If my message is that I’m available, I should be out there,” he said again to his staff, who had discouraged it. He fidgeted. He turned to the last camera crew, packing its gear, and asked: “What do you guys think? Do you think I should go outside?” Everyone said no, politely. Acworth fidgeted some more.
In a way, the armory, the titanic building itself, embodies the circumstances of porn these days: it is an exceedingly conspicuous presence in the community but also thoroughly sealed off and opaque. Kink could have tried to slip into the building innocuously, preserving that arrangement, yet Acworth seems bent on doing the opposite: he wants, very visibly and proactively, to be a good neighbor. (The week after the protest, he wrote an op-ed article for The San Francisco Chronicle, re-extending his open invitation to visitors.) Since the sale, he has been committed to making the armory’s two-foot-thick walls as transparent as possible — and B.D.S.M. along with it.
While Acworth clearly enjoys retelling Kink’s materialistic creation myth — the fireman article, the laughably easy money — he also describes the company as having a certain social mission. Too often, he told me, B.D.S.M. is conflated with **** or abuse. He realized early on that building a respectable company devoted to the fetish could help “demystify” it. People who felt conflicted about their kinkiness, as he once had, “would realize they’re not alone and, in fact, that there’s a big world of people that are into this stuff and that it can be done in a safe and respectful way. Loving partners can do this to each other.” Kink’s required pre- and post-scene interviews, like the one I watched Wild Bill and Adams tape, for example, are meant to break the fourth wall, assuring audiences that, as in real-life B.D.S.M. play, everything is negotiated in advance and rooted in a certain etiquette and trust — that everyone is friends. The company actually requires that each model be shown smiling during the segments.
Surprisingly, the commingling of pain and sex, the very core of Kink’s business, has long been unnerving within even the porn industry itself. For decades, the conventional wisdom among mainstream porn producers was that mixing the two, specifically showing bondage and intercourse simultaneously, might invite an obscenity prosecution. “People assumed that it was in the federal obscenity statute, that there was some specification about bondage and penetration,” says I. S. Levine, a k a Ernest Greene, longtime video director and screenwriter in the San Fernando Valley. “It just became one of these things everybody believed.” Bondage, he adds, was typically only shown in films without any visible penetration and sometimes hardly any nudity. Even Kink waited until 2005 before daring to show a man having intercourse with a bound woman.
This self-imposed prohibition likely stemmed from the Meese Commission, the attorney general’s controversial report on pornography released in 1986. The commission determined that some women were **** to perform in porn — particularly “in the fringe areas of bondage [and] sadomasochism” — and questioned how people could know whether a given S-and-M scene was or wasn’t documenting actual ****. “Obviously we are not dealing with people that can act, so they can’t act the pain,” one law-enforcement agent testified. (Last month, a Brooklyn federal court found a man guilty of sex trafficking and **** labor when a female “slave” testified that S-and-M acts he filmed and posted online were not consensual.)
Twenty years later, the subject of violent pornography’s effects on its audience is still debated. (Psychologists generally understand “violent pornography” as depictions of ****, coercion or some extreme imbalance of power; the term doesn’t specifically, or even necessarily, include B.D.S.M. porn.) Neil Malamuth, a U.C.L.A. psychologist, explains that the actual findings are nuanced enough to displease both sides of the political spectrum: heavy consumption of violent pornography is one of several risk factors that, working together, can increase the likelihood of sexual aggression in some men. The ambiguity of the research, according to Paul Cambria, an attorney who has represented the industry for 25 years, leaves pornography coupling sex to any depictions of violence potentially harder to defend.
According to the United States Supreme Court, one measure of obscenity is whether an average adult in the community would deem it obscene. In the Reagan era, federal attorneys often had a video from a Southern California porn studio sent to places like Tulsa or Birmingham and prosecuted the company when it arrived. Thus they could lock in a far-more-conservative community standard than that of Los Angeles. But it has always been unclear what community standard applies to the Web. Moreover, while the Reagan administration fervidly prosecuted pornographers, the Internet sprung up smack in the middle of the Clinton years, a relatively tranquil time for legitimate adult businesses.
Nevertheless, Levine says, the Web masters who first challenged the industry’s reticence about S-and-M weren’t seasoned pornographers accustomed to calculating such risks in the first place. They were “lifestylers” like Acworth and his directors, merely recreating what they saw all the time in underground clubs. “They set out to do what is natural to them,” Levine says, “and the roof didn’t fall in.”
Acworth, in fact, seems to police his content simply by the values of the B.D.S.M. community, laboring to make its playful, consensual spirit transparent. Given the ultimate subjectivity of obscenity law, he told me, he can only rely on his own comfort level. Like many companies, Kink has also developed a list of “shooting rules.” It bars things Acworth finds distasteful or dangerous, including crying, urination, blood and needle play, “**** models to put their heads down the toilet,” filming anyone who is drunk or high and electroshocks above the waist — except in certain cases, like when using “nipple clamps where the nipple completes the circuit.” Several industry people told me that Kink is known for treating its models courteously and professionally. “They are very ethical,” says Mark Spiegler, a porn talent manager, “which is not the norm in this business, either.”
Though President George W. Bush signaled he would renew vigorous obscenity prosecutions, the Justice Department never got around to any significant crackdown. Fetish sites like Kink carried on confidently and grew. At the same time, an unprecedented volume of porn has spurred producers to distinguish themselves with more extreme content — and, as that becomes commoditized and omnipresent, still more extreme stuff. By now, even the biggest DVD companies have gradually followed the lead of sites like Kink into S-and-M-themed or other edgy content. Levine directed “Jenna Loves Pain,” an S-and-M film for one of the industry’s largest studios, starring Jenna Jameson, one of the world’s most famous porn stars. Its tagline: “Look Who’s Learning the Ropes.”
Cambria, the attorney, says he sees pornographers of all stripes producing material now that they wouldn’t have touched eight or nine years ago. “Maybe many years with no consequences emboldened them,” he told me. “But it may very well have educated the public too, and that plays into the community-standard test.” The longer something is out in the open, and the more you see average people enjoying it, “the more you say, ‘Well, this is a part of America,’ ” he explained. “Familiarity leads to acceptance.”
The porn business, in short, has a community standard of its own. What starts on the fringes works its way to the center. And this affects all of us since, more and more, the center of porn culture has converged with the fringes of popular culture. But Kink’s purchase of the armory represents a quirky quantum leap in the process Cambria describes: taking a real-life fetish traditionally relegated to underground clubs and the ethereal back channels of the Web and moving it directly into a brick-and-mortar landmark in the middle of a city — unabashedly, with the conviction that both it and porn can belong there.
For those who feel that B.D.S.M. porn, or any porn, is toxic and reprehensible, the fact that at least some of it is being produced by thoughtful, educated young people might only be more troubling — a sign of how deep into respectable society it has reached. Then Cambria’s point would be more terrifying still: as such material stitches itself more tightly into the mainstream, through both its consumers and its producers, it strengthens its own legality. It makes itself unobscene.
But Acworth, for his part, seems to find hope in some of the developments of the last decade, signs that some unfortunate misunderstandings are being righted. I asked him what he would think if one day he could walk into Wal-Mart and find racks of constrictive leather corsets. “I think it would be great,” he said. Though at that point, he added, in a world so awash with kinkiness: “I’ll probably stop making money. But I won’t mind that. A life goal will have been completed.”
Early one morning in late February, a group of predominately Latino parents from a nearby elementary school and their principal arrived at the armory. They had taken Kink up on its offer of a tour.
Mothers hoisted their strollers in teams of two as Lisset Barcellos, Kink’s longtime executive producer, invited them down the central staircase. Speaking in Spanish, Barcellos led them through the basement, refurbished considerably in the month since that first shoot. On the fourth floor, she took them past a freshly painted medical set with a table of surgical tools and gynecological chair. This is where crews keep their supplies, she explained at one point, opening a prop crate with a drawer marked “Vibrators/Insertables.” Acworth, looking as if he just woke up, darted ahead of the tour, switching on lights, trying to be helpful.
Wild Bill and Claire Adams’s episode of Men in Pain would go online two days later. Kink was simultaneously opening several new sites and preparing an ambitious four-hour live feed of something called Device Bondage. (Its high-quality, streaming content would be lauded by the technology news site Cnet as an innovative way to stay ahead of the problem of piracy.) While opposition hadn’t died out in the Mission, the news coverage of it had, and the elementary-school group, for its part, seemed only faintly disgruntled, if at all. A few women asked to be warned the next time Kink had a party; the company had just been a host for 400 industry people, in town for the GayVN Awards, the so-called Oscars of gay porn. But someone also asked about holding school events in the armory.
The tour ended in the drill court. An enormous parade-float-like vehicle — built by Kink’s in-house carpenters and metalworkers for a recent arts festival — was parked in a far corner. It was made to look like an old Western saloon, with cactuses, bar stools and an upright piano. A poster advertised Peter Acworth for sheriff.+
Soon a dozen people had climbed onto the float, and Acworth took the driver’s seat. Suddenly he was piloting the women around the empty drill court in so many expansive loops — extremely fast, with a ****like impervious grin. After a while, he whirred his saloon to nearly the exact center of the arena. He parked. Behind him, the huddled mothers laughed. One, lowering her hips slightly, began to twirl her arm cavalierly over her head, as if working a lasso.
Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer, last wrote for the magazine about designer dogs.
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