“Is Porn Darling Kink.com Ripping Off Its Webcam Girls?”

SF Weekly

For connoisseurs of BDSM porn, San Francisco’s Kink.com has built up a reputation that makes them the sadomasochistic equivalent of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Fans of the company’s sites look to them not only for high-quality porn that caters to a wide variety of fetishes, but for an explicit ethical code. As cultural messages directly equating “sex work” with “trafficking” become stronger, Kink.com has established itself as the Good Guy of porn, where the models are there because they want to be and are able to stay safely within their personal limits.

These are not vague promises on Kink.com’s part: On its website, there’s a nine-point list of model’s rights that includes the right to safewords, sanitized toys, condoms, and STD tests. An even more detailed list of rules for shooting includes strict guidelines that prohibit directors from pressuring performers to go beyond their stated limits and outlines safety measures for specific kinds of scenes. Thanks to policies like this, many in the local BDSM and fetish communities regard Kink.com as one of their own, a remarkable achievement in a town as anti-corporate as San Francisco.

But now, as a labor dispute heats up at the company’s cam site, KinkLive, some people are taking a second look at that reputation. Maxine Holloway, a local artist, activist, and adult performer, is alleging that she was fired from KinkLive last month when she tried to organize her fellow performers in opposition to changes in the payment policy that would eliminate minimum payments for each shift in favor of a commission-only plan. The new plan, according to Holloway and her supporters, would amount to a drastic reduction in wages for most of KinkLive’s performers.

According to Holloway, she was fired from Kink.com immediately after she started trying to get KinkLive models to sign a letter protesting the new system of payment. Peter Acworth, CEO of Kink.com, denies that she was fired at all, instead saying that she was asked to take a temporary leave. “It was only a temporary thing,” Acworth says. “We asked her to take a break because her shows had turned nonprofitable. If she’s no longer on the site for a while, then she comes back, maybe it’ll be a different story.” According to Acworth, Holloway has already been invited to perform on KinkLive at the end of June. She acknowledges the invitation, but says she received it only last week, after the situation had gone public. …