San Francisco Blog

Oh please, get over yourself. Matt Smith's piece was poorly-written and that alone should have been enough to shame SF Weekly into a retraction.

This and your last piece here also continue to put your paper in a really unprofessional light. Instead of picking nits and tilting at windmills, perhaps you could do us all a favor and find someone else who's more coherent to defend your paper.

With so many on the Kink.com side of things making wild accusations of bad facts and worse writing, it seems as though criticizing Violet Blue's own missteps has been rendered exceedingly fair game.

For my part, Kink lost my business when their product turned exceedingly more mean-spirited and just plain WEIRD, as in the case of the borderline crazy project, "The Upper Floor." Their ongoing attempts to turn this debate about Matt Smith's article into anything other than a discussion of Kink's abuse of ETP have likewise left a bad taste in my mouth.

Even with the childishness of Kink and its supporters, I must say that SF Weekly isn't helping matters by stirring the pot. These people are fringe sorts AT BEST, and if they choose to be offended and make noise amongst themselves... so what? Until they're willing to address Kink's wrongdoing in terms of ETP funds, there's no debate to be had.

Guess all that criticism stung, eh? Oh, good.

It's highly ironic that anyone defending the piece of misdirecting crap that was the original article should demand a correction from anyone else.

So let's see now. Anyone who doesn't agree with anything published in SF Weekly is a thin-skinned whiny liberal...

Sorry Ben, most of the nitpicking, defensive whining I see comes from yours and Matt's quarters.

"That's a natural curiosity. "Thin skinned and whining" would be to accuse a reporter - like Matt Smith - of an anti-sex bias just because he doesn't pay sufficient homage to anybody's particular kink in a story about government spending."

Um, no. If Smith wanted to simply stay on topic, he would have stuck to the issue of Kink.com and its use of ETP funding for its employees. Instead he chose to introduce some very loaded language about "torture porn", cast nasty aspersions on whether the acts shown in Kink's videos are actually consensual, and back it all up not with any discussion with Kink workers or models, but with quotes from anti-porn ideologue Melissa Farley. I'm sorry, that amounts to a pushing an agenda above and beyond the narrow issue of ETP funds. This isn't a lack of "pay sufficient homage to anybody's particular kink", but rather an outright attack on those particular kinks and by extension, the larger BDSM community. And now Smith and other SF Weekly columnists have the nerve to cry foul just because the larger BDSM community that was directly attacked by such rhetoric actually responded. That is, in a word, thin-skinned.

If you want an analogy, say a reporter broke as story on misappropriated funding in the SF LGBT Film Festival. This, of course, would be an entirely appropriate story for any local reporter. Now say said journalist took it a little further and started throwing in barbs about anal sex, AIDS, and gerbiling, and for good measure, decided to ask Rick Warren for his take on the issue. The latter case would be rightly accused of pursuing an anti-gay agenda, and protests that said journalist was just exposing financial impropriety would be rightly dismissed as a smoke screen.

And as for the larger agenda of SF Weekly, well, its pretty obvious to many of us who have been following SF Weekly coverage of sexual politics that your paper has been pursuing a clearly sexually conservative agenda that is right-wing in substance, if not in explicit affiliation. This has been going on for the last three years and is particularly evident in article by Eliza Strickland, Benjamin Wachs, and Matt Smith. In particular, why these writers have decided to carry water for the extremist sexual politics of Melissa Farley is anybody's guess, but in doing so, certainly have no case in putting anybody else down for supposedly pushing a fringe agenda.

"So can you really not tell the difference between us and a “sexually conservative,” “right wing” agenda? "

just because you've never come out against something doesn't excuse you from irresponsible journalism.

Moreover-what does the use of the word "torture porn" have to do with a business that recieves government funding?

ESPECIALLY, when the common conception of "torture" is what it is in the current climate. The fact is that there WAS a story there, but removing funding for a legitimate business was not it. Depicting a community as abusive and "coerced" served the story how?

It's divisive language like what was in the article that can get innocent people hurt because people believe that these people are "torturing" other people.

So yes-you deserve all the crap you get for this because You, the SF Weekly and Matt Smith were collectively irresponsible regardless of whatever "long standing" opinions" you might have, the use of hateful remarks towards the community is wrong and should not be tolerated.

KTVU seemed to ge through the story without equating a loving consensual community as "abusive"...so wtf?

Think of it this way- you wouldn't call it "F*ggot Porn"...or maybe you would and that's the point. Just because you're for gay marriage doesn't mean you're excused from making bad decisions. The article had merit-but all of the merit was lost when you and Matt and the SF weekly chose to use hate and instigation.

furthermore-you assumed that everyone in disagreement worked for kink.com and that is simply not true. You have responses from Spain, New york-people that have never even been to Kink.com and they still view your depiction as hateful and something that could endanger innocent people. If you want to continue to deny wrongdoing and the outrage from the community, that is fine. That's your choice, but don't pretend that you don't know why "people are so angry". Liberals make hateful remarks too, it is just more pathetic when they do it.

I would like the money for the 184 hours of training that Matt Smith recieved back, please, because it's obvious to me that it was a waste.