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BDSM and Transgression 2.0

The Case of Kink.com
GRANT KIEN
study of BDSM (Bondage, Domination, Submission, Sadism, Masochism) to discuss some effects of contemporary media on notions of sexual transgression. The study employs a classic critical cultural studies analysis of the popular online porn site Kink.com, and an informational depth interview I conducted with its founder and CEO, Peter Ackworth, in October 2010. Through a historiography of BDSM I illustrate the evolution of a subculture of subversive erotic practices closely related to the evolution of the Internet. Our civilization drives technology to ever greater feats, resulting in both intended and accidental changes to our environment and culture. As I have pointed out in previous work (Kien 2009), an intended change of the rapid seamless convergence of mobile and networked technologies into our everyday experiences, for instance, suggests that the concept of a separate virtual and physical reality, once taken for granted, is rapidly becoming nonsensical. The effect of this is the ontological impossibility of maintaining a separation of worlds and consequences. This impossibility seems to manifest quite noticeably in terms of erotic aesthetics and performativity, in which the everyday consumption and performance of kinky erotics over the past two decades appears to correlate with an online commodification and proliferation of kinky pornography. In this context, new rules and norms are established even while old cultural forms, including norms and mores, get remediated into new technological formats and performative scripts. I suggest that transgressions are one of the surest and clearest ways to identify what those rules, norms, and mores are, as they in theory cause the entire system to ripple with the effort to explain, contain, or co-opt them. Researching BDSM and its relation to Internet technology has revealed the development of a transgressive global community and subculture through online coordination over the past twenty years. Along the way, numerous aspects of this subculture have become intentionally
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mainstreamed through the very same medium that enabled its inception. This mainstreaming process seems to involve at least three steps: first, the steady commodification of what began as a derelict virtual commons populated by deviants; second, the enclosure of virtual spaces that were considered profane until their appropriation by capitalism; and third, the legitimation of certain erotic practices, many of which, until recently, were considered perverse and even symptomatic of mental illnesses. The development of Kink.com as a prominent corporate entity exemplifies these steps in both the nurturing and capitalist appropriation of a subculture: in its rise to online dominance in BDSM pornography, as an advocate for the acceptance of BDSM by mainstream society, and in its corresponding growth as a formidable physical communal presence in the city of San Francisco. In effect, Kink.com has developed into a node centering a particular network assemblage of peoples, technologies, and practices within what I suggest is a neotribally defined BDSM community. McLuhan (1995) described the phenomenon of neo-tribalism as a tribal formation structured through the use of electronic media. While Maffesoli (1996) is often referred to as introducting the term to sociological parlance, Baumans (1998) rendering of McLuhans original idea on a global scale is the notion at play in this analysis. Through its commodification and mainstreaming of previously transgressive erotic practices coalescing around the exchange of erotic aesthetics, Kink.com thus exemplifies the perfect smudging of virtual and physical environments into a singularized reality.

performing Transgression
To ground this discussion, I shall begin with the obvious statement that transgression is always cultural in nature, even in the juridical sense of breaking the law. Transgression is, then, the appearance of violating cultural norms. Drawing from Careys (1989) ritual model of communication and Nightingales (2003) description of audiencetext relationships, my analysis assumes that moral codes are scripted within a sociocultural symbolic order that then gets enactedor, in the language of symbolic interactionism, performedin the material world. As new media formats are created and popularized, old scripts become remediated into new formats, and new scripts specific to the new medium may also erupt from interactions with and around the technology. For example, the repurposing and improvisation with texts such as Star Trek by Trekkies, or The Rocky Horror Picture Show by active audience members, demonstrate the eruption of new scripts specific to particular media and content. Changes in representations of sexuality throughout the twentieth century show that sexuality as a performative script has been excessively malleable in terms of its moral symbolic (and hence material/enacted) form. This process has

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of course been discussed at length by Foucault (1977), but it is important to consider that even within the past few decades, masturbation has been transformed from a sexual perversion to an indication of sexual health in popular discourses of sexuality. In this chapter, I focus on phenomena of sexual deviance including discourses and practices of perversion, kink, and sexual fetish. The relatively recent emergence of what is known as the BDSM community, comprising practitioners of these three and a few other categories of sexual deviance, provides a rare opportunity to study the correlation of the development of a new media platform in relation to changes in social norms. A historical dependency of BDSM on the Internet as a community-forming and discursive tool has been documented in various ways, which makes the examination of BDSM an important case study in coming to understand transgression in a web 2.0 world.

What is a 2.0 World and a 2.0 Condition?

Throughout this chapter, I use the term 2.0 world to refer to our present digital globally networked civilization, in which people and our global media apparatus seemingly ubiquitously interconnect us, and we share content with one another on a global scale. The 2.0 condition is such that time is typically experienced as instant and always accessible, and space is often experienced as an inconsequential barrier, especially since the 2.0 experience is rooted in aesthetics. Previous research I have conducted on this condition (see Kien 2010) has demonstrated that the global media apparatus in its current incarnation depends a great deal on the appropriation of user-generated content to keep the media system generating economic value. In the work presented here, the capitalist appropriation of user-generated cultural norms, values, logics, and practices are the issue. One unmistakable finding of this study is that in the case of Kink.com, many pre-web 2.0 sexual transgressions which used to be kept private (i.e. kept out of mainstream/popular media) and discussed only in terms of medical illness have, in a 2.0 media condition, been commoditized and widely distributed to a global market, while others continue to languish in a standing reserve of deviance. Marketed thus, some new world transgressions remain consistent with the past definition of sexual transgression: the sudden shocking revelation of sexual practices that are generally not discussed in a positive light and are kept hidden from public view. The question is, then, what remains hidden from view and why? Rather than a simple break with mainstream morality by isolated individuals, I suggest the commodification of BDSM effects a sophisticated moral system achieved through the remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1998) of tastes and values entrenched in consumerist, quasi-psychological categorizations of individual sexual tastes. My research on BDSM and Kink.com reveals that in a 2.0 world, the content is not the main issue in this practice of

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consumer society identity building. Rather, the building of ones personal brand of sexual expression within the broader rubric of sexual identity, in which BDSM represents a catalog of extreme signifying styles and practices, is emphasized through the open, freely circulating signifiers available through the Internet. Thus, transgression in terms of online erotic aesthetics is that which cannot be successfully commoditized and brought to market as a desired exchange commodity. Rather, such human practices get assigned to a purgatory of negative speculation and used as a comparative dark side of the sanctioned (through successful commoditization) aesthetic representation of the BDSM community until such time that they can be called forth to be aesthetically appropriated and successfully commoditized for mass consumption. It is of course the case that virtual world activities have physical world implications, for which consumers of pornography in general are quite grateful as it aids in satisfying a basic physical need. Beyond the sensational experience of consuming BDSM porn, however, I contend that this media condition contributes to a panoptic system of policed sexuality (Foucault 1979, 1990), in which many mainstream consumers further entrench distance between their consumption of porn and practices of BDSM in the physical world. In a post-networked world, our newest transgressions remain based on a rather timeless principle: the hiding of certain practices from social condemnation. In the case of Kink.com, certain erotic practices are kept from the moral judgment of consumers by simply refusing to enter them into the arena for discussion. It is important to recognize that however familiar and ancient the principle of social concealment may be, evolutions in digital media both make new methods of constructing transgression possible and at the same time reveal the arbitrariness (and conceptual fragility) of all things codified as transgressions. For Carey (1989), successful communication as culture occurs when a shared sense of community is formed through communicative practices. Extrapolating from this understanding, breaks with a sense of ritual and shared community may signal transgressions in society. That is to say, whereas communal recognition and identification with individuals practices as normal and consistent with the dominating symbolic order signify belonging, failure of a community to recognize and identify with individuals practices as normal signifies transgression. For Stuart Hall (2003), a failure to have meaningful discourse between the sending and receiving parties in discursive formations can happen in a number of ways, but to qualify as a transgression in the way I am using the term, there must be the invocation of an oppositional reading. That is, the receiving party must adequately understand the intended meaning in order to reject (i.e. transgress, behave contrary to) the message, rather than just reject it based upon unintelligibility. This is clearly the case with BDSM and Kink.com.

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Kink.com and the bDsM subcultural Community

The invention of BDSM is firmly rooted in a discursive community of people who sought one another out to share their ideas and everyday erotic practices that transgress the cultural norm. At the same time, these people have been keenly aware of how their everyday erotic practices their transgressionshave kept them from sharing a sense of community with mainstream society. Hence, as read through Hebdige (1979), a transgressive subculture formed by appropriating and subverting the codes of mainstream culture, thereby challenging mainstream taken-for-granted understandings of sexual and erotic normalcy. Peter Ackworth describes himself and Kink.com as part of the BDSM community, and an advocate for the understanding and acceptance of kink in mainstream culture. This shared sense of community is most visibly reflected in the production side of Ackworths business, as his talent pool and many production personnel are drawn from the San Francisco and broader BDSM community of which he has personally been a member for many years. As part of his personal credo, Ackworth has been a long-time advocate for the broader acceptance of BDSM, and has not been hesitant to build this into part of the mission of his business. In our interview, he described plans for community outreach that included his envisioning of an educational program (KinkU. com), and he mentioned that he has given financial and in-kind assistance in various forms over the years to kinky community organizations. Meanwhile, it stands to reason that beyond the social benefit, Kink.com has a vested interest in the mainstreaming of BDSM, as it is both a way to expand the BDSM pornography market and build a solid alliance of popular support should there ever come a moralistic legal challenge to the business. However, in terms of business practice, Kink.com seems to make a committed effort to show what goes on behind the scenes and behind the boardroom doors of the company. For example, pre- and post-shoot interviews with the models are included in every video package to show a spirit of consensual erotic fun, and their portal includes a website of behindthe-scenes content. When I asked Ackworth (2010) about his commitment of resources to these non-profit-generating aspects of his business, he reiterated his personal commitment to demystify the process of Kink.coms BDSM porn production and his goal of a broader acceptance of BDSM by mainstream society. Moreover, I suggest that it is an oppositional understanding of the signifying order of sexuality that motivates BDSM subcultural community members to apprehendin a sense, to confiscatethe signifiers of erotic deviance. In as much as one might attempt to uniformly generalize motivations of a subculture, the goal is to displace the dominant reading of BDSM practices as negative and abnormal with the subcultures preferred reading. But within the BDSM community proper, the result is tension and

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struggle between various structures of meaning (which inform individual opinions) held by the numerous different people who comprise the community. As actor-network theorists have pointed out, it isnt an issue of which translation of everyday practice is correct, but rather which has the strongest network of alliances that allows it to dominate the discussion (Latour 1988). However, in pornography, this is seldom an issue, as it is often the most taken-for-granted assumptions about transgressions that enable their commoditization. Hence, for Kink.com, the decision is fairly easy to settle, as it is the alliance of consumer with commodity that directs which transgressions become commodified and which become reified as undesirable and relegated to a psychologically or morally determined categorical container until such time that they might find a more sympathetic consumer base that allows them to be taken to market. Moving forward from these two theoretical premises, the following pages demonstrate the process of how the above-described elements work together to create a new formation of erotic transgression in a -2.0 world. After a quick clarification of terminology and context, I will discuss the medium and what is unique about the channel of delivery for Kink.coms content. Next, I will consider the content and what may or may not be different about it in light of the technological changes in the medium. Finally, I will speculate on some of the theoretical implications of social interactions around the medium. While the case study at the center of this analysis is the highly successful commercial porn website Kink.com and its founder Peter Ackworth, its sociocultural role can only realistically be understood when contextualized among community-based web and physical presences such as Fetlife.com, the San Francisco Society of Janus, San Franciscos weekly Bondage a Go Go event, and the San Francisco Citadel BDSM playspace.

The invention of bDsM online

The invention of the acronym BDSM is tied directly to the evolution of Internet technology. There are very few print sources from which to glean a timeline of its development as a concept and a community of practice.1 However, numerous online sources corroborate a popular understanding of BDSMs origin and development into a subcultural lexicon forged by an online community.2 The letters BDSM themselves represent the erotic practices of bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism. However, BDSM as a communal scene and subculture also appropriates the erotic terms kink, fetish, and perversion. For the purposes of this chapter, the term kink refers to what many might consider uncommon acts that bring erotic gratification to the practitioner. Fetish refers to the erotic desire and use of objects, including objectified (i.e. fetishized) peoples. Perversion refers to any type of eroticism that

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lays outside the purview of mainstream erotic practices (which are labeled vanilla by those in the BDSM scene). Although definitions and interpretations of what BDSM properly signifies have been struggled over within the community, and indeed continue to be a subject of ongoing discussion, what is significant to understand here is that this amalgamation of erotic practices and the eruption of the signifier BDSM occurs at a specific technological moment in history. According to various sources, in the late 1980s and early 1990s selfidentified kinky people and practitioners of S&M began to connect with one another anonymously on the Internet (see Shadow 2002; TheMunch.org 2007; Wiseman 2003). For the first time, enabled by Internet technology, people around the globe (mainly in the USA) whose sexual practices were considered abnormal and perverse were able to find one another in common purpose with relatively little risk to their everyday lives. Within a matter of a few short years, an online subculture had formed around practices which were until that point largely kept secret and isolated, or part of a derelict and often dangerous street scene. As Jay Wiseman (1999) describes:
SM was a lot more taboo and widely condemned than it is now. The SM communitysuch as it waswas much smaller and more underground than it is now, and the different groups tended to be smaller and more isolated than they are now. We didnt know as much as we do now, and what knowledge did exist was harder to findother than by personal trial and error. Almost all of the books, clubs, and so forth that exist today didnt exist back then. The main teaching of the time was that being interested in SM wasnt in and of itself proof that someone was seriously mentally ill.

As individuals began to recognize that they were in fact not alone in their so-called deviance, communities centered on kinks and fetishes sprung up, and BDSM as a sanctioned and policed set of practices between consenting adults began to institutionalize. The key discussion boards at the time were the Usenet newsgroups alt.sex-bondage, alt.sex.beastiality, and alt. sex-stories. This was not uncontested; the alt.sex groups hosted by the University of Waterloo, for instance, were shut down in 1994 3 as they were judged to violate the criminal code of Canada.4 It is important to note here that what became the BDSM community in the 1990s and into the present owes considerable homage to the Leather movement as part of the Queer Nation struggle. The important role of the Queer Leather community is often overlooked in the casual telling of BDSM history, even in spite of the fact that it is the Leather flag that BDSM practitioners eventually adopted as their own. Although Kink.com includes at least five exclusively gay porn sites and frequently flies the Leather flag above its studio and office site, the SF Armory, Ackworth expressed his

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surprise when I informed him of the origin of the flag during our faceto-face discussion. Thus here we have an indication of one of the first remediations of a pre-2.0 oppression: the erasure of queer history. While queer voices have been an important part of the BDSM community throughout its evolution, BDSM as a practice is often represented in the mainstream as an unproblematized heteronormative power erotics practiced between loving, often married, heterosexual couples, disconnected from the political struggles of oppressed peoples. Bisexuality and heteroflexibility are commonly expressed identities in the BDSM community, and homosexuality is an important identity within the BDSM scene, though less common than hetero.5 However, acknowledgment of the pre-Internet struggles, battles, and gains of the Queer Leather community on behalf of kinksters and fetishists is important and significantly underrepresented. In Leather bars and dungeons in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the Old Guard established many of the practices, rules, and protocols that, along with fantasy novels such as the anonymously published The Story of O (1954),6 would later become the foundational texts of the burgeoning BDSM community. The Leather community and the BDSM community continue in the present to exist side by side, sharing a flag, duplicating numerous practices, and often intermingling at events such as the annual Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. However, Queer Leather culture remains its own distinct gay identity, with its own bars and gay events that, while often not exclusive, are clearly different from the hetero-dominated BDSM community. Encouraged by discussions on the Alt.sex newsgroup and other forms of anonymous discussion, kinksters in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco Bay area decided to take things a step further and meet up in person. What began as a small gathering of like-minded people munching on burgers at a local restaurant (the Flames coffee shop in Santa Clara, CA) over the course of a few years became institutionalized as a regular meeting dubbed a Munch (at Kirks Steakhouse in Palo Alto, CA). Within a short time, munches were happening throughout the U.S.A. and even in other nations, and the global online community of kinky people began to assert itself in physical space. By the mid-1990s, kink was out of the closet to those who sought it out, and had become a subcultural lifestyle choice for many people. This time frame also saw some important technological leaps that made it possible for mainstream society to access these subcultural forms. In the mid-1990s, three technological advances radically changed the range of choices for the construction of sexual subjectivity and erotic aesthetic consumer options available to mainstream society: the compressed image file format, the invention of the World Wide Web, and advances in the adoption and use of the Internet as a point of sale.7 The development of the compressed image format significantly sped up the time it took to transfer picture files over the Internet, reducing the transfer time from

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hours to minutes, and eventually, seconds. Coupled with the invention of the Internet browser which enabled viewing of graphics within web pages, web users were able to view and share images relatively easily online. Within a couple of years, the invention of compressed video file formats made the same phenomenon possible with video. The creation of the World Wide Web made it possible for users around the globe to easily navigate from website to website, significantly deterritorializing the cyberspace experience. Content became geographically unbordered, and in a new phase of McLuhans global village (1995) users gained access to cultural spectacles that had previously been unavailable or off limits. Finally, the commercialization of the Internet effectively put a point of sale in every home that had Internet access and a credit card. Able to shop in the privacy of their own homes, many consumers began to take advantage of the opportunity to discreetly explore their sexual desires, acquiring images and videos that appealed to their erotic appetites.8 Pornography exploded online, and in many respects pioneered numerous important developments in online marketing and Internet business practices. One of the early Internet entrepreneurs to recognize the opportunity the Internet offered in the pornography business was the aforementioned Peter Ackworth. Ackworth describes his own entry into the online world of kinky pornography as a business decision inspired by stories he had heard of other people who were making money by putting porn online, guided by his own erotic taste. He started out much like most others in that time period, scanning and mounting borrowed images on his website without much regard for copyright issues. His site, Hogtied.com, grew in popularity. As his business developed, he found that he needed a continual supply of fresh content that couldnt be found elsewhere to maintain his community of repeat customers and build his web traffic. His solution to the problem was to move from Europe to San Francisco, set up a studio in a rented apartment, recruit female models and actors from the local kink and sex worker scene, and shoot still and video footage of himself interacting with the women he hired. For many years, Ackworth was the sole employee of what would develop into one of the worlds largest kinky pornography businesses. Ackworths career as a pornographer has spanned the maturation of the Internet over the past fifteen years, constructing his Kink.com enterprise through the establishment of numerous online porn sites. All the while, he has been an active participant in the San Francisco kinky scene, and has cultivated an audience of consumers of kinky porn that interact both through the consumption of his websites pornography and through user forums. In the present day, web communities such as Tribe.com and, more popularly, Fetlife.com, have arisen to replace the void left by the early newsgroup forums and continue to unite kinksters and fetishists on a global scale. Ackworth and many of his employees and models may easily be found on such social networking sites. Meanwhile,

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kinky dating sites such as Bondage.com, Alt.com, Collarme.com, and numerous others connect individuals with compatible erotic tastes.

naughty Content: a new Type of old script

If we were to determine innocence by measures of naivety and good intentions, we might conclude that there are many innocent people. However, Durham and Kellner (2006) point out that there are no innocent texts. All cultural artifactstextual, performative, and materialare laden with meaning, values, biases, and messages. This means that in spite of any intentions of their originators, all cultural artifacts participate in advancing relations of power and subordination. Prejudices like class, gender, race, sexuality, abelism, age, etc. are encoded within our artifacts and messages, as it is culture and history rather than any one persons intentions that constructs our structures of learned meanings. Culture thus constitutes a set of discourses, stories, images, spectacles, cultural forms, and practices which generate meaning, identities, and political effects. As Ackworth described to me, early Internet pornographers often began their businesses through remediation of old images, by simply scanning pictures and mounting them online. Along with these images also came the remediation of narratives. To make it possible to acquire a constant supply of original content and thereby build his consumer base, he set up a studio in his apartment and began to produce film and video content for his first porn website, Hogtied.com. At that time, he did everything from the coding on the website to the filming and shooting to setting up and interacting on camera with the models in the scenes he was shooting. It was literally a one-person business, as the models worked on a shoot-by-shoot contract basis. When I asked where the ideas for his early pornographic scenes came from, he described his early work as the re-enactment of scenes hed seen in magazines, and in particular House of Milan (aka HOM, Inc.). It is perhaps not surprising then that his first website, Hogtied.com, closely resembled the name and themes of the HOM publication Hogtie. The reproduction of scenes from these and other texts such as the aforementioned Story of O and Laura Antonious Marketplace series continue to figure prominently in Kink.com productions in the present. This is evidenced by both a review of their online library of content and perhaps more tellingly in the creation of Kink.coms Upper Floor, which is both a set and functioning BDSM party room fashioned after a room described in The Story of O. Kink.com also follows a very narrative formula in its productions traditional in most pornography, typically ending the onscreen play with an (male) orgasm (aka money shot). Hence, the case of Kink.com clearly illustrates Bolter and Grusins (1998) concept of remediation (i.e. the content of any new medium is the old medium it replaces), and the reproduction of aesthetic codes of deviance and power-erotics. Interestingly, Ackworth described the

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relationship of pornography to the public BDSM scene as imitative in the opposite direction. Ackworth employs what he calls BDSM lifestylers in production roles, pays attention to feedback from participants, and involves the BDSM community in productions in various ways (as extras, for example) to ensure the integrity of authenticity in his productions. With such attention to the construction of authenticity, one might then assume that Kink.com is capitalizing on performative spectacles one might find in the public scene. According to Ackworth, however, the relationship of BDSM porn images to the public scene flows in the direction of life imitating art. He described that performers must play to the camera, not necessarily to each other or a public audience, to work well as pornography. Rather than recreating images one might witness in the public scene for sale on Kink. com, he has seen his own scenes reproduced in public dungeons and play spaces such as the SF Citadel and Bondage-a-go-go. He has seen people use pictures and scenes that he himself designed to express what they want to do, then recreate them to the best of their ability. Theoretically, Nightingales (2003) work on [audience-text] explains that we can expect this appropriation of texts by audience members as part of their meaningful everyday existence. As she points out, audiences act out the text for their own purposes, and use the text to improvise upon, sometimes inventing embellishments that go far beyond the original narrative. To return to the question of how these naughty texts are reproducing oppressions and traditional notions of transgressions, the most obvious problematic narrative elements are the traditional issues that arise in pornography in general: male/female power dynamics, unchallenged stereotypes, and moral judgments of their existence in the first place to name just a few. However, BDSM aesthetics often stands female/male power dynamics on their head, with women commanding, overpowering, and torturing men. Stereotypes are likewise often inverted or played up to the point of caricature, and in the case of Kink.com, there is a set of protocols that ensure the content doesnt upset obscenity laws. The effectiveness of these tensions on mainstream attitudes about sexuality is worthy of lengthy discussion, but for this chapter, what is more relevant is the way in which these remediations have given rise to a new type of transgressive morality. That is, a system of moral categorization based on the ability to commodify transgressions. While Ackworths contributions to the BDSM community have been positive in many aspects, the limits to Kink.coms textual interventions are ultimately guided by financial concerns. As Ackworth put it, the companys list of prohibited content is limited by what he feels the audience can tolerate in terms of sales. In response to my question, How does BDSM continue to push the boundaries of sexual expression into the future? Ackworth explained: There will always be extremes that the mainstream

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society will find objectionable. I dont want to get more hardcore theres not a big market for more extreme content, it doesnt really appeal to the masses. People accept it, but dont choose it. Hence it is ultimately the logic of the paying market that limits the amount of freedom of BDSM expression fought for in popular media as exemplified by Kink.com. This is new in the sense that it is the market policing the discourse of power erotics rather than the traditional medical-psychology approach to regulation. This is not to condemn Ackworth or Kink.com, as they are simply operating as businesses do, and if judged by intention as described at the beginning of this section, he and his producers would appear to be rather innocent. Rather, the point is to demonstrate how BDSM texts have given rise to a redefinition of transgression in a 2.0 world, and to acknowledge that online pornography has played a role in its change.

The business of selling bDsM

The Frankfurt School described the culture industries as being concerned with the industrialization and mass production of culture. The three main criteria of the industrialization of culture include commodification, standardization, and massification. The industrialization of porn online is no exception to this. Rather, as a business greatly concerned with aesthetics, the Internet has made it possible to industrialize pornography with incredible efficiency. However, as I suggested above, the ease of duplication and disregard for copyright online made a steady stream of new content essential in securing repeat customers to porn websites. In this context, sexual transgressions have been steadily reappropriated as a frontier of capital. Of course, porn is as old as drawing itself, but what is unique in the 2.0 world is the exponential increase in pace of appropriation and opportunities for distribution. This has driven mass production, standardization, and mass distribution to new heights in terms of the consumption of eroticism. While this has undoubtedly contributed to some realignment of cultural values in terms of sexuality through visual reconstructions, it has done nothing to intervene in the economic logic of our culture. Rather, it works towards the legitimation of the existing capitalist system, and all of these principles can be exemplified by the case of Kink.com. Horkheimer and Adorno (1995) pointed out that organizations and institutions overpower individuals, and as such individuals are only as powerful as the institutions to which they belong. However, the main types of institutions/organizations that capitalism creates are businesses, motivated by profit. Products are secondary to the institution of the business itself. A key feature of consumer society is uniformity of needs and desires, and mass society is based on conformity to (or at least general agreement on) social norms. The culture industry works to filter common sense, and thus mass culture comes to dominate social interaction and discourse. Since

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standardization and uniformity are essential to massification, the same ideas must be present in multiple facets of culture. To be successful, the ideas reflected in mass culture and mass consumption must work towards reification of the social order, and must not radically disrupt it. The commodification of fetish is no exception to this theory. As it collapses fetishism (erotic desire of objects and erotic objectification of people) into commodity fetishism labeled as erotic taste, popularity of the resulting product in the market is taken as proof of its legitimate acceptance by society. In the case of BDSM acts, this effectively supplants the formerly oppositional reading into the dominant position, creating a new normal much like that described by Warner (2000) in his discussion of Queer representation and identity. Precedents in the pornographic magazine industry, such as Larry Flints various legal victories in his protracted battle for pornographic content in the name of freedom of expression, demonstrate that obscenity is in a constant state of redefinition (see Kipnis (1996) for an in-depth discussion of this issue). However, since successful commodification redefines certain BDSM acts as legitimate, the definition of obscenity becomes that which cannot be brought to mass market. Interpreting Cindy Shermans work, Laura Mulvey (1991) theorized that obscenity is the close-up, describing the revelation of the interior of things as horrific. Similarly, Benjamin (1969) illustrated that in consumer society we strive to bring things closer, and that mechanically reproduced media make distant objects seem attainable to the masses. A logic of universal equality of things thus becomes widespread, and this is especially so online. That is to say, no one thing seems to be more or less valuable than any other. In the online environment, for example, there is little to distinguish one mass-distributed jpeg image files value as being any more or less than any other mass-distributed jpeg image file. With this logic of universal equality, all aesthetics of erotics become equalized. However, as Heidegger (1977) pointed out, the result of technology is not to bring things closer, but rather to maintain a universal distancelessness which neither brings things closer nor pushes them further away. Consumption of online pornography is a scopophillic pleasure, bringing the image into view, but of course consumers still cannot touch the image itself, much less so the models in the image. The porn consumers reconciliation is found in touching themselves. The implication for the case of online porn is that the consumption of BDSM is not the doing of BDSM; it is, rather, an ironic aesthetic alliance with BDSM and its actual everyday practitioners through the doing of capitalistic consumption. What then are some of the changes in social patterns and behavior resulting from this situation? Perhaps most obvious, interest in and consumption of BDSM pornography, such as extreme bondage, pain, humiliation, torture, costume play, role playing, power exchange, group sex, various fetishistic fixations, age/race/species play, and much much

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more, used to be considered an indication of a deranged mental condition. With the invention of BDSM as a lifestyle choice and the popularization of BDSM as a pornographic choice, its okay for normal men to masturbate to this genre of content, especially when its done as a communal activity (i.e. there is a widespread community of people doing it, giving evidence of its normalcy). Its okay to produce this genre of content as long as certain fundamental taboos are not broken (i.e. involvement of children, animals, scat/urine, sexualized blood, sexualized killing, and above all, an uncritical acceptance of the dominating capitalistic social order). To restate, these fundamental taboos are determined by (1) the content producers tastes and sensibilities as a self-identified BDSM community member, (2) legal anti-obscenity obligations, and (3) the paying customers tastes. To break this down further in terms of Halls aforementioned theoretical model, morality in the encoding of BDSM pornography comes from a structure of meaning rooted in the construct of a BDSM community: the San Francisco Society of Janus, the New York-based Eulenspiegel Society, dungeons and playspaces such as the SF Citadel, Bondage-a-go-go, and any BDSM practitioners aware of the rules and standards by which people interact in those spaces. This is combined with and magnified by the policing of the medium itself through obscenity laws, which do create some hard limits such as prohibitions regarding age and bestiality. Moreover, as Ackworth argued, even in terms of basic consumption, content is limited by what the audience can tolerate. A logic of scopophillic consumer culture has in many ways displaced the psychiatric discourse that once dominated the mainstream consumers structure of meaning for an aesthetics of BDSM. Mining erotic practices from the on-hand supply of psychiatrically-defined deviances, unsuccessful commoditization becomes the measure of obscenity. Transgression 2.0 is thus the calling forth of those aesthetics and performative scripts in spite of their lack of sanction through capitalistic economics.

post-2.0 Transgression
New media continue to foster the BDSM community, but also exploit individuals as a condition of their participation, just as FaceBook and other social media outlets do. As I have argued elsewhere (Kien 2010), privacy in our 2.0 networked world is the management of public identity through strategic revelations, rather than removing oneself from the public. There are thus a multiplicity of conditions that further describe transgression in this condition. Demanding authenticity, freedom of goods, going off the grid, being unduplicatable, interventions into dominating discourses, being too personal, refusal to participate, refusal to pay, calling the bluff of simulacra, a staunch DIY (do it yourself) ethos, acknowledging ones class consciousness in the capitalist environment of the Internet, profane invasions of capitalistically cleansed digital space, ironic misrepresentation,

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airing dirty laundry, the reappropriation of violence from the state, irreverent humor, and the full list of shenanigans that social deviants and revolutionaries have relied on throughout history to intervene and break with the dominating discourse. As Baudrillard suggested, Parody renders submission and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based (2006: 467). Thus, in a 2.0 world, even our submission to the world of simulacra may be taken as a form of transgression, so long as it is a hyper-real simulation of submission acted out by ones own free will. In the case of Kink.com, this is perhaps the final theoretical lesson needed for treating their work as a transgression, for their content can be an intervention into the dominating discourse of capitalism if the people producing it can maintain a sense of irony in the doing of it, even if the people consuming it cant.

notes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Jay Wiseman (2000a, 2000b) offers brief histories of BDSM, though these books are how-to manuals rather than an expos of the concept. See Kadrey (1994), Shadow (2002), Wiseman (2003), the Wikipedia entry on Munch (BDSM), and www.TheMunch.org (2007). Full archives of the original newsgroups are available online at http://faqs.cs.uu.nl/ na-bng/alt.sex.bondage.html. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.sex.bondage. A tally of sexual identities on various BDSM websites easily demonstrates the predominance of heteronormative identity in the BDSM scene. When asked, Peter Ackworth of Kink.com answered that their customer base is approximately 90 percent male. Available online at http://parousa.tripod.com/story-o.html. Here, I mean not just the administrative and technological ability to conduct transactions, but the actual development of online business models that took advantage of the web browser as a point of sale. This same innovation enabled consumers to order other types of erotic products (BDSM gear, sex toys, etc.) and have them delivered discretely to their front door, encouraging exploration into realms of sexuality that had previously entailed much more risk to curious individuals.

references
Ackworth, Peter. 2010. Personal interview, October 8: San Francisco, CA. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. The Ecstasy of Communication. Translated by Bernard and Caroline Schutze. New York: Autonomedia. Baudrillard, Jean. 2006. The Precession of Simulacra. In Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (2nd edn), edited by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Malden: Blackwell. Bauman, Zygmunt. (1998). Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. (1998). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carey, James. 1989. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: Routledge. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas M. Kellner (eds). 2006. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (2nd edn). Malden: Blackwell.

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Durkheim, mile. 1996. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In Readings in Social Theory, edited by Francis Farganis (pp. 90100). Toronto: McGraw-Hill. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction,Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Hall, Stuart. 2003. Encoding/Decoding. In Critical Readings: Media and Audiences, edited by Virginia Nightingale and K. Ross (pp. 5164). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovett. New York: Harper & Row. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. 1995. Dialectic of the Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Kadrey, Richard. 1994. alt.sex.bondage. In Wired, Issue 2.06 (accessed November 15, 2010). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.06/alt.sex.bondage_pr.html. Kien, Grant. 2009. Virtual Environment: The Machine is Our World. In Identity, Learning and Support in Virtual Environments, edited by Sharon Tettegah and Cynthia Cologne. The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Kien, Grant. 2010. Privacy As Work: The Appropriation of Labor in Post-Global Network. In Post-Global Network and Everyday Life, edited by Marina Levina and Grant Kien. New York: Peter Lang. Kipnis, Laura. 1996. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. New York: Grove Press. Latour, Bruno. 1988. Part Two: Irreductions. In The Pasteurization of France, translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law (pp. 158236). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media. New York: Mentor/Penguin. McLuhan, Marshall. 1995. Essential McLuhan, edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. Concord: House of Anansi Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Mulvey, Laura. 1991. A Phantasmorgia of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman. New Left Review 188: 136150. Mulvey, Laura. 1996. Fetishism and Curiosity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nightingale, Virginia. 2003. Improvising Elvis, Marilyn and Mickey Mouse. In Critical Readings: Media and Audiences, edited by Virginia Nightingale and K. Ross. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Shadow. 2002. History of Munches (accessed August 1, 2010). http://www.houseofdesade.com/munchhistory/history.htm. TheMunch.org. 2007. FAQ (accessed August 1, 2010). www.TheMunch.org. Warner, Michael. 2000. The Trouble With Normal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wikipedia contributors. Munch (BDSM). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (accessed August 1, 2010). http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title= Munch_(BDSM)&oldid=385643087. Wiseman, Jay. 1999. An Essay About The Old Days (accessed August 8, 2010). http://www.jaywiseman.com/SEX_BDSM_Old_Guard_1.html. Wiseman, Jay. 2000a. SM 101: A Realistic Introduction (2nd edn). Eugene: Greenery Press. Wiseman, Jay. 2000b. Jay Wisemans Erotic Bondage Handbook. Eugene: Greenery Press. Wiseman, Jay. 2003. A Beginners Guide to BDSM Munches (accessed August 8, 2010). http://www.jaywiseman.com/SEX_BDSM_MunchGuide.html.

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8
Sick Stuff 1
Law, Criminality, and Obscenity
JULIAN PETLEY
In February 2008, Darryn Walker, a 35-year-old civil servant from South Shields in the north east of England, was arrested at his home by officers from Scotland Yards Obscene Publications Unit. His alleged crime was to have posted on the Internet in the summer of 2007 a prose fantasy, Girls (Scream) Aloud (henceforth G(S)A). The story involves the members of the pop group Girls Aloud being kidnapped, raped, mutilated, and murdered, and their body parts then being sold on eBay. In October 2008 he was formally charged with an offense under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 (OPA). Interestingly enough, when the case came to court on June 29, 2009 it immediately collapsed; the prosecution offered no evidence, and the judge formally returned a not guilty verdict. Nonetheless, the fact that it was ever brought in the first place is extremely disturbing, as ever since the prosecution of the book Inside Linda Lovelace failed in 1976, it has generally been accepted that the written word will not be prosecuted under the OPA. Had the prosecution succeeded, the written word, in whatever medium, would once again have been liable to prosecution. Alternatively, the principle would have been established that what is legal offline is not necessarily legal online. But although the fact that the prosecution ultimately failed should be a cause for profound relief among those who care about freedom of expression, and especially those with a penchant for the transgressive, the fact that it was actually brought in the first place suggests a renewed desire in the UK to censor sexually transgressive material. This case also needs to be viewed in the light of the Criminal Justice Act 2008, which makes it an offense even to possess what it defines as extreme pornography. This too is indicative of a new censoriousness, but it also draws attention to the key role which, in the Internet age, surveillance plays in the censorship process, since the measure depends at least partly for its efficacy on people worrying that the authorities may be shadowing
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their Internet activity, thus scaring them into self-censorship by refraining from accessing and distributing certain kinds of material online. However, as I will demonstrate, it is not only sexually transgressive material which is being targeted by the authorities, and, among democratic countries, this kind of oppressive behavior is by no means limited to the U.K. On July 26, 2007 the tabloid Daily Star ran an exclusive story headed Sicko Plots to Torture, Rape and Kill Girls Aloud whose first line reads: Pop beauties Girls Aloud are being stalked by a vile Internet psycho. This is an entirely inaccurate statement, and as the story progresses it becomes clear that the Star is referring to a rather more mundane truth; the man to whom the paper refers in typical U.K. tabloid style as a cyber-sicko has simply published a fantasy, although admittedly a gruesome one, about the group. Indeed, the Star actually quotes from the prologue to the story, which clearly states: I cannot stress enough that this is entirely fictitious. The Star noted that it had reported the fantasy to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF, of whom more below) which traced the host site back to America, and Interpol has been notified to help track down the operators and writer. The IWF, the story adds, then alerted the U.K. police as a result of the Stars tip-off. Girls Aloud are an absolute staple of the celebrity-obsessed tabloid press, and one of its members, Cheryl Cole, doubly obsesses this form of journalism, since at one point she was married to Chelsea and England footballer Ashley Cole. What we have here, then, is a classic example of what in a U.S. context John H. McManus (1994) has called market driven journalism and in a U.K. context Nick Davies (2008) has identified as an attitude of if we can sell it well tell it, an attitude which results, in his view, in a bias against truth (138). UK tabloids may be more lurid and explicit than their U.S. equivalents, but there is nothing remotely transgressive about them, unless it be in their attitude to the truth, and to conventional journalistic standards in general. Their ideological position is essentially an authoritarian-populist one (at the last general election all but one stridently supported the Conservatives), and sensational stories such as the G(S)A one perform the double function of selling newspapers and engendering moral outrage. As Nick Davies points out, one of the unwritten rules of this form of modern journalism is Go with the moral panic, a rule which he notes as being capable of generating stunning falsehoods as the facts are forced to fit the feeling (142). According to the transcript of the interview with the alleged criminal Darryn Walker at South Shields police station on the morning of February 27, 2008, after the appearance of the Star article he e-mailed the website hosting the story, which he described as an adult celebrity parody (although the transcript has ittwiceas parity) saying something along the lines of due to the distress and upset caused by the story could it please be withdrawn, and they e-mailed me back saying yes at your request the story has been withdrawn and all links to it have been deleted. In

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