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from www.sfweekly.com – 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.

“I really enjoyed my job working there,” she says. “But I’ve seen things and heard a lot of things that make me really uncomfortable. And then, having this whole payment policy thing go down and then being let go … illustrates the fact that they consider us to be disposable. I think it is unfortunate that they are going to publicly say that they don’t treat their models that way at Kink.com, but in actuality, they do.”

If Kink.com was, in fact, trying to shut Holloway up by giving her the boot, they failed miserably. The letter was ultimately delivered via the Sex Workers Outreach Project (SWOP) without individual names. It was then posted and re-posted online via Twitter, Tumblr, and sex blogs. For a few days, the headline “New Kink.com Policy Disrespects Models” seemed to have become a mantra of every pervy Twitter feed in the country. The news of Holloway’s firing just gave the letter an extra signal boost.

What’s happening at KinkLive allegedly goes much deeper than whether Holloway was or wasn’t fired, or whether or not it was done for legitimate business reasons. Holloway and three other cam models — Coral Aorta, Wendy Fairfax, and Siren Wolf — have filed a class-action lawsuit representing the models against Kink.com, alleging that the new payment policy violates labor law. While reluctant to discuss the specifics of the case, the models’ personal concerns range from being able to make a living wage to being able to enforce their boundaries without pressure.

Already, Fairfax says, policies allowing models to set and maintain personal limits are largely theoretical. “I know that when I started there, there was no discussion of boundaries. It was like, ‘You have boundaries, I’m sure, and you will follow them,’ and that was it. There were no examples of how to deal with pushy customers or anything like that.”

Under the old system, cam workers were guaranteed $150 for a four-hour shift in which they brought in $500 or less from customers paying for private sessions. Above $500, commissions ranged from 30 to 50 percent. In the new payment plan, which becomes official July 1, models get a 30 percent commission for shifts below $300, 40 percent between $300 and $1,500, and 50 percent if they bring in more than $1,500 on a shift.

“That’s one of the reasons that KinkLive is — was — such an awesome place to work,” Fairfax said. “It’s one of the very rare things where you can make consistent money as an adult performer.”

Without that minimum to support them, Holloway and her colleagues are afraid that models are going to feel pressured to push past their personal limits, to always ramp the kink up to 11 and beyond just to make the rent. In addition, changes have also been made to what KinkLive models are allowed to do in the free chat channels. The free chat channels are kind of like the antechamber of KinkLive, where viewers come to see which models are available and engage in some light chat before signing up for a private session.

Until recently, models were restricted to relatively mild, playful behavior while in free chat. Those guidelines were discarded in favor of allowing every model to be as explicit as she likes. At first, that might sound like an opportunity for the models, but Holloway sees it differently.

“I think the significance is that now you’re on this commission-only system, and there’s this big new policy change that will affect how much money you make. If the girl next to you is spreading her legs in public for a couple [dollars], and you’re like, ‘No, I can’t do that,’ or ‘I can’t do that for that low an amount,’ she’s going to make more money than you.” In other words, the models will be forced into a race to the bottom to see who can be the kinkiest for the least amount of money, just as their base pay has been eliminated.

But Peter Acworth says that without making drastic changes, there won’t be a KinkLive. “The product is not profitable in its current form. We’re losing somewhere in the range of $30,000 to $50,000 a month, and it’s because of having these model minimums in place,” he says.

“There’s no other cam company that does that. The business is incredibly competitive and cutthroat. The webcam sites all compete for models by offering them better and better deals. Our deal was to compete by offering them a minimum. Unfortunately, that didn’t work for us, so we’re reverting to what the entire industry does, which is commissions only.” In addition to the payment policy, Acworth expects to have most models doing their shifts from home by October 1, instead of in studios at the Armory.

It’s certainly unreasonable to expect Acworth and Kink.com to commit financial suicide, but at the same time, it’s somewhat jarring to hear him cite industry standards to rationalize the new policy. The entire Kink.com brand is built on customers who expect them to invent new standards, not follow them.

However, Acworth thinks that, in this case, the industry standard will provide KinkLive models with fair and safe employment. He wrote in an email to SF Weekly: “If I thought the industry standard for the webcam business was exploitative or endangered the model in some manner, I would advocate we just close KinkLive…. Since numerous webcam companies compete for the same webcam models, this ensures the model receives a substantial cut of the revenue.”

For Coral Aorta, the fact that Kink.com is such an exception to the standard practices of the industry is the very reason that confronting them on this is so urgent. “I think it’s the only company where models come into the studio and work only in the studio for a wage. I don’t think that there’s ever been any company like this, which is why it’s such an important issue to set this precedent now, that if you’re going to be operating like this, you have to pay your models.”

At the same time, Aorta is not unsympathetic to the financial woes of KinkLive. “It’s my goal to see a compromise between the models and Kink.com in which everyone’s making money, KinkLive is able to continue operating, and they treat us with respect. I would love to keep working with them, as long as I’m getting some kind of a base pay that makes it worth my time to work there.”

The models say that the work they do for KinkLive is also unique from any other company in the industry. “It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had,” Wendy Fairfax says. “I’ve worked as a pro-domme and stuff, and I find that the KinkLive experience is way more intense than doing anything like that. It’s partly because you have to do it for multiple people, but also because they expect so much. It’s because these are Kink.com customers.”

Holloway agrees: “I’ve never done any other kind of cam work where you are doing anal, electrocution, bondage. You are like a BDSM porn magician. You’re shifting gears, you are giving it your all. You might be doing 20 minutes of anal, and then back in public and then 10 minutes later doing hardcore pain endurance or corporal punishment. You are doing a much more intense level of work than any other webcam company ever, I think.”