Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, explores the porn production studio of Kink.com. She describes the studio as a “rare accomplishment” that “aims to favorably represent a sexual subculture, that holds free sex parties and (paid) public tours, [and] that positions itself as a San Francisco institution with unironic civic pride.” In the studio’s penthouse, called the Upper Floor, Kink hosts live sex shows:
[F]or some of Kink.com’s community members, performing on the Upper Floor could feel more like a service Kink offered to them. There are probably more public sex play spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else in this hemisphere, but Kink’s are certainly more lavish and, for some, come with a certain prestige that just having kinky sex in a homegrown dungeon—without the cameras, without the “fame”—does not. After the parties, [Upper Floor producer] Stefanos told me, he sometimes sends the guests still photographs that he thinks they’d like as keepsakes. They can post them to their online profiles on sites like Fetlife, on pseudonymous personal blogs, or slightly blurred on Instagram.
“This is almost the ultimate form of ‘do what you love,’” said Georgina Voss, a researcher and writer who examines how technologies are designed, interpreted, and regulated, particularly in the creative and culture industries, including the adult industry.
I rang her over Skype to ask her if the porn industry was going the way of all creative industries online: replacing the professionals with amateurs. With “do what you love,” Voss referred back to Miya Tokumitsu’s essay of the same name in Jacobin. It’s easier to direct porn performers to “do what you love,” perhaps, when even the producers who depend on it don’t readily regard the work of performing sex as work, but instead as sexual expression.
This reluctance, along with the various poor working conditions we’re supposed to absorb in exchange for “doing what we love,” Voss said, is in a way “almost the perfect storm of what’s going on in culture industries. Because what is more fun than sex—with someone you love in a really nice place?”
The Dish 