So not entirely, obviously – we are a tech company in a tech city – but it is something that everyone takes very seriously. Our directors, our performers, the people that work in the IT department, are largely drawn from the BDSM and kink communities in San Francisco and in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you were to come to the Armory and go on a tour and talk to people, you'd see it's really central to what we do. Our mission statement is, at least in part, to demystify and celebrate alternative sexuality. Image courtesy ĭo you perceive a noticeable increase in acceptance of kink because of this widening exposure facilitated by the internet? It allowed you to find an audience and then define content, create content specifically for them, no matter where they were in the world. So you would find all the people who were really into this particular thing which seemed obscure, and you might not sell mass-market because who the heck would know, at any given retail store, that people would be into this. I think that one thing the internet did both in terms of sexuality and then adult entertainment, in general, is that it allowed more niche tastes and more niche preferences to essentially gerrymander an audience. allowed more niche tastes and more niche preferences to essentially gerrymander an audience. We built our business on that and in catering to fetishes that a traditional distributor might find… to find an audience for. And so it was only able to be distributed on the internet.
And even ten years into – probably even by like 2006, which was maybe the height of DVD – you couldn't sell DVDs, distributors wouldn't pick you up if you had both bondage and sex because that was seen as a red flag for obscenity prosecutions. When started in the late '90s, it was still close to illegal to distribute content that had both bondage and sex in it. We don't have very many "vanilla sites" – we have sites that are more vanilla than others but generally that's our niche. Image courtesy Īre the majority of these sites “fetish-specific,” so to speak? We tend to be a little more polymorphous perverse in terms of how people view themselves trying to lock down anybody in this community to one specific sexuality or gender identity.īut I can talk to directors and they'll say, "Well based on the comments we get in forums or things like this, I would say we're 90/10 heterosexual versus gay or queer or something." So aside from actually subscribing to the site, we don't generally require people to give a lot of information. People, particularly with BDSM, can be fairly closeted about their desires. With adult content, you want to be careful about requiring too much identifying information. I would say that, in general, we have more sites that cater to heterosexual men and women but it's never as clear-cut as that For example, there are a lot of gay men and lesbians who watch content that is not specifically geared towards gay men or lesbians But generally 75/25 percent is a good barometer. Some of our sites, like Kink University, which is more educational, tend to skew a little more heavily female. users, like a lot of adult users, skew male: it's about 75%-25% male-female and that varies from site-to-site. To begin, could you tell me a bit about the audience? I talked on the phone with Michael Stabile, an independent filmmaker and the media relations coordinator for, about the world of design that backgrounds a fetish film.Ī view of some of the old brickwork on the Armory building. And the high degree of fantasy involved in many fetishes demands a slew of machinery, sets, and props not required by most adult entertainment. The high degree of fantasy involved in many fetishes demands a slew of machinery, sets, and props not required by most adult entertainment.īecause BDSM has connotations of non-consensual violence for many, there’s a particular onus on kink film producers to clearly demarcate their products as fictional. Formerly the home of the San Francisco National Guard Armory and Arsenal, the towering edifice was in a state of disrepair for decades until Acworth purchased and restored it – a real estate transaction that was not without controversy. Part of that involves public tours of its facilities, which happen to be a 1912-era, Moorish revival fortress in the city’s Mission District.
also aspires to be something of a ‘lifestyle brand,’ with a stated mission to demystify alternative sexuality. The Armory building, located in San Francisco's Mission District, is a historic structure dating back to 1912.
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