PETER ACWORTH: The Kink Kronikles
Once a budding mathematician, Brit expatriate Peter Acworth began to indulge his fascination with the BDSM subculture while a student at Columbia. He began putting images of dominance and submission up on the then-fledgling (mid-1990s) Internet, and was amazed at the response. Now, he runs the multi-million dollar Kink.com web empire, a network of edgy (but explicitly consensual) sites devoted to every variation of bondage behavior, including sexandsubmission.com, fuckingmachines.com, and meninpain.com, as well as the latest venture, thetrainingofo.com. We met up with Acworth at the Kink.com offices, in a nondescript building in San Francisco's Mission District. Mild-mannered and highly articulate, he talked about the future of SM-themed websites, bringing kink to the suburban masses, and the controversial purchase of the historic (and long-neglected) San Francisco Armory, which is now being used as a marvelously Gothic set for various Kink.com shoots.
Listen to the interview (mp3, 27 minutes, 7.5MB)