Scooter was commuted. Obscenity prosecutions are willfully heading toward Comstock-era proportions. Bill O’Reilly is “news”. Gitmo, Gitmo, Gitmo. Nice place we got here, eh?

Actually, it’s pretty nice, despite our government’s best efforts of late. Exercise your San Francisco values today and enjoy a little porn that flaunts your rights as an adult. Namely, check out Kink.com’s newest site launched this week, The Training Of O. Mind you, this is not for the faint of heart; it’s some very intense kink, BDSM, bondage and all kinds of hardcore (and very creative) sexual extremes — that’s the point. The basis of the site is focusing on a model who honestly explains her sexual/physical limits, and how she’d like those limits pushed. I was at Kink when they started filming the series and got to talk to one of the models, and the guys in the shop making devices based on her desires to have her limits and fears pushed. At the time I was writing about Behind Kink, who was doing this segment about Training of O.

I’m not a big BDSM person in my private life, and the only dungeon I’ve really been to is Kink’s set during happy hour on fridays; though I do try things sometimes — and I’ll admit that trying kinky things are often way hotter for me than watching them in porn. But the intersection of kink and porn, I think, is going to be one of the final frontiers and proving grounds for our rights as American citizens, and sexuality being seen as normal and healthy, individuated and self-defined. And a place like Kink.com, thanks to Peter Acworth (and not thanks to BDSM’s marginalization in mainstream porn), is actively putting out there that kinkiness among us adults, is normal. In context, the whole thing makes me think of this closing paragraph for my Madame and Mr. S column, when they put me in an isolation booth:

Once seated on a metal chair in the black leather-padded booth, smiley PR/Affiliate Manager Leah Perry waved good-bye to me as Paige shut the door. Suddenly I was in total darkness, with no sound except for the gentle, piped-in New Age music. In the utter pitch black, I thought about how, with the Folsom Street Fair, Kink.com and all the other powerhouses of sex-positive kinkiness, San Francisco really is the center of the world for all of this. It’s the calm, safe voice of reason about what adults do behind closed doors with paddles and handcuffs at a time in America when our hysterically sex-phobic government and media would rather have us think that anything off the prescribed sexual road map is abuse, degradation or worse — much like 1950s thinking that homosexuality is a disorder or illness. Here at Mr. S, we find that the same video clips of leathermen in chaps that the right wing will run as anti-gay or anti-San Francisco propaganda are suddenly a lot less threatening or harmful. In all of leather’s perceived extremes, it’s really just kind of normal. Um, and hot.

Link.

Here’s the sample page — and yes, I wish they had higher-res images to entice us with. Here’s the page with a sample video (and yes, they should be making this play inline, on the page, not a downloadable file). On the page you’ll see a girl who’s been on this blog a few hardcore times before, Lorelei Lee — my favorite geeky pornstar (MySpace) blogger*.

* As a side note, I had a weird dream about Justine Joli last night, or rather the hype about her. She’s sweet and pretty, but I guess in the dream I was trying to work out my frustration about her selling herself as a podcaster (among other things). Can anyone find her podcast, or anything proving all that geek cred her site designer stuck in the title bar of the blog that sells her site memberships? I mean, c’mon — some of us cut our teeth in the iTunes porn battles of 2005; if you talk the talk, you better walk the walk.