Girls Spanking Girls: The L.A. Fetish Film Festival

When you think about how satisfying it is to just slap someone, it’s surprising that such a staple of human desire is considered a fetish at all. Still, the inaugural L.A. Fetish Film Festival, hosted at multiple locations around Los Angeles, was a tribute to women spanking women.

Everywhere I went, from the opening soiree above an unsuspecting Korean church on Wilshire Blvd., to private parties associated with the event, to the film festival itself, to the closing reception at Bar Sinister, all I saw was women slapping the shit out of each other.

“You remember J—?” Sinn Sage asked me, just before slapping her, pulling her hair, and dragging her around the room.

“Yes,” I said, recalling the woman I first met when she was a P.A. on the set of “Kill Girl Kill” in 2006, who now seemed to enjoy the abuse she was taking. “You sure are slapping her a lot.”

“We’re really proud of the movies we’re screening,” said Michael Simmons, festival founder and director of the film “American Fetish.” “L.A. doesn’t have a festival like this, even though there’s a huge scene here.”

“Yes,” I said, “and there are a lot of women slapping other women.”

Screenings included work by James Avalon, Lily Cade, Lithium Picnic, and Nick Orleans, who is reportedly “retired from porn.”

Dr. Susan Block slapped several seemingly random women with crops before taking the stage to deliver a lively lecture on fetishes above the sounds of slapping. Performers would act out her text, and if they didn’t respond quickly enough, she would slap them.

At the door of Club Monte Cristo, a nearly naked man asked me if there would be dancing inside.

“Yes,” I said, not yet knowing how much slapping there’d be.

“See you in there!” he said.

“Fuck,” I said.

I admit I enjoy directing women with a riding crop lightly but securely gripped in my hand—that is how I crafted “The Facts of Life XXX” into a work of genius—but I’ve never accepted into my heart the uniform, the rope suspensions, the order taking and following, and the dark, latex-clad pageantry of the fetish world.

Still, I sensed a deep satisfaction in the people I met that I never encountered in the world of LL Bean catalog models.

Several hundred people attended the various events, not bad for an underground festival, and screenings ran the gamut from the intense, disturbing, and specific to the broader world of co-opted Fetish Lite. Simmons was pleased with the turnout.

“There’s a lot of great people here,” he said. “People who’ve been in the fetish community for years. But it’s cool when people show up and you have no idea who they are.”

Watch my video for some spanking.

Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Gothic.net oarty—sinister, Malice; January Seraph, your kinky friend; At loose ends with Ela Darling; Home for Eros Day with Dr. Suzy; Sinn Sage’s late night double feature
See also: LA Fetish Film Festival