Shadow Lane: 2014 Party Update May 20 2014, 3 Comments

Part of the magic of being into an esoteric fetish is that it allows otherwise ordinary people to engage together in what are, by our lights, glamorous and exciting activities.  Movie stars at Cannes don't have more fun than cute girls in plaid skirts at spanking balls. It isn't possible to be more excited than a spanking enthusiast is at the prospect of meeting someone they've been corresponding with for months and finally playing out a fantasy scenario with them, either one on one or with an audience. Actually getting to play, after dreaming about playing one's whole life, is everything.

Many a spanking enthusiast has confided to me that like myself, in the world of vanilla society, they are painfully bashful and never know what to say at a party to strangers. In the spanking world, we have our own culture, our own language, and our own common experiences to bind us together from the moment we meet. Normally reserved people can rock in the spanking scene. Just look at our scene heroes and role models: teachers and librarians. You can make the heart of spanking enthusiast pound just by pulling out a plain straight-backed chair in front of them or wearing a pleated skirt or carrying a hairbrush in your purse. It doesn't take much to get us going when we're just out in the scene and alert to every "startle", i.e., a thing of any kind possessing some sort of spanking connotation.

Regional spanking parties, in America and Europe, have become contagious, with many people attending multiple events per year, sometimes crossing borders and oceans to party with our obsessive counterparts in distant cities or even other lands. You don't have to be an A-lister to live your fantasies to the hilt in the spanking scene. If someone is willing to be proactive, agreeable and the slightest bit social, these parties can serve as a portal into the heart of the scene. Not that success is guaranteed to anyone. It's not in the vanilla world either. You have to bring something to the table. 

We were one of the first, if not the first entity to throw a large, gala spanking party in a hotel, with a vendor fair, catered food and dancing. We held our first event of this nature in 1991 and will host our 34th party in Vegas this Labor Day Weekend, 2014.

Parties, spanking personals and personal introductions have wrought miracles in our scene, mating up people who never even came close to dating before, people who had been despaired of as too weird ever to find a significant other. The scene brings together all sorts of people and naturally within the mix, water seeks its own level. Attractive people tend to be attracted to each other. Same goes for geeky people. You could pan around a room at a spanking party and see some couples that looked like they stepped out of Vanity Fair and others who might have posed for Dian Arbus. 

There is no typical spanking person. A spanking enthusiast could be a stunning college girl or a fifty three year old virgin male, who has never had any sex other than with himself and a magazine or video. Both are equally obsessed with spanking. Obviously, that cute girl is going to hook up fast, but once in a while, that middle aged hobbit of a spanking shut-in will bump into his female counterpart, at a party or online, or because a friend put them together in a room, and the affinity will spring up between them to bring them into the land of the living together. And they will marry and play and not be lonely anymore. 

Then again, it's possible to be too awkward even for the spanking scene, but everyone gets at least a couple of chances to test the waters. If the brilliant Samuel Johnson were alive today, he'd be a member of his local BDSM support group and he'd go to parties. He'd strike out of course, because he was notoriously unwashed. I mention Johnson because he spoke of wanting to be whipped to Boswell and with that, expressed some self-loathing. Sounds like a guilty but subbed out 18th century Christian to me. But take the much more urbane Rousseau. He never seemed to connect with a spanking mistress, though he openly yearned for one. Today, he'd have his pick of them and also have enjoyed himself.

But back to spanking parties. They've become one big, international floating convention, with the half-dorky/half-hip spanking jet set planning most of their vacations around them. With ages ranging from the barely legal to the barely ambulatory, the live social end of the scene is remarkably diverse. The range of available play options is correspondingly expansive, encompassing everything from the so-called "littles" with their crayons and pinafores getting birthday paddlings, to the full blown floggings of totally nude submissives, with plenty of room in the middle for traditional home and school discipline, institutional discipline, clinical discipline, romantic spanking, erotic spanking, and of course, the all time favorite, spanking as sexual foreplay. 

You only live once and once you're into spanking, it  never goes away. Many have stepped through the looking glass of a hotel spanking weekend, few emerge at the other end unaffected by this often magical experience. And if there was ever any place to try your luck, it's at the Shadow Lane party in Vegas.

Visit our party pages to learn all the details.