Moving On From Dreams Of Spanking

In a moving letter written as if she is addressing her Dreams Of Spanking website, Pandora Blake has just released some unhappy news about her site’s future. Fundamentally, she needs to move on from Dreams Of Spanking, for reasons that won’t surprise anyone who has been following legal developments in the UK. She says she won’t be producing further content for the site, although perhaps a bit more that has already been produced will still appear.

Apparently the site never recovered its commercial momentum after being targeted by the UK’s censors and shuttered during Pandora’s “successful” legal battles, and Pandora needs to focus on supporting herself. With a new round of UK censorship on the horizon, further investment in British porn has become an insupportable thing to be doing. As Pandora says:

The mandatory age verification in the Digital Economy Bill leaves me three choices. To maintain my current level of page views, I’d have to pay several orders of magnitude more than your turnover each day to age verify every viewer. This is obviously not possible. To avoid having to age verify non-paying viewers, I would have to completely reorganise the site – months of unpaid work – and put everything classifiable as 18 or higher behind a paywall. I’d no longer be able to use any of the preview images, trailers, or explicit promotional materials I’ve spent years making. We’d make fewer sales as a result of not being able to publically promote the scenes in the archive, unless I spent yet more time creating new PG-13 promo materials for all the old scenes. Not only would this be a colossal waste of my time, it would lose the transparency which was always one of our core missions.

The third option is to geo-block all UK site visitors – 40% of your paying customers – and suffer a corresponding loss of sales. You’re already barely covering your costs, and I’m not getting paid enough to keep updating you. None of the available options are going to improve that situation.

The conclusion is clear. It’s time for me to step away.

Sad news for all of Pandora’s fans and friends and for everyone who supported her mission. Dreams Of Spanking will be missed!

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June 6th, 2017 | 2 Comments »

Legal Victory! For Dreams Of Spanking

This is excellent news: Pandora Blake’s Dreams Of Spanking website, which got shuttered by British censors in 2015, is to reopen soon after Pandora won a solid legal victory.

dreams of spanking photos

Here is Pandora’s press release:

FEMINIST PORN MAKER THRASHES CENSOR

Pandora Blake, award-winning activist and feminist pornographer, has won her appeal to Ofcom against ATVOD and can reinstate her site Dreams of Spanking, which was banned under the AVMS guidelines in August 2015, triggering widespread anger among free speech advocates as well as porn fans.

The controversial Audiovisual Media Services Regulations came into effect in December 2014, banning consensual sex acts from online porn including facesitting, female ejaculation, and spanking that leaves marks. Pandora Blake took part in the ‘facesitting protest’ outside Westminster, and also spoke on Newsnight and Women’s Hour challenging the sexist and regressive nature of the regulations. She believes that speaking out made her a target for censorship.

ATVOD – the Association for TV on Demand – were tasked with regulating online porn in 2010. While porn critics often focus on the ‘mainstream’ industry, ATVOD made a point of targeting independent niche and fetish porn producers, including a disproportionate number of female filmmakers. In January 2016, Ofcom shut down the quango amid rumours that it was acting beyond its remit.

Pandora Blake said, “The point of Dreams of Spanking was to make ethical porn based on my own fantasies. I’m not ashamed of being kinky and there’s no harm in adults sharing consensual BDSM films. The AVMS regulations effectively criminalised my sexuality. I was singled out because I criticised the new laws. ATVOD tried to shut me up, but they failed.”

“Now I’ve won my appeal I feel vindicated. It proves that it’s worth standing up to bullies. The war against intrusive and oppressive state censorship isn’t over, but this decision is a landmark victory for feminist porn, diversity and freedom of expression.”

Pandora said on Twitter that Dreams Of Spanking will reopen for business as soon as she gets things sorted out with her credit card processor: “Hopefully CCBill will reactivate my credit card processing soon & I can re-open the full site again!”

6/10/2016 update: It’s open!

Legal nerds among you will find the official bureaucratic bulletin here containing the details of Pandora’s victory, starting on page 20. It’s dry reading and not particularly recommended. There is a huge amount of celebratory press that’s come out today; Pandora’s twitter feed is probably the easiest place to find all of that.

It took a lot of courage (and, I do not doubt, economic sacrifice) for Pandora to fight this censorship and win. I look forward to the return of the site and especially to fresh production when that starts to happen again.

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June 6th, 2016 | No Comments »

Dreams Of Spanking: Going Offline Soon, Because Censorship

(Updated with new August 7 link.)

I don’t know how many of you have been following Pandora Blake’s unhappy saga as her egalitarian fairtrade ethical spanking porn studio and life’s work, Dreams Of Spanking, has come under the dire scrutiny of the British censoring body known as ATVOD. Today she was forced to stop selling new memberships, and it looks like her site is going offline (pending appeals) as of August 27:

If you want to know more, Pandora has been documenting the whole sorry story in a series of blog posts over this past spring and summer. They are:

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August 5th, 2015 | 8 Comments »

Dreams Of Spanking: Enjoy It While You Can

Pandora Blake has made no secret of the fact that her Dreams Of Spanking website (which we have greatly enjoyed here at Spanking Blog) has been under serious regulatory threat since that ridiculous-but-terrifying censorious regulatory regime went into effect last year in Great Britain. (From this great distance, my murky impression is that a fading agency primarily responsible for regulating the adult content of DVDs — which have long been heavily censored in Britain — has made a successful grab for power, relevance, and funding, by the expedient of saying “adult websites are like old-fashioned video-on-demand services, which we also regulate because they used to just play DVDs over the cable TV network, so we ought to be able to regulate websites too!”)

Regulatory officialdom in Great Britain turns out to be impossibly hostile to BDSM and kinky stuff, the more so if it involves women in any role other than the traditionally-submissive. Thus it has been clear from the start that this is an existential threat to sites like Dreams Of Spanking. Pandora has legal representation and the courage to speak out, be activist, and keep doing what she’s doing, but there’s a lot of legal and financial peril involved. As an outspoken activist, it was probably inevitable that she would clash with regulatory authorities sooner rather than later, and indeed that day has come:

If you like Dreams Of Spanking, go read her post. Many people are rooting for her, and we can wish for a triumphant outcome, but that’s by no means a sure thing. As Pandora says (and I do not think she’s being either melodramatic or self-serving here):

If you haven’t yet joined the site, do it now, while you still can – time is running out, and legal fees are expensive.

Verbum sapienti satis.

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April 16th, 2015 | 3 Comments »

Awesome Reviews For Dreams Of Spanking

Have you noticed all the awesome reviews Pandora Blake has been racking up for her Dreams Of Spanking website? She is officially doing it right!

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July 3rd, 2013 | No Comments »

Rabbits Need Spankings Too!

One of my rules of thumb is that any credible list of recommended spanking porn created since 2012 or so simply must include the Dreams Of Spanking site started and run by long-term friend-of-the-blog Blake. By that yardstick, the Rabbits Reviews list of best spanking porn sites is an obvious success, because Dreams is on it.

otk bunnygirl gets hand spanking

Back in 2015 (almost 10 years ago!) I asked my readers to help me identify any new and fresh producers of spanking porn that I might have missed at that time. What became clear from that exercise is that the spanking porn space wasn’t brimming with new startups a decade ago, and (I am here to tell you) it still isn’t. So if the sites with reviews at Rabbit mostly seem familiar to you, that’s a sign of curatorial care, not any lack of diligence.

playboy bunny waitress getting her hair pulled as she's spanked and fucked from behind wants it more and harder

What are the reasons that we don’t see so many new and novel spanking porn sites these days? My answer is in multiple parts, but the first part is dull and boring. Innovation in porn has declined everywhere, subsequent to the rise of the so-called vampire tubes and the porn-industry consolidation that fell out from that.

coctail waitress bunny kneels for a degrading slap on her bottom

The second part of my answer is demographic. After 22 years of spanking blogging, I’ve come to understand that I am not the only spanko out here with grey hair. Not hardly! Indeed, I think our little corner of fetish-space may trend just a tiny bit grey. I have no data for this, but imagine for the sake of argument that I am right. If the most desirable marketing demographic is the 18-34 set, it’s not a stretch to imagine that new porn ventures might not be aimed at us.

bunny girl starting to cry as she is vigorously spanked

My third answer? Any loss of vitality in the spanking website space might be attributable to something you could call the gentrification of BDSM, but which I choose to call a trend toward fetish acceptance, if not downright polymorphous perversity. It’s really common for me to encounter older people with spanking interest who have convinced themselves that erotic spanking is just a little peccadillo, a sexual quirk perhaps, but it’s not actually a genuine fetish, and they aren’t themselves genuinely kinky, are they? Denial, thou art a boomer…

spanked bunnygirl is face down, ass up

Meanwhile, out among the millennials and GenZs who have architected the ongoing explosion of kink acceptance in our culture, spanking as a fetish (or fetish subculture) is almost invisible these days. It’s barely even a thing! It’s just “impact play” now — a tiny taxonomical corner of BDSM. In a commercial porn environment that doesn’t encourage micro-niche fetish sites of any kind, you wouldn’t start a “BDSM:ImpactPlay:Spanking” website any more than you’d start a “BodyModification:Ink:SexyMermaids” site. It’s just too niche!

Image credits, top to bottom: The fat-bottomed bunny girl getting her ass tanned OTK is by CherryS-12. The cocktail-waitress club bunny happily getting her hair pulled as she’s spanked and doggy-fucked is by Ebinkuu. The club waitress bunny kneeling for a degrading ass slap (that she loves) is by DeusV. The headset-wearing bunny who is starting to cry from her spanking is by tekona0. The face-down, ass-up spanked bunny with the colorful braids is by Tlandolt69.

rabbits reviews banner 800x30

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October 3rd, 2024 | No Comments »

A Good Christian Girl, Spanked

Let us be precise about this scenario: Sarah Gregory’s character here is only pretending to be A God-Fearing Christian Girl in this recent shoot from Dreams of Spanking. But even so, she must have understood that good Christian girls don’t throw tantrums like this without expecting the most serious of consequences:

sarah gregory throws a tantrum

And, indeed, that spectacular outburst earned her a long and slow and very serious hairbrush spanking:

panties down otk hairbrush spanking for Sarah Gregory with her pussy peeping out

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February 4th, 2022 | 1 Comment »

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