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 »

Who’s Still Shooting Fresh Spanking Porn In 2015?

Fellow spanking porn enthusiasts, I invite you to participate in my lazyweb research. It has begun to seem to me that an awful lot of the spanking porn universe has gone stale, with ancient stalwarts of the spanking porn industry failing to shoot new content on any kind of regular basis. Of course they may try to minimize the visibility of this fact, often recycling old shoots into “new” weekly updates on an automated basis, sometimes with fraudulent current dates shown on their tours. Sometimes, too, there’s no actual fraud; instead they show current dates for their “updates” but have carefully edited their tours so that there’s no claim that the updates are new or fresh material. It can be really hard to tell, if you don’t have an encyclopedic memory for spanking porn. (I don’t.)

Be that as it may, my summer quest is to produce a more-or-less comprehensive list of active spanking porn producers: folks who are actively shooting new spanking porn content and releasing it on their websites at least a couple of times a month, with visible dates and advertising on their tours that make it clear the material is new.

Quite honestly, there’s only one producer I’m fairly certain of at the moment, because I often see details of their current shooting activity in my twitter feed:

Here are some more producers whose websites show frequent updates with recent calendar dates:

Warning: It’s not clear in every case whether the new-dated material is actually shot recently, or is content that might have been saved from older shoots (and thus is still “new to us”) or perhaps recycled from earlier updates that were first published long ago.

There’s a lot more sites I haven’t listed, of course. Some I don’t know about, some I have surely forgotten about, and a great weary many have no dates on their updates and are (perhaps) running a script that takes the oldest shoot in the member area each week and splashes it on the front page of the tour for a new generation of surfers. There are also some sites I associate in my mind with active producers, but where the sites themselves don’t advertise that the content is fresh.

I hope there remain many current and active spanking porn producers, some of which I will feel stupid for not thinking of right off the bat. Please suggest them in the comments, and feel free to link. (Be aware that comments with links get hung up in the system until I can check them for spam, so they may not show up right away.) Also if you have any personal knowledge or insight about which of the producers I’ve listed are actually shooting spanking porn in 2015, please share it. And if you are a spanking porn producer shooting regularly in 2015, feel free to drop your link and tell us about your stuff, especially if your site design doesn’t make it clear that your stuff is new.

Thanks for your help.

June 1st, 2015 | 9 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 »

Fair Trade Spanking Dreams

Congratulations seem to be in order for Pandora Blake and her crew at Dreams Of Spanking, who give every impression of having been principally responsible for a righteous education delivered via detailed interviews to the Guardian reporter who wrote this excellent article about fair trade porn that appeared on Saturday. And why am I not as surprised as the reporter that Pandora’s home looks like that of “a young academic, who for some reason needs high-spec recording equipment”?

What Blake does could never be generated by a computer. The film she’s making – a futuristic dystopia in which men have been abolished – sounds a bit muesli on paper; but the landscape of bondage, fetish and futurism is incredibly unmuesli. The shoot looks pretty lo-fi (Blake’s flat, which she sometimes uses as a location, looks like the home of a young academic, who for some reason needs high-spec recording equipment). Confusingly, you can see real human beings in Blake’s films. Even more confusingly, I love it.

I was pleased to see Pandora unpack the too-common confusing between ethical porn and feminist porn, which can often overlap, but do not necessarily do so:

Feminism is not a prerequisite when it comes to making ethical porn, Blake says. “Feminist porn is explicitly focused on women’s desires and sexuality. So, for example, the belt-whipping scene where I got the life thrashed out of me, that I would say is feminist, because it’s about my journey and my sexuality. Whereas I think it’s possible to produce male-gaze porn in an ethical and fair trade way. That means complete respect for performers, for their boundaries and consent. If someone says no, you don’t ask again, you don’t ask last minute in the middle of a scene. You don’t trick them into doing stuff. You pay them. It’s not only all of those principles, but also communicating that to your audience.”

There’s a whole lot more. Good job, Pandora and D and AJ!

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November 4th, 2014 | No Comments »

Hand Spankings Can Hurt

I was amused to see Pandora Blake “dancing with trolls” in the comments section of her Dreams Of Spanking blog; she took on with professional politesse a commenter called Bacchus who was derisive about an OTK hand spanking delivered to one of her male models as part of a punishment scenario. I’m not 100% sure the commenter was trolling by design, but with phrasing like “The idea is to cause him pain, not give him a thrill. Does she like his pee-pee on her dress?” and “the idea is to cause him pain, use an implement” the effect was purely troll-tacular.

As Pandora rightly points out, hand spankings can hurt plenty. I’m a lazy top and I often prefer to use an instrument for greater effect (more better wiggling!) with less effort, but it’s a preference, not a law of nature. What say you, Spanking Blog readers? Is there one among you who is willing to go out on the “hand spankings don’t hurt” limb with Bacchus? Because I think that’s a foolish assertion, likely to end in tears in a universe that has any justice in it.

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July 22nd, 2014 | 10 Comments »

Spanking Vix Vixxxen

If you like your spanked girls to have a bit of “alternative” about them, you might really enjoy this photoset of Pandora Blake spanking Vix Vixxen at Dreams Of Spanking:

vix-vixxxen-spanked

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April 22nd, 2014 | 2 Comments »

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