Spanking for Pleasure

I’ve never been able to find a history of ‘Spanking for Pleasure’ so I’ve been collecting information in the hope of filling that void.  It hasn’t been easy but I’ve had some success and maybe it’s time I collected some of what I’ve learned into a post.

Spanking for Pleasure (SfP) was founded in 1983 by Christian Fennington (left, filming College Classics 2 in 1986) and Michael Harry Smith (right with Sophie Fennington, 1982).  I have seen occasional references to a third partner who may have joined later but I’ve never been able to identify that person.  I have seen suggestions that this third partner was frequent SfP performer and director ‘Michael Dawes’ but I have come to believe that Michael Dawes is a stage name for Michael Harry Smith, who is otherwise a rather shadowy figure in the SfP story.

The original name of the company was ‘Raincoat Productions’.  The first movie produced by Raincoat/SfP was ‘Veronica Takes the Rap’ featuring Sophie Fennington was who reported to be 19 at the time the movie was made.  Sophie would go on to make 10 SfP movies including the ‘Sophie Fennington Interview’ which was a retrospective of her first 8 movies.  Two of her movies, ‘Canings and Cold Showers’ and ‘The Flogging of Lady Constance’ are among my favorites.  Her last movie was ‘Room Service’ made about the time that Sophie and Christian separated in 1995.

I don’t know when Raincoat became Spanking for Pleasure, partly because SfP has operated under a number of different names over the years.  ‘Tallion’, ‘Playback’ and ‘VexFilm’ were among the early SfP ‘brands’.  VexFilm was a short-lived brand that ventured into harder BDSM work.  I have only been able to identify five VexFilm movies, all made in 1983/84: ‘A Feel for the Cane’, ‘Bondage Nightmare’, ‘Diary of Discipline’, ‘The Reformatory’ and ‘Rough Justice’.  A tweet on the old SfP Twitter account said that the filming of ‘Diary of Discipline’, the last VexFilm movie, attracted some attention from the local police which lead to the end of that brand.  ‘Paradox’ may be the best known SfP brand.  It operated from 1998 to 2002 and I think that it includes some of the best SfP movies.

SfP produced their own movies, they bought movies from other producers and they distributed movies on behalf of other producers, some of whom also sold their own work directly to consumers.  SfP worked through a number of different distribution channels.  In the early years they sold video tapes by mail from printed catalogues.  I would love to find one of those catalogues and I’ve been searching for several years without success.  I did find a photo showing two pages from one of the catalogues which is shown at the left.  In the early to mid-2000s, SfP created a number of websites that sold SfP movies on-line.  These websites included ‘1^st Choice Spanking’, ‘Classic Spanking’, ‘Spanking College’ and ‘Total Spanking’.  These websites all sold movies (and often the same movies) under their own brand name which meant that they striped off the original title cards and replaced them with their brand logo; fortunately, they usually retained the original name.  Many SfP movies were also released in the US by CalStar which also removed the original title cards.  CalStar also changed the name of some of the movies and created fictitious names for performers, even those who were well known in the UK.

Another SfP venture is Jardale Publishing which published 11 issues of Fessee magazine between 1989 to 1992.  Jardale hired Lynn Paula Russell (aka Paula Meadows), who appeared in ‘To Ride a Tiger (1983) and ‘The Kane Assignment (1991) among other films, to be a writer, illustrator and letter editor for Fessee.  About the time Fessee ceased publication, SfP co-founder Christian Fennington took over as the editor of Janus magazine under the name of ‘F. St. John North’.  He created a sister publication to Janus called ‘Februs’ to serve the same market niche as Fessee and Ms. Russell was hired to serve as the editor of Februs over its entire 9-year history. 

‘British Spanking’ was another Jardale venture that operated out of Beneden-Leeuwen, Holland, probably to circumvent the U.K. Video Recordings Act which required that all video recordings offered for sale or for rent within the UK had to be classified by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) which refused to classify SfP movies.   I have acquired several British Spanking DVDs but I have never found any evidence of a British Spanking website.

Copyright to the SfP websites were all transferred to Jardale Publishing in the early 2010s and the websites were all shutdown in 2016.   By coincidence that was the same year that Gatisle Ltd., the owners of Janus, and several other ‘sex shop’ operators in the City of Westminster (within London) received a final judgement in a court case  regarding licensing fees charged by the City (https://cornerstonebarristers.com/news/westminster-council-face-soho-sex-shops-supreme-court-lawyer-13th-march-2014-13.03.14/).  Gatisle Ltd ceased operation after the end of the lawsuit and all of its remaining assets, including the rights to all of the Janus magazines and movies, were acquired by SfP.  SfP would also acquire the rights to the movies and magazines produced by Cheek-to-Cheek, Redstripe, Roue and possibly others.  These movies are all now available through a new SfP video-on-demand operation called ‘Spankflix’ and the magazines are now available from www.JanusWorldWide.com.  SfP has largely stopped producing new works but they did produce a new movie with Amelia Jane Rutherford in 2017.  Jardale is still in operation but it is currently registered in Cheyenne, Wyoming, USA. 

I’ve been working on a SfP filmography but its a difficult task due to the changes in the names of movies and performers, missing title cards and the recent acquisition of movies from other producers.  It’s been impossible to determine which of the movies were produced by SfP, which were purchased and which were distributed on behalf of other producers.  Even trying to assign dates to the movies is often impossible since the title and end cards have been stripped off so many of the movies.  My list is just short of 400 titles at present and I’m still finding more all the time.  The Spankflix Twitter account is one of my best sources and it occasionally provides interesting bits of information, and this one just appeared today ...