Top 10 things (Part 2) that have changed in swinging in the past 25 years
Part 2: Playrooms and Dungeons
This is part 2 of our series of Top 10 things that have changed in swinging in the past 25 years. This week’s top 10 list takes us to numbers three and four Playrooms and Dungeons.
If you missed Part 1, you can click here to go back so you can start from the beginning.
3. Playrooms
One big change we have seen over the years is in the playroom areas. When we went to events 20 years ago, most of the events rented out a couple of hotel rooms and simply opened them up for people to play in. What we noticed is that they didn’t get much action. They were always empty, late into the evening with people standing outside, talking loudly, with drinks in their hands. They would peak in the rooms, see no one there, and go on to the next one and on and on without ever entering or staying.
Once, at an event in Las Vegas, we saw a playroom that was in a big suite that had an actual basketball court inside the suite. There was only one option for the lighting in the basketball suite: all the way on or off. The lights were those industrial Halogen or metal halide lights that were SUPER bright. The event producer hadn’t thought about bringing in softer, more intimate lighting, so SUPER bright it was.
They added a couple of roll-away mattresses and voila! There you go, our least favorite playroom we had ever seen.
In the beginning, we used hotel rooms, but we took out most of the furniture and crammed them into storage rooms or other hotel rooms. Our goal was to make it look as least like a hotel room as possible.
We gave each room a theme. Some were dungeons, some were glow rooms, some had color themes (the Pink Room, the White Lace Room) and some looked like a medieval castle inside because we covered the walls with fake stone-looking paper and fake fire lanterns.
Each year we added more and more decorations. We added Sybians, crosses, bondage furniture, and electronic candles. Our goal was to create a room so pretty that it would appeal to the ladies in attendance. Eventually, we moved our playrooms out of hotel rooms and into larger meeting rooms so we could fit more mattresses, more people, and more decorations into this space.
We added music to every room. We curated playlists, added water features, and added more sensual lighting to make sure the room had a sexy hue that allowed people to see each other but not too bright.
(Note: This year we have added a couple of new sexy playlists we can’t wait to try out.)
It turned out that our changes worked, we had the most active playrooms anyone had ever seen at any event or club. Even the manager of Trapeze, one of the nicest clubs in the country tells us “Wow, this is amazing, I have never seen so many people playing at one time in my life.” Coming from Little Allen, this was a huge compliment for us and we never stopped trying to add more ambiance so that our playrooms were always active and full.
Another thing that really helped our playrooms was that we required everyone to dress down before entering. They could not be in street clothes, they had to be in lingerie, boxers or briefs, a towel, a robe, or something super sexy. No jeans, long dresses, suits, or ties.
This took away the people that would just hang out in the hall talking all night and make sure that the people were more likely to play. It might be the single best decision we made and many other playrooms at clubs and events are now doing the same.
4. Dungeons
When we started, there were BDSM events and “Swinger” events, and never did one mix with the other. I thought that was just silly, so I bought a couple of crosses and recruited a couple of “Masters” to come to teach at our events.
We only had two themes at our first event and they were a Fetish Night and a Mardi Gras theme. Right from the beginning we were integrating fetish and BDSM into our philosophy so that both could be combined for one amazing event.
Eventually, our educational courses were divided into three different tracks and BDSM has become 1/3rd of our classes. Our dungeon became the perfect place for those interested in BDSM to start exploring, practicing, and becoming well-versed in things like bondage, sadomasochism, rope tying, flogging, and Dom/Sub relationships.
