Elite Spanking

Once you login, it's apparent you're on a big network. You're directed right to the main membership page, but still given easy access to the Fetish Network sites, which are categorized and linked on the right-hand side of the page. Still, Elite Spanking manages to keep most of that aesthetic allure of your average, gritty bondage site — black color scheme, forboding graphics, and more femme fatales than you can shake a dick at — while also including some — though not enough — of those snazzy features a mega-site has to offer.

Scenes can be sorted by model, date, and number of views. What's more, each scene is clearly rated(5 star system) is labeled with the appropriate tags. Once inside an episode page, things get even more in depth, with a highly descriptive synopsis and a nice collage coming together to give you a good gauge of whether or not any given scene is worth your while. Although, I have a feeling if you're really into the rough stuff, nearly every scene you click is going to leave you drooling. I haven't seen a thumbnail yet that was absent a beet red tushy.

The scenes are hot and, especially when compared to other touted sites in the genre, surprisingly well done. Everything is brightly lit and tightly shot — you know, so you don't miss a gash or bruise. There's also a lot of variety in terms of models, plot, and location. One scene you might have a cruel male Dom dishing out punishment on a female sub. The next episodes, the roles very well could be reversed. There's just as much variety when it comes to forms of punishment, too. A girl might be on a rack in a faux dungeon, or strung up in a dusty old barn, complete with fancy period accurate duds. One thing that stays pretty consistent, though, is the brutality.

One area in which this site is quite similar to a lot of its bondage brethren, however, is in video quality. Videos can only be downloaded in one format(MPEG-4) in two quality options. Resolution sizes are a far cry away from the 720 and 1080p which is quickly becoming the standard, and oddly enough, have even dropped a bit since the site's launch. Still, they look surprisingly good for what they are, so if you don't mind 680 x 480 video, have at it.

There's 236 of 'em, altogether, dating all the way back to October, 2008. While those numbers are certainly nothing to laugh at, they're a bit shy of what I'd expect for a site that's 4 years old. Worse still, the last posted update was over 2 months ago, which means one of two things: they rotate content or they've just stopped updating altogether. Obviously, the latter is particularly troubling, but given patterns I've seen in similar sites on the network, I'm more apt to believe it's the former, anyway.

Another minor area of concern would be with the overly simplistic layout. For such a big network, you'd expect stronger browse-tools, or at least something more site specific. With so few ways to categorize content, it's near impossible to fine tune search results. Just browsing the archive, for example, isn't of much use since the niche tags (Spanking/Caning) are identical on every single scene posted in the last 4 and a half years.

Oh, and if you're looking for photos, look elsewhere. Some scenes come attached with a screen cap gallery, but they're low-res and frankly not worth the trouble. Honestly, though, this site doesn't advertise itself as having great photography — or any, actually — so I really don't mind that.

Still, this one is definitely a good deal for the frugal BDSM fan. The Fetish Network package deal is a great value, with over 40 sites to choose from, including a number of similarly themed ones like Femdom Academy and Rick Savage.