Got Your Eyes

TigerLilly chokes out "pipsqueak" Sam.

On Saturday night, in the protected brick-and-mortar bosom of Lacy Street Studios in Downtown L.A., a MMA training enterprise called Ultimate Female Fitness launched Beat Down Girls, a "female supremacist" wrestling studio and collective, with a four-match, mixed wrestling tournament. Cassandra Lee, the company's founder and madame of fetish clubs past, describes the Beat Down Girls as an athletic "girl gang" that champions the physical, mental and sexual superiority of women over their estrogen-challenged cohorts -- and aren't afraid to get in the ring to prove it.

Several of the fit and fiercest from various corners of the women's fighting world, including pro boxer/Penthouse centerfold Hollie "Hotstuff" Dunaway; darling of online BDSM porn emporium Kink.com, Rain DeGrey; former competitive body builder Jennifer Thomas; and buxom-legged newcomer TigerLilly were there on Saturday to spar with more-than-willing male victims.

For those out of the professional fighting loop, this event involved "mixed fighting," meaning men and lady folk in the ring, together, mixing sweat and guff and grunts. One catch is, the ladies always come out on top -- each fight is thrown to the fairer sex to propagate an illusion of impervious female strength. Literally, the champion would, in the immortal words of Mortal Kombat, "finish him" by digging a dainty foot into a helpless lad's ribs and flash her biceps for the crowd. This is prime wank material for a large subculture of fetishists who prefer women of the Amazonian variety, and the fetish hinges on a flawless victory for the ladies.

Mills Entertainment

Alice Moran, Patrick Whalen and Anne Marie Scheffler

If you've read Fifty Shades of Grey and think it's about as thought-provoking as the parody cookbook Fifty Shades of Chicken, then you're sure to laugh -- intentionally -- at Spank! The Fifty Shades Parody, which opens at the Grove of Anaheim, followed by Club Nokia, just before Valentine's Day, on Feb. 11.

The erotic trilogy's worldwide appeal started less than two years ago and has already spawned countless parody books, not to mention celebs on TV and YouTube reading the novel's steamiest passages for comic relief. (Gilbert Gottfried reading this nugget comes to mind: "His hands reach around and touch my breasts and my nipples pucker at his touch.") It was only a matter of time before a stage spoof popped up, bringing to life the not-so-sophisticated words of housewife-turned-smut-peddler-disguised-as-author E.L. James.

Carolyn Stimson

Mistress Cyan, right, is by far the most successful transgender dominatrix in the country.

Mistress Cyan first encountered BDSM at a party in the early '80s, following months of correspondence with the hostess, whose PO Box she found in a personal ad in a long-defunct fetish magazine called Encore.

"It was like, wow," she recalls. "There's loads of people tied up. They've got this woman inverted, okay, and this guy's dropping hot wax between her legs, and she's screaming, and I'm thinking, I gotta go... my God, how am I ever gonna explain if this place gets raided?"

But she stayed. Or rather, he stayed, and fell down the rabbit hole. Back then, Cyan was a married man, the director of operations for a $3.5 billion corporation that manufactured housewares and woodenware, with a company car, an expense account and two young sons. Thirty years later, at age 58, this stunning transgender powerhouse is the most respected professional dominatrix in Los Angeles, plus the founder and executive producer of DomCon, an annual convention in LA and Atlanta; a bondage model who has appeared on shows like Nip/Tuck and Las Vegas; a regular guest speaker at UCLA; a community leader commended by the city of West Hollywood for her Thanksgiving and Christmas charity slave auctions; and the owner of Sanctuary, a 7,000-square-foot commercial dungeon near LAX, which employs forty women and boasts nine themed playrooms named after Greek goddesses.

Louann

On their first date, Mistress Tetra (top) asked Nicole (bottom) to pose for her birthday party invitation.

Smack. Slap slap slap. Thwack. Professional dominatrix Mistress Tetra pauses her spanking to press her breasts into the bare bottom of a woman clad only in a gold corset, eliciting applause, cheers and monkey-like screeching from the nearly two hundred voyeurs and fetishists assembled on a recent Saturday for Mistress Tetra's Birthday Flesh Fest at Sanctuary, a 7,000-square foot commercial dungeon near LAX. Clad only in black underwear and platform heels, with her dark red hair slicked back and her nipples covered by green pot leaf stickers, Tetra, 25, is one of four dominants currently on stage paddling, scratching, whacking and spanking four eager, submissive party-goers.

As Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me" transitions into Juvenile's "Back That Azz Up," the girl in the gold corset stands, hugs Tetra, and exits the stage, only to be replaced by a smiling, voluptuous 20-year-old college student wearing a frilly white corset and garter belt, crotch-high white fishnet socks and a collar of pink fabric rosettes. She doesn't want her family, her sorority sisters or her professors to know she's here, so I'll call her Nicole, which is part of her username on FetLife, a social networking site for kinksters that has 16,379 registered users in the city of Los Angeles and another 12,000 or so within thirty minutes of downtown.

Before bending her over the spanking horse, Tetra grabs the back of Nicole's head and kisses her hard on the mouth, a rare moment of sappy, vanilla affection at a party filled with leather, whips and chains. Why do these two make out, unlike all of the other dom/sub pairs on stage?

James, Pet Productions

Mistress Justine Cross has a B.A. in Literature and a B.S. in Psychology. Reading 50 Shades of Grey saddened her "as an academic and intellectual."

"Chains and whips excite me," Rihanna sings. "You're a dirty little whore, and I'm going to send you home to your parents covered in cum," Lena Dunham's love interest tells her on "Girls."

And in Hollywood, a bidding war over the film rights to E.L. James' bondage-laced romance novel, 50 Shades of Grey, which has sold 31 million copies worldwide, ended with Universal Pictures plunking down $5 million: more than was paid for Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code or The Hunger Games.

But even as 50 Shades and other mainstream representations of BDSM (bondage and discipline; domination and submission; sadism and masochism) broaden the sexual horizons of middle-aged women everywhere, the Angelenos who have spent years and careers "playing," or participating in kinky encounters in dungeons and at fetish parties, are rolling their eyes at the book's popularity, scoffing at how prude we all are.

Spanking? Puh-leez. Try scrotal piercings. Try glass rods inserted into the urethra. Try tying your genitals to a pulley system and using the rope to slowly yank your body off the ground. Numerous professional dominatrices (or "dommes") call the erotic bestseller "vanilla" and "entry-level"; one compares the trilogy to a grown-up version of The Babysitter's Club.

So if the book that's scandalizing readers profoundly disappoints those truly in the know, what is L.A.'s professional BDSM world really like, in 2012? What kind of people get paid hundreds of dollars an hour to flog, gag, interrogate and tease willing clients?