Play party

What is a play party?

A play party (in Dutch speelfeest) is a private evening where visitors meet each other and also actually practice BDSM, with furniture, with rules and without any obligation to join in. In the Dutch scene the word speelfeest comes up most, and at the same time it is the word that outside the scene means something entirely different.

What a play party is in practice

An evening in a private house, a rented hall or a private club, where between twenty and two hundred people come and where play happens in agreed spots.

The rules of such an evening are set out in that party’s house rules, at larger parties a dungeon monitor walks around, and the big pieces of furniture belong to the house while your own gear is yours. That is how a play party is organized, wherever it is held.

What is typically Dutch is the word on the invitation. It rarely says “party” and almost always “speelfeest”, usually with “besloten” (private) in front and “aanmelden vóór” (register before) behind. That trio tells you in one line what kind of evening it is: no walk-ins, no tickets at the door, and someone who knows who is coming.

Where the word speelfeest comes from

Nowhere from the scene, and that can be checked.

It appears in no Dutch dictionary. The Geïntegreerde Taalbank of the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal gives zero hits for speelfeest in the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, while that same dictionary does list speelkamer twice. The Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek too, which describes Dutch from 1970 on, has no article on it, while speelkamer does have one.

In the newspapers it does appear, but about something else. The Royal Library’s newspaper archive yields 34 articles, from 1879 to 1987, and none of them is about BDSM. From 1966 on it is almost always about children: De waarheid of 4 May 1971 announces in the Jordaan a “Groot speelfeest voor kinderen van 4 tot 12 jaar in de Noorderspeeltuin”, with sack-hitting and street drawing. Het Parool uses the word in 1966 for a twenty-four-hour art happening.

A warning about that archive, because I nearly fell for it myself: the two oldest hits, both advertisements in the Nieuwe Groninger courant of November 1879, are not a real attestation. The OCR reads “Tel- Speel-Feest- , Raadsel- en Kinderrijmpjes”, a list with hyphens. The search engine reads a word there that the typesetter never intended.

Where the word is recorded, it is in one place: the Wikidata entity for a BDSM play party carries as its Dutch label literally speelfeest, with the description “sociaal evenement waarbij deelnemers BDSM-activiteiten ondernemen”. A dictionary that is not. It is, though, the only reference work that knows the meaning you are looking for.

Why people go to a play party

To do what does not fit at home, with people around who don’t bat an eye.

• If you are new, this is the cheapest way to see what all exists, without having to do anything yourself.
• For those who have played longer, the pull is in the furniture and the space: a suspension point in the ceiling is not something you have at home.
• For a couple, it is often the first place where a fantasy is said out loud, because around you are people to whom it is ordinary.

A play party makes nothing easier that it was not already beforehand. Anyone who goes with a half-spoken expectation usually stands there all evening holding it. And it is not everyone’s evening; some people notice right there that they would rather play at home.

What an invitation to a play party looks like

Usually as a message in a group chat, not as an advertisement.

The usual order is that you first come to a munch a few times and only after that get asked. The invitation itself is short and says four things: where and when, whether you may bring someone, what the dress code is, and whether you bring your own gear. If nothing is said about that last one, the answer is yes.

Two phrasings are worth reading closely. “Guest allowed” means the host trusts you, and your guest through you; if it goes wrong, that lies with you. And “no alcohol” is not prudishness but usually just the licensing requirement.

What a play party is not

“It is a swingers club by another name.” No. A swingers club is a business with opening hours and an entry fee, where sex is the subject. A play party is private, revolves around rope, striking and power play, and at many parties sex in the play space is actually not allowed.

“Play party is a polite word for a swingers party.” Also not. Swinging is about partner swapping, and that is exactly what plays no part at a play party: you play with whoever you agreed with beforehand, or with no one.

“It is something for children.” Outside the scene the Dutch word speelfeest does mean exactly that, and it is no joke: it is the only meaning you find back in the newspaper archive. Type the Dutch word without saying what it is about, and you get playgrounds.

What I see myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo in Amsterdam, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. The question I get most often about these evenings is not what happens, but how you get away again.

That is a fair question and there is a simple answer for it: you agree a time with yourself beforehand. Not because there is anything wrong with staying longer, but because a private evening has no natural end and otherwise you keep hanging on until you are too tired to pay proper attention.

The people who have the best evening are almost never the ones who do the most. They are the ones who had thought of one thing and let the rest happen.

More reading on play parties

Within this glossary the rules are at house rules, DM covers who keeps watch, and munch describes the gathering that usually comes before it. And on the blog, visiting a swingers club describes exactly the kind of evening a play party sets itself apart from.

Beyond this site, the Royal Library’s newspaper archive is freely searchable, and it is nice to see for yourself what a Dutch newspaper understood by this word for a hundred years.

Where this fits on this site

If you would rather not walk into such an evening on your own: I come along. What gets discussed beforehand, and how the hours before and after are arranged, is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Geïntegreerde Taalbank, WNT. Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. Gives the negative finding: zero entries for speelfeest in the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, with speelkamer (two hits) as a positive control.
• Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek. Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal. Gives the second negative finding: the dictionary that describes Dutch from 1970 on has no article for speelfeest, while it does list speelkamer as an entry.
• Royal Library newspaper archive (Delpher). Searched via the SRU service on the DDD_artikel collection. Gives 34 articles with the word speelfeest between 1879 and 1987, none about BDSM; the announcement in De waarheid of 4 May 1971 of a “Groot speelfeest voor kinderen van 4 tot 12 jaar in de Noorderspeeltuin”; the art-happening use in Het Parool of 10 June 1966; and the finding, after re-reading the OCR, that the two oldest hits from November 1879 are not a real attestation but a list with hyphens (“Tel- Speel-Feest- , Raadsel- en Kinderrijmpjes”).
• Wikidata Q7203113. Checked against the Wikidata API. Gives that the Dutch label of the entity for a BDSM play party is literally speelfeest, with the description “sociaal evenement waarbij deelnemers BDSM-activiteiten ondernemen”, and that no Dutch-language encyclopedia article is attached to it.

Related terms

• Munch. The café hour where you get to know the people who invite you later.
• House rules. The list that gets gone through with you on arrival, and where it comes from.
• DM. The monitor on duty, and where their authority ends.
• Fetish party. The evening that revolves around clothing instead of play.
• Public play. Playing while others watch, and what the law says about it.
• Pick-up play. Playing with someone you did not know an hour earlier.
• Playroom. The room such an evening takes place in.
• Swinging. The other kind of evening with more people, the one a play party is most often confused with.
• Voyeurism. Watching as an agreed way of taking part, and where the line lies with images.