La Fistinière was a guesthouse and sex club for gay men in Assigny, in the Cher department of France, opened in 2007 and closed on 31 December 2018. Husbands François Mallet and Juan Carlos Garcia Berrio ran it, and they built it for fist-fucking and hard sex. The house was a renovated seventeenth-century farm about a hundred miles south of Paris. Men who travel for deep penetration treated it as a place to sleep and as a place to be among their own. Guests came from forty-four countries on five continents. They were consenting adults.
Mallet and Berrio were fisters themselves. They folded the practice into domestic life, and they named a cat Fistouille, roughly “my beloved fist-fuck.” In a 2011 Vice interview Berrio said they already liked throwing orgies at home and wanted a dedicated place where everyone could relax into it. The website called the house a home for “the big fisting family,” designed by people who wanted to share the passion, for comfort, pleasure, and sexual fantasy.
The Fistine Chapel
The centre of the property was the Fistine Chapel, a play room of about a hundred square metres. It held furniture and gear for fisting and BDSM: slings, benches, a Saint Andrew’s cross, and a toy collection. The toys mixed shop goods with everyday objects used as dildos, including baseball bats, golf clubs, and bowling pins, plus a veterinary speculum made for cows and mares and kept for deep anal dilation. A cathedral-style ceiling carried frescoes, smaller than a church and frankly erotic. French artist Victor le Graphfist, born in 1967, painted a series of fisting orgies, including double fisting and prolapse play. Mallet and Berrio called him “our Michelangelo.”
A bar inside the chapel sold wine, beer, mineral water, soda, juices, and candy during play. Hard liquor was not sold, because the liquor licence did not allow it. That also kept extreme scenes clearer-headed. What follows is what the room contained, not instructions for using any of it. Away from the play room the farm kept softer space: a main dining room, a boudoir, and a living room, for the time between hard scenes.
Rooms, meals, and the grounds
Five non-smoking bedrooms, each with an ensuite bathroom, used farm names. The Attic, upstairs, had one double bed, for lovers who wanted extra privacy. The Cowshed had three single beds and was described as the largest and most comfortable room. The Sheepfold had one queen bed and the original wall-mounted hay rack. The Pigstay, in the old pig sty, had four singles and one double, advertised for “nasty pigs everywhere.” The Stable had three singles and was fully wheelchair friendly. The house served breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mallet’s sister did the cooking. An all-inclusive weekend bundled lodging, dinner, the Saturday night party, Sunday brunch, and free use of the facilities, with special rates for groups and longer stays.
Clothing was optional outdoors: the swimming pool, a sundeck, a terrace, and the lawn called le parc d’attrap’fion, “the asshole catcher’s park.” Public sex was allowed if it could not be seen or heard off the property. The site told guests to ask about the fisting tree. The house also ran theme nights and holiday parties, and a shuttle to Cosne-sur-Loire station. Known artists came through. Singer Giedrė Barauskaitė performed in 2017 for the tenth anniversary. In 2013 the punk group Opium Du Peuple filmed a music video there.
House rules and what they called the fist
The house rules were written as carefully as the toy list. Every guest had to be a consenting adult, and sex stayed in the areas made for it. The hosts warned people not to fist someone on the kitchen table after picking him up at the pool. For hygiene, Crisco, J-Lube, and other heavy lubricants were banned from the bedrooms and from the swimming pool or anywhere near it. Guests were not to be naked where passers-by could see them, and not to “howl at the moon” outside. Sound carries a long way in the countryside.
Mallet and Berrio called fisting magic, and something close to religious. Berrio described it as opening a partner’s perception in a spiritual way: touch, smell, taste, sight, and the feel of that person’s interior. They called the anus a sacred ring. Each year they gave the title La Truieasse, “the pig ass,” to a guest who could take and give pleasure in a crowd, with sharing, reciprocity, and comradeship. They chose the archangel Uriel as patron, as someone who helps people understand their inner nature and change in spiritual and material life.
The house is still on record in François Mallet’s 2015 book La Fistinière – sous ma bonne étoile, the 2021 France 3 documentary short Le cœur au Centre, photographs of Graphfist’s chapel paintings, and Opium Du Peuple’s video Fais Moi Mal Johnny. After the building closed, travelers still used it as a reference for hard-play weekends. A married couple had built that piece of French countryside infrastructure. Extreme penetration was craft and community ritual there, and the rules were there to keep the neighbours quiet and the kitchen clean.
