More Pain, More Gain
“Two years ago, I was a journalist for a magazine in Manhattan. I lost my job in post-9/11 cutbacks. A year later, I’d had only two job offers and few freelance assignments, and I was walking dogs to pay my rent. I was nearly broke. I hated the idea of needing help. Then I remembered one summer when I was a university student and working at a restaurant. There, one of the other waitresses told me, ‘As long as we’ve got this [she pointed between her legs] and these [she pointed at her breasts], men will want us.’ So now I’m a dominatrix and the night manager of a fetish/fantasy/role play studio — also known as a dungeon. We have five rooms and 15 women, with guest dominatrices from other cities and countries featuring every couple of months… Along with the day manager, Elena, I am in charge of recruiting and training the inexperienced girls… Elena and I can do as we like, provided we keep making money and don’t sleep with the girls… I’m the one who has to be reminded not to fraternise… A couple of weeks ago, I was scolded for my enthusiasm over an applicant who looked more like my ideal woman than the clients’. ‘These are middle-aged men. They want to be whipped by Grace Kelly, not Tank Girl,’ my boss told me. ‘You can keep this one, but not for yourself. She’ll only make money if she covers her tattoos and buys a blonde wig.’ We are always desperate for blondes. But you try to find a fair-haired, fetish-friendly woman under the age of 25 who has no tattoos or facial piercings. And one whom I haven’t slept with…” — Guardian (UK)
If you haven’t already figured it out, PervScan has a certain methodology to the stories it chooses to feature. Generally speaking, blogs, opinion pieces, editorials, and other sorts of first-person narratives are eschewed in favor of fact-based stories — yes, yes, what is is a fact? — that depict perverse events of some kind or other. Miserably enough, this often means that the stories are about people getting hurt, abused, or arrested. Conversely, the advantage of this approach is that you get a panorama of weird behavior — you get a glimpse of perversity in the wild — without having to wallow in the narcissistic musings of the up-with-sex type of polysexual San Franciscans who tend to write first-person narratives about perversion.
Accordingly, “More Pain, More Gain” is not the kind of story that PervScan would usually feature. It is essentially one woman’s very articulate acount of how she came to work as a dominatrix. Though her motives were no doubt complex, she portrays the economic recession that has hit New York since 9/11 as the immediate stimulus for her decision to go into sex work — er, if you can call working in a dungeon “sex” work, since real dominatrices do not fuck their customers, but rather fuck with their minds. Reading the piece, you can’t help but be struck by a point that the author herself does not make very explicitly — i.e. how ironic it is that fundamentalists, who hate America for its decadence, were at least partly responsible for obliging this poor girl to turn to sex work.
Anyway, this is a fine, honest, witty, mostly unself-indulgent piece of writing. Go read it if you have a few minutes.
This really was a fun read.
Every time I read about a dominatrix, I have to admit that I’m exceedingly jealous. Women have so many ways to exploit themselves sexually for money.
Sure, most good looking guys under 35 could make a little extra cash by doing a homoerotic jerk-off video, but nothing that would pay the rent on a regular basis. And who wants to find pictures of themselves while looking for porn? (OK, it might be a fun suprise… once.) There just isn’t the overwhelming demand for male flesh that there is for female flesh. And, excluding your bears and what have you, those who do want to see naked men are much more aethetically demanding. Whereas, any sloppy looking chick with a nice rack can pull in well over 100 nearly tax-free dollars a night as a stripper. It all still seems a little sleazy and degrading and ultimately unglamorous, but it’s a living. Probably beats working as a grocery store check out girl or folding t-shirts at the Gap any day.
But being a dominatrix, being in a position of power all day/night long, making a bundle, and not having to actually have sex or even pretend to like the client – heck, not even having to actually be fully naked…where do I sign up? Flexible hours, decent pay, cool outfits, and actually being paid to treat people like the pathetic, degraded, needy creatures they generally are. Sounds like a dream job to me.
Unfortunately, again, the market just isn’t there for men to dominate sadistically – probably because quasi-dominant, thoroughly sadistic male assholes are so commonplace that you can barely take a walk without tripping over one. Even the garbage man probably slaps his wife or his kids around.
Still…it’s a good dream, and I’m green with envy as I sit here at my day job waxing romantic about the fabulous life of a dominatrix. Ahhh…
well said, malebranche. and nice read, nice find, pervscan.
It’s funny; I spoke to my friends in the BDSM sex industry in the months after 9/11, and asked how business was. They said it wasn’t doing so well for a while, because people were feeling guilty about going out to have fun.
I did some stripping and pro-dom work myself in my toothsome youth. Ironically, I picked it up after doing a time/cost comparison – a night’s dancing paid about as much as a freelance article being sold, but the freelance article took a week’s worth of spare time, and the dancing took 4 hours. Watching and working with friends, I learned the litany of exasparation that a professional dominatrix goes through; they earn every penny! During my own experiences, I also went to graduate school. I now have a different job, one that the domme in the article might want for herself, in fact. On bad days I say to myself, “At least I get to keep my clothes on.”
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