My ears always prick up when people are talking about fetish or bdsm, because that’s my world and it’s where I earn my living. I am generally struck by how much fantasy is injected into the retelling though. No civilian speaks about bdsm the way another does, because their words are almost always informed by their sexual desires.
Behind The Whip is the first book I have ever read that is honest in that respect. The profiles of the Mistresses featured are just about them, not any projected desires. They are presented to us only as who they are pretending to be.
The book begins with an amazing introduction that reads almost as a sexy history lesson, reminding us how interwoven this world is with the world it exists directly outside of (or beneath, depending on your views).
The stories begin with a woman in London, naturally, but feature women from all over the world. Some very interesting points are made throughout that feel like common knowledge but may not be. Specifically:
I have a policy that fetish play is just that, play, and as such I am loathe to take it into the public eye. This policy exists for a few reasons, the most important being that I hate when people push their shit on me, so I’m not going to push mine on them. I get grossed out by overly lovey couples, religious zealots, and the lot. Walking a slave on a leash in the middle of Downtown Dallas would be right along those lines as far as I’m concerned.
Having said all that, it is pretty hilarious. I imagine that there are submissives wanking to this as I type, so many people have that “In Public” fetish. Most of them are too chickenshit to go through with it though, so I admire this guy’s bravery. He isn’t even wearing a costume!
Picture the scene. You’re sitting in a strange room with your friend, waiting for the near-stranger to come and give you instructions, and, you hope, some money. You look around at the expensive furnishings, and your friend, who is wearing just a bed sheet. “So…are you wearing any underwear?” you ask. “No,” they shoot back at you, and you both crack up. And then your client comes back in the room, and you eye them with a mix of ingratiation and just enough jut of the chin to let them know who’s in charge.
The mix of camaraderie, defiance, curiosity and sitting around naked in unfamiliar places is familiar to any sex worker. But the two characters onscreen are Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, who have been summoned to Buckingham Palace to work on a confidential case involving some compromising photos of a young royal. The photos in question are held by one Irene Adler, a dominatrix, who we also see in tantalisingly brief shots intercut with Holmes and Watson. While they look at tastefully posed photos from her website, she thumbs through real-time snapshots of them on a swanky phone. A game of wits is thus begun between Holmes and Adler, in which they bluff, drug, evade and outfox each other by turns for ninety convoluted minutes.
Content warning—the following contains descriptions of underage sex work and an adult fantasizing about sexual activity with a pre-teenage child.
I don’t know how I started seeing Jeff. I can’t remember meeting him, or what the first session was like, or what he looked like in clothes. I just remember when it turned.
Jeff was a big money client for me at the time. It was my first year as a pro-domme and I worked in the sketchiest dungeon in town. Jeff would book me out for the entire night, freeing me from having to charm individual clients during meet and greets and guaranteeing me enough cash to cover my rent. He was easy too: the session was almost entirely verbal and consisted of my languishing on a velvet padded throne and rattling staccato words at him while hoovering lines of cocaine off the mirror in my Chanel compact. He would sit at my feet, cross-legged and hunched over, slavishly masturbating and smoking poorly rolled joints. He requested that I wear street clothes during one of our early sessions. I returned to the room, minus the latex, in what I had arrived at work in: platform boots, skintight ripped up jeans, and a tube top. I could tell he was hoping for something different, and he came to our next appointment with a small plastic shopping bag.
After I took Jeff’s money and dutifully handed it over to the biker who ran the place, I went into the dressing room to inspect the contents of the bag: a very small pair of shorts and a very small camisole, both in the lightest shade of pink, made of waffle knit cotton. There was a second where I wanted to sit down and cry. I was never molested as a child, but for some reason introducing the specter of childhood into an S&M session disturbed me more than anything else I did at work. From my first day on the job, I had a preternatural ability to perform acts of severe subjugation without being affected by them. I could fist a guy’s ass, piss in his mouth, beat him until he bled, and it didn’t touch me. It didn’t disgust me or traumatize me or make me feel much of anything aside from the intoxication of desire and the masturbatory pleasure of receiving the cash. But the kid stuff fucked with me. Calling it “age play,” the euphemism of choice in BDSM circles creeped me out even more. I didn’t ever want to be called Mommy and I didn’t ever want to play a little girl. Even though I was just seventeen, technically under the age of legality for sex work in New York, I felt like an adult at work, and I wanted to keep it like that.
It’s tax season! That makes me think of a story I found out about a few weeks ago involving a Domina and a silly man with a government job.
A tax collector from Secaucus, NJ named Alan Bartolozzi wired (maybe more than) $780,000 in taxpayer money to a Domina with addresses in 5 states. He wired money internationally too, but there isn’t any info out there on where… I imagine somewhere sunny. She featured the guy on her website, but it’s down. I am assuming he’s dressed up in sissy clothes or bent over with objects inside him based on my own experience with government workers, but I could be wrong.
