People ask me this more than you'd think. Always quietly, then with a little embarrassed laugh first, to cover the real question underneath it.
“You've been a dominatrix?” More quietly, “What was it like?” “What is it like?”
So I tell them: “Here's what I've learned,” and their reaction surprises me, “it's almost never about hurting anyone. It's rarely about sex or what turns them on,” although that can be part of the kink.
“It's about being the one who decides. Who holds the field, so they can let go. Surrender is another word for it, which some find more difficult to fully comprehend.”
Before it's anything else, it's that.
Most of the women asking me this have spent years reading a room before they've ever read themselves.
Managing. Softening. Making it easy to be around.
The fantasy of the whip isn't cruelty, it's the fantasy of a body that gets to want something out loud and have that be the end of the conversation, not the start of a negotiation, although negotiation is at the foundation of any BDSM scene.
I trained in that world. Worked in it for years, properly, not as a phase. What worries me now isn't the desire. The desire is honest and I take it seriously, I always have.
What worries me is how many women walk toward it with no map at all, mistaking control for safety, intensity for intimacy, performing power before they've ever once practiced holding it, or knowing what surrender feels like.
Part One: The Tape On The Floor
I remember a workshop, they had marked the floor with a strip of tape. A question would be asked, and if it was true for you, you crossed the line, side to side, and stood there while everyone saw who else had crossed it too. This was a me-too exercise, slaying shame, because as Brené Brown says: shame hides in the shadows.
The questions got harder as the room went on: “who's ever been in love? Who's ever had their heart broken? Who's ever paid for sex?”
I stood still for a second on that one. Then I thought about Karim, my ex-husband now, back when we were only dating. I had more money than he did at the time, took care of things here and there, a suit for his new job. And we were in a relationship and had sex.
Have I ever paid for sex? I don't actually know. I crossed the line anyway, because of exactly those ponderings.
Then the next question came: “who's ever been paid for sex?” The same interrogation started up in me all over again, this time from the other side of it.
I've been given beautiful gifts. Taken out to dinners, more times than I could count. When is that actually being paid for sex, and when is it just someone receiving a gift? Interesting question.
I didn't land on an answer either time. I'm still not sure I have one now.
That not-knowing is the actual work. A room like that doesn't hand you a tidy line between what's transactional and what's love. It just makes you stand on the tape long enough to notice you'd never once asked yourself the question honestly before.
Part Two: Where To Start
None of what's above needed a costume to work. That's worth staying with, before you decide this is about kink at all.
I watch this over and over, in my own inbox: women who can run a boardroom and can't order dinner without checking it's fine with everyone else first. Ask what they actually want and watch the sentence bend, mid-air, into a question about what's easiest for the room.
None of this makes the desire itself suspect, either.
Kinky is one of five real pleasure languages I test for in my own work, alongside Energetic, Sensual, Sexual and Shapeshifter, Jaiya's framework, credited every time I teach it. Some people are simply, legitimately wired toward power and intensity as their real erotic home, not a consolation prize standing in for something else.
If any of the above is you, start smaller than you want to, this week, nowhere near a club. Say three real wants out loud, to the people already in your life.
What you want for dinner, without the “but whatever's easier” tacked on the end. What you actually need from a meeting, stated once, plainly.
What you want from a partner's hands tonight, said before you've already talked yourself out of needing it.
Notice which one is hardest to get out of your mouth. That's usually the exact place a fantasy like this is trying to reach on your behalf.
Betty Martin has a line I keep coming back to: most of us have only ever practiced giving, or giving dressed up as taking, and almost never taking itself. Wanting something out loud, and letting it land without softening it, is a taking practice before it's anything else. It's worth building in the small rooms first, with people who already love you, long before it's worth building anywhere else.
It's enough to start with, on its own, if that's as far as you want to take it. What's ahead is what it looks like once someone's actually ready to build a real container, the kind I build with clients, and the kind that took me years to learn to build for myself first. I'm still building it, if I'm honest.
Part Three: What The Room Actually Is
People picture leather and shouting. What you'd actually find, if you were ever really in that room, looks closer to a negotiation than anything you've seen in a film.
Every scene starts with a conversation, no exceptions. What's on, and what's off, named specifically, never assumed.
A traffic light system, red, orange, green, agreed in advance, so nobody has to go hunting for the right words in the middle of something, when words are the hardest thing to reach for right then.
A number, one to ten, for how much of a given touch someone actually wants, checked as you go.
Negotiation is the container the real thing happens inside of. Skip it, and nothing that follows is safe enough to actually mean something.
I have one rule I never bend. No alcohol for twenty-four hours before a session, none at dinner either if there's a dinner.
If I can smell it on someone, the session's over before it begins, and they still pay me in full. No drugs, ever.
People assume that's about liability.
It's actually simpler than that: a body under the influence can't consent to what happens next, and I won't take instructions from a body that isn't fully home.
I've also used this work with other women carrying real trauma of their own. Flogging, different kinds of touch, inside that same agreed container, moving something through the body that talking alone had never managed to shift. I call it duplication, recreating the shape of something charged until the body finishes what it never got to finish the first time.
I use it on my own fear too, not just trauma. Afraid of heights, I've jumped out of a plane. Afraid of spiders, I've let a tarantula walk the length of my arm. Same mechanism every time: move toward the exact thing, on purpose, inside a container, instead of spending a lifetime walking around it. I still don't love spiders, for what it's worth.
I watch this too, over and over, in the rooms I don't run: people turning up to clubs and parties with none of this in place. Heavy drinking, limits agreed so loosely they're not really limits.
Someone wanting a new sensation badly enough to ask for a blindfold before they've ever once practiced saying stop, sober, to a stranger's actual face.
I've pulled people apart mid-scene more than once. A spanking that had drawn blood, once, and the woman underneath it was in such a heightened state she genuinely hadn't registered it happening. I spent three or four days afterward doing the aftercare somebody else should have done properly the first time.
People call that a bad scene sometimes. I just call it harm, dressed better.
If you're going to explore this world for real, and some of you should, find someone with an actual trauma background, not someone trying it on for the weekend. The field is enormous, genuinely. I could teach on it for the rest of my working life and never run out of it.
Part Four: The Power Isn't Always Sexual
Some of my longest-standing work with clients has never once involved touching anyone's genitals.
Powerful men fly in for a session with me, and what they're actually asking for is somewhere to put the control down for one evening. They don't need one more thing to organise, they've got plenty of those already.