I’ve always been a headstrong girl. Bossy, even. And I’ve never made a secret of my kinky inclinations, so it came as no surprise to my friends last winter when I announced I had begun working with an established Dominatrix with the goal of opening my own practice. What surprised me most was my own surprise. I would lay awake at night, recounting an afternoon of corporal punishment, a grown man bent over my lap as I spanked him with purposeful rhythm, thinking: Is this really what I’m doing with my life?
My foray into sex work began six years ago when I started stripping to pay for art school. In the beginning I saw sex work as a means to an end rather than a career, a loophole in the economy that allowed me to trade a social stigma I didn’t care about for good money and flexible hours. I graduated from university debt-free, quit stripping, and took an office job at a successful startup. This is a career, I told myself. I have health insurance now.
My office job paid half of what I made stripping, but more than the money, I missed the freedom of self-employment. I missed the relationships I had built at the club, and that particular window of vulnerability that strangers propped open in the dark safety of the champagne room, inviting me into their lives as both confidant and cohort. My coworkers at the office were nice, my job security unimpeachable, but I craved the intimacy and excitement I had grown accustomed to in my previous work. I filled my days with Gchat and instant noodles to distract from the sneaking suspicion that the life I wanted was passing me by. I gained ten pounds, developed lower back pain, and lost interest in my work altogether. Less than a year into my one and only office job, I resigned.
Perhaps I was the conductor of my own undoing. I certainly could have worked harder to advance my role at the office and become more invested in my work, but even then my job felt like a layover on the way to some far-flung destination. I am surrounded by friends who find meaning and joy in their 9-to-5 jobs, but even as a child I always wanted to be a performer: a ballerina, a fashion designer, a model. I missed dancing, missed the glitz and glamour of being on stage and the comfort of the club, but I didn’t want to go back. There was too little agency in being a stripper, too much reliance on a male-managed business paradigm that profits off of women’s bodies, and places the value of those profits above all else. I recalled an offer that a friend had made years earlier: he was friendly with a number of professional Dominatrices and could offer me an introduction or two if was ever curious about their line of work.
In some ways my work as a Dominatrix is not unlike my work at strip clubs. Just as the House Mom at my first club took me in and showed me the ropes, my Domme Mom generously gave her time to teach me about professional domination and tutored me through the process of starting my own business. The sororal bonds I’ve discovered in both strip clubs and dungeons have introduced me to a sisterhood of strong, driven women that I’m privileged to call colleagues and friends. As a Dominatrix I now run a small business like so many other “vanilla” entrepreneurs. Without a house dungeon to handle booking and advertising, I spend a good portion of my days answering emails, running advertisements, tweeting, traveling, and updating my website. In this way, my job feels like so many others, and not unlike my old job in tech, only instead of working in e-commerce I now trade in fantasies, secrets, fetishes, and self-acceptance. Still, I felt like something was missing. I had never considered sex work to be a career, and I still couldn’t fathom how being a Dominatrix fit into mine.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve used my experience as a Dominatrix to give a friend advice about navigating their vanilla job, I could probably stop charging money to tie people up and flog them. These conversations range from email syntax to social media savvy, but so often concern the insecurities of imposter syndrome. Even as a Dominatrix I’ve felt the nagging pull of self-doubt, that insidious inside voice that questions the worth of my work. Am I charging too much? I’ve asked myself, knowing full well that my rates are commensurate with my time and skills. Am I being too harsh? I’ve wondered, as I enforce disciplinary boundaries with difficult clients. Most heart-rending of all is: Can this ever be a “real” career, this work that I love?
Will capital “c” Culture ever acknowledge the legitimacy of shocking men into empathy by nurturing their submission, facilitating their fantasies and role-playing their most secret masochistic desires for a living? That’s the Big One, the one that kept me up nights wondering if I’d gone off the rails, wondering if maybe I shouldn’t just call it quits and retreat to the predictable security of working at an office before the gap in my resumé grew irreparably large.
But we all face those sleepless nights, that anxiety that races through our hearts, churning our guts up into our throats. We’ve all felt the nagging pull of self-doubt that corners our triumphs and infuses them with the fear that we are not good enough. I never feared that what I do for work is somehow wrong, just like I’ve never feared that being a writer is somehow wrong. What I feared was that it was only a matter of time before the world came crashing in like the Kool-Aid man to tell me that what I did was not a “real” job. I love my work. I love dressing up and taking control. I love the tight feeling of shiny latex and the sharp clacking of my stilettos across the hardwood floor as I prepare the dark dungeon for someone’s afternoon sanctuary. I love the exquisite agony on a masochist’s face as my leather crop lures them deep into subspace and away from their worries, one stroke at a time. I love the soft grip of garter and stocking on the tender thigh of a man who’s always longed for feminization, the shy submission and giddy joy under rosy cheeks that marks the beginning of self-acceptance. Ultimately, it was my own self-acceptance that was conspicuously missing from my practice.
What is a career, and how does it define us?
This is the single question I have found myself ruminating on more than anything else in my first year as a Dominatrix. This is the question that once answered, I felt would have the power to make or break my resolve.
Recently I spent an afternoon with my friend’s eight-year-old niece. My friend had a meeting and her niece, on winter break, was spending the day at her office. I picked her up in the financial district and we walked leisurely toward Union Square to see the puppies in the Macy’s holiday windows. Even Dommes babysit. Along the way I asked her general questions about school, about what held her interest and what she most loved learning about.
“Well, I’m not sure what I want to be when I grow up yet, if that’s what you mean,” she answered, divining my played-out grown up curiosity. “I think I’ll have lots of jobs,” she added, “just like my mom. She has four jobs.”
And then this beautiful child with her multitudinous interests and vast, unfathomable potential shared with me all of the things she might want to do with her future. How she might become a counselor or a businesswoman, or both, but also be a florist, either as a hobby or a side business, because she loves flowers. She told me how it was okay to have lots of jobs, even to make up your own jobs, because this was the example she had been shown by her parents. All of the things I wish I had been told, she held to be true. That a job is but one of the many things that you do, neither exclusive nor defining, unless you let it be.
Just as stripping was only one part of who I was in my early twenties, being a Dominatrix is only one of many jobs that make up my identity now. The main difference is that I no longer need to compartmentalize my role as a sex worker from the rest of my life. As a stripper, I never shied away from telling people what I did for a living. At worst I endured immature banalities; at best people saw it through the pretext of financial need. It was what I did, but not who I was. These days I see things differently. My years working at strip clubs are an essential part of who I have become. Stripping fostered my curiosity about the taboo, both in others and myself. It laid the foundation for me to find and build a dream job and to embrace my passion for sex work and sex education. In addition to my practice as a Dominatrix I work as a freelance writer and editor, and I’m going back to school to study Sexual Health Education—a passion I never would have discovered if not for sex work. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the notion of “career” is outdated. We are the sum of our parts, a puzzle of our own making.
The community of women I work with, both online and off, exemplifies this same understanding. In addition to being Dominatrices they are counselors, health professionals, grad students, activists, writers, professors, mothers, wives, and more. I see the same sea change in my teenage sister and her peers’ generation and it warms my heart. A career is no longer a static point in an antiquated timeline that defines us to the outside world. Knowing this, I approach each one of my submissives as a three-dimensional unknown. Their relationship to me is but one facet of who they are, just as my work as a professional Dominatrix is but one part of who I am. It’s an integral part of who I am, and it sings in chorus with all of the parts of me, permeating my life without defining me.
If there’s one way in which I feel regret it’s that it has taken so long for Culture to catch up with our humanity. That so many of us toil at things we don’t love, afraid to embrace our passions because they don’t look good on paper. Living ain’t easy, and in San Francisco it ain’t cheap either, but if the Internet has taught me anything it’s that there’s a community for every kink, sexual or otherwise, and revenue streams to be had at every turn. Instead of defining myself by this one unorthodox job, I now define myself by all of my jobs: daughter, sister, wife, friend, writer, student, and yes, Dominatrix. I am the sum of my parts, a puzzle of my own making. And now that I’m okay with that, I sleep like a baby.
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Feature photograph © Kevin Whittaker. All other photographs © Morgana Maye.
