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Professional dominatrix, adult performer share journey as sex workers

Source: Sundial.csun.edu.

USA – A panel of current and past female sex workers, along with a CSUN sociology professor, held a discussion about the issues surrounding sex work.

Members of the Women’s Research and Resource Center hosted “An Honest Conversation Regarding Sex Work,” Tuesday night at the Thousand Oaks Room in the Universtity Student Union building.

Ela Darling, 29, an adult performer, model and inventor of adult virtual reality content didn’t find happiness in a regular nine to five job, so she went looking for something more.

“I have been doing adult films for, wow, seven years. I used to be a librarian, I got a masters degree when I was twenty-one,” said Darling. “I chose sex work because it was far more empowering and gave me a lot more opportunities than any other jobs outside of academia. I am also the world’s first virtual reality cam girl.”

Cadence Valentine, a CSUN grad student pursuing her masters in social work, is an intern at the Women’s Research and Resource Center, and is also a professional dominatrix and webcam girl. She opened up the discussion by sharing with the audience the reason behind the event.

“It is very important for me to take hold of these topics and really bring it to CSUN because I know, from my own experience, that there is a huge lack of understanding and great divide between what is reality and what exists in the media, what exists in the world,” Valentine said.

More often then not, there is a negative stigma connected to adults that make a living off of engaging in sexual acts, she said.

Sex work often times gets associated with human sex trafficking, but according to Emily Prior, CSUN sociology professor and director of the Center for Positive Sexuality, those two things are completely unrelated.

“Human trafficking is not the same as sex work at all,” Prior said. “People involved in human sex trafficking are forced, abducted and coerced into sex acts that they do not give consent for. They are exploited. Sex workers chose their life styles and careers that help them find themselves and explore their sexuality.”

What people don’t understand is that being a sex worker is not something solely based on sex or even for the money, but is an actual occupation that creates personal bonds.

Each person on the panel opened up to the audience and shared their own life experiences on how they began their journey as a sex worker.

The “Honest Conversation Regarding Sex Work” was the second part to the “Behind Closed Doors” series, which looks at topics that are found to be controversial.

Third part of the series, “Intersectionalities of Sex Work,” will be held on April 19 at the Thousand Oaks Room, USU from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. The event is free.

See more and larger photo’s: Sundial.csun.edu.

Defense: Slain ‘house slave’ wanted beatings

Source: Theleafchronicle.com.

USA – CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. — A roommate who watched while Shirley Beck was hit, kicked, choked and eventually killed testified Tuesday that Beck was a “house slave” who enjoyed being hurt.

But prosecutors say the dozens of blows that killed the slender 5-foot-4 woman on June 26, 2014, amounted to “murder, plain and simple.”

Assistant District Attorney Robert Nash led opening statements by telling jurors that Beck, 39, had 16 fractured ribs, a fractured sternum, bruises over 80 percent of her torso, contusions and abrasions on her legs, multiple lacerations to her liver and damage to her small intestine, among other injuries caused by four of her roommates.

“She passes out and they revive her,” Nash said. “They hang her up again and they beat her again. And then what? She passes out again. They revive her again only to hang her from the ceiling and beat her again.”

Derek M. Vicchitto, Matthew Lee Reynolds, Alphonso Richardson and Cynthia Dianne Skipper are all charged with murder, aggravated sexual battery and especially aggravated kidnapping in the beating death of Beck at the home they shared at 108 Wilson Court.

‘The house slave’

Nash said Beck died of blunt force trauma and strangulation but said BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism) was not to blame. Although Beck was Skipper’s submissive, he said the attack on her was not part of a BDSM scenario. Instead, it was because she didn’t wash the dishes correctly, angering another roommate.

“Ms. Beck was the house slave,” Nash said. “She did all the chores for these people. Granted, she subjected herself to being a slave, but not to this extent.”

He told jurors in opening statements that if Beck’s death had been part of BDSM, there would have been no reason for the roommates to lie or run away.

“This is not ’50 Shades of Grey,’ ” he told the jury. “This is murder, plain and simple.”

Roach dust

Another roommate, Kristin Wilkerson, who was not charged in the case, said she watched with Skipper from a dining room table while the three men took turns beating Beck for almost four hours.

She said Richardson woke everyone the day before, June 25, saying he was supervising Beck as she did her kitchen chores and that he thought she was trying to kill him and his fiancee because he saw residue that might be boric acid on the rims of their cups.

Boric acid dust was being used to treat a roach infestation at the home.

Wilkerson said Beck was first suspended by her arms in the master bedroom but was then strung up in the living room so the bedroom TV and game system wouldn’t get damaged while Beck was being punished.

She said she watched Richardson, Vicchitto and Reynolds hit and kick Beck until she lost consciousness.

She said Richardson hit Beck the most times, even after Reynolds and Vicchitto stopped. One of the weapons used was a metal pole taken from a military cot that he used to hit Beck about 10 to 15 times, she said.

“He was swinging the pole as if it was a baseball bat,” Wilkerson testified. “At one point he had his hand around her throat. It appears he was choking her.”

She heard Beck moan but never say anything she could decipher.

After everyone else stopped, she said, it was Richardson who kept beating Beck, even as the two other men tried to make him stop.

She said she never tried to intervene. Eventually, Beck was put in a bath to revive her, and then Wilkerson helped dress her in different clothes and another roommate was wakened to attempt CPR.

She admitted she helped concoct a lie that she and Vicchitto were going to Wal-Mart to get snacks and saw Beck lying in the Publix parking lot already beaten. She later admitted she lied to police.

Wanted her dead

Chase Smith, who is representing Reynolds, said Beck moved to Clarksville from Illinois because she wanted to be part of the BDSM community and had been a “slave” before.

He said Skipper would not have wanted to “kill her property,” but Richardson kept up the beating because he was angry.

“He beat her like a pinata,” Smith said. “Mr. Richardson is the only one who wanted her dead.”

Richardson’s attorney, Eric Yow, argued that many of Beck’s injuries could have come from CPR the other roommate tried to perform after Beck stopped breathing or from earlier beatings that she consented to.

“This case is not about Alphonso Richardson,” Yow said. “This case is about Shirley Beck. She could have left, and she did from time to time, but she kept coming back.”

Testimony is expected to resume at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday with another dominatrix who kept Beck as a slave before Skipper took over that role.

See a lot more larger photo’s: www.theleafchronicle.com.

Review: Rihanna on Tour, Part Preacher, Part Dominatrix, All Human

Source: NYtimes.com.

USA – There wasn’t much to look at in terms of set design during Rihanna’s Sunday-night concert at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Oversized plastic cocoons throbbed with pulsing air on either side of the stage. About two-thirds into the show, a huge shower curtain dropped from the ceiling; for a while, it displayed multicolored psychedelic swirls, and shortly after, foam came tumbling down it from the top, as if Rihanna had let the world’s largest washing machine overflow.

These didn’t feel like strategic choices so much as a result of needing literally to fill space — vertical, horizontal, intellectual, psychological.

But there was one exceedingly potent and poetic visual gambit early in the night, one that required just as little thought but was endlessly rich. Rihanna began the concert on a platform at the opposite end of the arena from the stage. After one song there, she boarded a clear floating catwalk and soared above the crowd, slithering through erotic numbers like “Woo” and “Sex With Me” while striking one hard pose after the next. She was moving laterally, and also undulating, and also pausing for effect. Songs were playing, she might even have been singing them, but in those minutes, all that mattered was her mastery of space.

She could have done the whole show like this, truly — staring down upon her faithful, bent at various angles, part tent preacher and part dominatrix. Rihanna is exceptional at being famous, and she needs very little in the way of help to fascinate a room.

At this show, though — the first of two sellouts at Barclays Center on her world tour celebrating “Anti” (Roc Nation), her eighth album, which was released in January — she aimed for more, which she doesn’t always do. The concert was arranged thematically, split into sections that showcased different parts of her catalog — bombastic, anthemic, somewhat Caribbean, very Caribbean — if not of her personality. About two dozen songs were compressed into around 90 minutes, a warp-speed recent-career overview that played something like a workout video: tightly controlled with mild variations designed only to obscure the fact that, really, there are no variations.

That was echoed in the wardrobe, which utilized a restrained, mature palette — beige, ivory, taupe, olive — on garments designed for druids, a look that channeled 2013-era Kanye West and suggested a concert at the hottest club on Tatooine.

Neutrality is not anonymity, though. Rihanna, the 28-year-old pop star, was the most present she’s ever been onstage, and maybe the most confident. (Although in the past she has managed to pull off a supremely confident disengagement.)

She wasn’t particularly animated by the particulars of performing — her dancing was still casual, her lip-syncing not always spot on. But she appeared to be finding joy in singing — when she was doing it, which was only some of the time — a part of pop fame that has not always been her strength. Often, performers will front load their sets with songs that demand the most vocally, but Rihanna waited until the concert’s final leg to push herself: an ecstatic “Diamonds,” a bare-bones “FourFiveSeconds,” a melodramatic “Love on the Brain.” As people began to stream out of their seats to head home, Rihanna aimed to pull them back with her humanity.

This represented, in so much as is possible, Rihanna with her guard down. The rollout of “Anti” was scattershot and messy, and the album lacks a center. But it also includes some of Rihanna’s most thoughtful and invested singing ever. She is doing something extremely rare in pop: trying harder the more famous she’s become.

She surrounded herself with worthy allies here: a gaggle of outstanding dancers, including voguers and bone breakers, and a crack band, initially submerged on four square platforms arranged evenly onstage and eventually raised to sea level. The drums were tough and synthetic, the keyboards tingling. The band alternated between faithfulness to the source material and disruption, excelling on a space-funk version of “Birthday Cake” that was colder and dreamier than the original.

It also delivered an expertly rendered but unfortunate run of dance music, a world Rihanna occasionally visits with a big smile and a pinched nose: a nitrous-injected version of Drake’s “Take Care,” followed by “We Found Love” — on which her vocals were unsteady enough that they were clearly live, something that humanized the song’s assault — followed by “Where Have You Been.”

This, the most energized portion of the night’s show, was also the most disjointed. Each person onstage was operating in his or her independent universe; from a distance, it all suggested an Off Broadway play, about an arena show, where each person surrounding the star harbors a provocative inner life but is trapped in an endless performance. In the middle of it all, Rihanna moved a little, but not much — everyone else’s physical scramble for attention only made her reluctance more entrancing.

See larger photo: www.nytimes.com.

Meet Portland’s World-Famous Cyber Dominatrix

“Humiliatrix” Ceara Lynch cracks the whip.

Source: PDXmonthly.com.

USA – PORTLAND She calls herself a “humiliatrix,” but, really, she’s a multimedia entrepreneur. Ceara Lynch, a 29-year-old Portlander, has garnered international attention—from an episode of popular podcast Love + Radio to British gossip flagship Daily Mail to many websites you wouldn’t want to browse on a work computer—for her thriving, self-made business. Which, true to this century’s newfangled ideas of intimacy, involves catering to the tastes of (mostly) men who enjoy getting bossed around, verbally abused, and emotionally crushed—all in her digital dungeon.

Sooo… how do you make money as a “cyber dom”?

There’s this whole world out there. I have lots of international clients in Europe, UK, Canada, Australia. My clients can pay to stream my videos. It’s $40 a month. I won’t give you an exact number, but I’m making six figures a year. I own a couple of houses. I paid my way through college. I travel a lot.

How did you get started?

I was 17 and living in Japan as an exchange student. No one spoke English, so I sought refuge online. I started talking to this one guy, on a totally normal kind of channel, and it became pretty clear he was kind of a perv. I was intrigued and disgusted at the same time. But being online offered me a safe distance at which to explore. Once I started looking around, there was clearly a market.

What’s your secret?

I use Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr to grab people’s attention, and from there link them to my various pay sites. The trick is to constantly update. If you stop updating, the audience will start paying attention to someone else.

Who are your clients?

Primarily men, but I do have one female client who e-mails me a good bit. She requests custom videos for her boyfriend, then they watch them together. I play his bratty little sister who comes into his room and humiliates him about his impending circumcision. I also get males calling me pretending to be their wives. Basically they just want me to punish them for their “bad behavior.”

How much of your online persona is actually you?

Having an alter ego was confusing in my late teens and early 20s. I was still figuring out who I was, while at the same time trying to create a unique voice within this performance-art-type role in the fetish world. I’d wonder how much of it was “me.” As I got older, everything sort of fell into place. In real life, I’m a relaxed, go-with-the-flow type of person, which is a terrible attitude to have as a dominatrix.

Does your family know?

I got to where I had to tell them. I was making so much money and I was so young: I was paying for my own nice apartment, driving a nice car. I had told them I was working at Starbucks—it just didn’t add up. My dad was amazed and intrigued. Once he realized I was totally in control of the situation, he was like, “Wow, you’re a genius.” He tells all his friends.

See larger photo: www.pdxmonthly.com.