Source:Â KJZZ.org
USA – When Margo Steines was a teenager in New York, she began working as a dominatrix. She spent long nights in a dungeon, where she was paid by men who wanted to be beaten, punched, and spanked.
Soon, Steines found herself sometimes on the receiving end of the blows—the recipient of violent contact she deliberately sought out. It was a period in her life when, as she puts it, she “used her body to experience and mediate the world.”
Steines’s work as a dominatrix is just one aspect of her new memoir, “Brutalities.” She eventually fell in love with a man who often brutally—and consensually—beat her as part of their intimacy. Their relationship was unstable, and when he finally left her, she felt adrift and a deep chasm between her physical and emotional relationships with herself.
But while the collaboration caused Steines extreme pain, both physically and emotionally, she said it also helped her in many ways.
“Brutalities,” which she began about 10 years ago after moving to Tucson, tells the story of Steines’s long journey of weaving those parts of herself together, and the toll it takes on her body. As she acknowledges early in the book, it’s a difficult story.
