With ‘requests for pretty much everything you can think about’, a local dominatrix reveals that, for some, her job is almost therapy
Source: Cyprus-mail.com
CYPRUS – NICOSIA – ‘This is all legal, right?’ I ask Jenna (aka Miss Jenna Linn), sitting at Bean Bar in central Nicosia where her appearance has already drawn an appraising, not entirely approving look from our middle-aged waitress.
Yes, she replies a trifle wearily. “I talked to lawyers, I talked to a lot of lawyers about it – and it’s all fine. It’s all legal.”
I’m just double-checking, of course; it’s not like working as a dominatrix is a brand-new concept. It’s quite new for Cyprus, however, indeed Jenna – who arrived a few months ago – may be the first full-time, professional dominatrix on the island. She’s here as a digital nomad, meeting clients but also using Cyprus as a base, travelling often to events and stage shows. She’ll be at the Bucharest Summit (Europe’s largest gathering of the adult industry) in a few weeks – where she’s actually one of the ambassadors, billed as a “luxury dominatrix”.
Meaning what? Partly that she charges what she calls ‘international’ prices – but also that she’s not just one of those escorts who grab a whip and “brand themselves as a dominatrix,” as she puts it. She’s the real thing. To quote her bio at the Summit website: “Jenna blends the rigour of her discipline with an almost poetic advocacy for its deeper understanding and appreciation”.
She’s been doing this for three years (she’s now 26), her website laying out a menu of services. These range from ‘ball busting’ – not a euphemism but exactly what it sounds like, a form of torture causing pain to a man’s genitals – to bondage (BDSM), spanking, flogging, public humiliation, tickle torture, pony play, dog play and more.
The truth, however, is that many of the sessions are off-menu, custom-designed to the client’s request. “I’ve had requests for pretty much everything you can think about.” Her only red line is nothing sexual (“I don’t get undressed”) – and, more broadly, nothing too intimate, in the sense of dropping the persona.
“We can get intimate,” explains Jenna, “and we build some form of relationship, but I don’t want to get to ‘I like you too much’ – or I like you to the point where you actually get closer to me.” She shakes her head: “No. This doesn’t work for me”.
Beyond that, nothing is too extreme – even those requests which are almost as humiliating for her as they are for the client. “You know ‘brown shower’?” (I can imagine.) “That’s something I don’t like,” she says, wrinkling her small, rhinoplasty-enhanced nose. “What else? Um, puking.” (On the person’s face, usually.) “That’s what I don’t like also. I guess these are the two things I find the most disgusting… Fire play, or cutting, I don’t like. I don’t like to see blood.”
This is what the ‘escort with a whip’ brigade don’t realise: that being a dominatrix isn’t just about violence. Jenna’s job, in a weird way, is akin to a priest or confessor. Her clients expose themselves to her at their most pathetic and vulnerable, humanity in extremis.
“You find a lot of submissive girls,” she explains briskly. “This always happens, it’ll always be a thing. But to be dominant – like a dominatrix – you have to understand people a lot. You have to listen. And you have to be willing to accept everything. And you have to be willing to see, like – a sort of chaos, I guess.”
For some, the chaos becomes almost therapy. One client, clearly a prominent man – Jenna’s security guys reported seeing bodyguards’ cars patrol the area for two hours while he was with her – requested to be tied up and bastinadoed (caned on the soles of his feet), but ended up talking about his parents instead. Another’s request was to be whipped in a church, for maximum penance.
They’re mostly men, often wealthy or powerful men, but also “sometimes couples, and women. I treat them all differently,” although with men “you can be more rough, I guess,” she notes with a chuckle. “The Brits are the kinkiest! I don’t know why,” she says later, chuckling again, when I mention our UK readers.
S&M has been normalised, of course, hence the success of 50 Shades of Grey (“Oh!” she exclaims, rolling her eyes, when I mention that book) – but even Jenna is sometimes startled by the depths of pain and degradation people put themselves through. ‘Safe words’ don’t always help; many clients go into “a state of trance,” she reports, no longer conscious of pain. She has to check, to make sure she’s not injuring them. “I had a guy tied up the other day, his hands and wrists. So his hands, they got blue, actually – and he didn’t notice.”
Why do they do it? “Some men tell me they just like to see a woman being happy,” she shrugs. “Like, a different form of happy, right?… I still don’t get it, though. How can you enjoy suffering this much?”
Yet she enjoys inflicting that suffering?
“I do.”
So where does that come from? I’m unsure how forthcoming Jenna will be about herself – she has to keep a certain mystique, after all – but she’s actually happy to talk. (“In a world that often shies away from the shadows, Jenna Linn not only steps into them but illuminates them,” says her Summit bio.) Is she angry, or aggressive, in real life? “Not at all!” she assures me. “The best fight is no fight.” One thing a lot of dominatrixes have in common, though, she notes, is having been raised by authoritarian parents.
Her own folks weren’t tyrannical, just a bit daunting. Growing up in Germany (the small town of Saarlouis, near the French border), she didn’t see her parents – especially her dad – very much. They were hard-working, middle-class bakers with their own chain of shops, well-known in the community and setting an example for Jenna and her twin sister: a pressure to “perform”, as she puts it – the same word she uses, incidentally, to describe what she does now in response to a client’s request.
“As a German,” she recalls, “in my generation, you had to do everything. Like, I played the piano. I did karate. Volleyball, swimming. You were supposed to have the best grades in school… So that was the base level I grew up with – me and my sister, and then I always got compared to her, who was better.”
Her sister’s still in Germany, studying dance and performance. It’s no secret that their parents wish Jenna would do likewise – or at least drop this sordid BDSM stuff and come home “and live in the basement,” she quips sardonically. Do they know what she does for a living? “Yeah, they know. We don’t talk about it. When I go home and visit, we – prefer to talk about the weather, I guess.”
It’s easy to forget, chatting here so pleasantly, just how shocking and upsetting domination seems to most people – and not just parents, either. Jenna’s old account was taken down by Instagram (she now runs five accounts just in case, the main one @goddessjennalinn). Eva Oh – her role model, a legendary dominatrix who’s been active since 2011 – was shadow-banned on social media. The other day, in Limassol, a passerby “was running away from me,” so unnerved by her appearance that he actually fled the marina.
It’s disturbing on so many levels. It upends the old gender stereotypes: “I dress men up as women,” she says. “I train them as sluts, as sissies, or like a house-cleaning lady… Men come to me like, ‘Can you train me as a housemaid?’.” It equates pain and pleasure, and reduces relations to the old relations of violence, stripping away the thin veneer of civilisation. Most importantly (for her), it separates physical intimacy from its usual bedfellow, emotional intimacy.
Jenna recalls a dominatrix she saw on a podcast saying “she likes to keep her relations transactional more than emotional – which, I mean, I dunno if it’s good or bad. It is what it is. But I also grew up not being connected too much.” Her family in Saarlouis didn’t talk, certainly not about feelings. There was always a distance – “so I guess that’s what’s familiar to me still,” that sense of being privy to another’s most intimate secrets while retaining a cool, formal distance.
It’s about control – though it’s “also like a communication thing. I listen to them as much as they have to listen to me”. There’s a whole interpersonal dynamic. It’s also eye-opening, an education in human nature. “There’s always a story behind the story… Or like, people who are married their whole lives, they come to me – and we do things they’d never talk about with their spouse.” Jenna shakes her head: “Why don’t you talk to your partner?”.
And what does she get out of it?
“Umm… Excitement. Arousal. Not sexually, but like – euphoria. Adrenaline.”
That, too, is part of her makeup – the excitement of “pushing a person to their limits,” whether it’s a client or Jenna herself. S&M is a sport, in a way, like the macho games boys play to compete in inflicting pain – and Jenna has always been sporty, a black belt in karate and a snowboard instructor while she lived in Austria. Part of the thrill, I suspect, lies in self-improvement: pushing herself to be better, like competing with her sister back in Saarlouis.
Self-improvement is practically her brand. She’s improved her appearance, obsessively so: a nose-job, an eye-lift, silicon implants twice. Her lips look Botoxed (to my untrained eye), but in fact it’s just filler. She barely drinks, and doesn’t do drugs; she used to smoke weed, but didn’t like “this feeling of being addicted” – didn’t like the sense of being weak and dependent. “I tell people, ‘When you come to me, be sober, don’t do drugs,’” she says – though there’s also a practical aspect there, for informed consent.
She’s also obsessed with cryptocurrency and AI, meeting the future head-on – a more exalted kind of self-improvement. “I invest a lot in my crypto, and my stocks and ETFs. I’m like a – geek?” she tells me, unsure of the word. A crypto geek and a dominatrix, what a combination.
There’s another kind of improvement in the air as we talk – tying the conversation together, you might say. ‘Miss Jenna Linn’ comes off smart and articulate – so much so that I wonder why she stays in this particular sector. It’s not like a childhood dream, after all – she started out as a webcam girl and kind of drifted into it, though the kink “was always there” – and surely she could get a job in fintech or something, with her connections and confidence.
Maybe. But it’s also “about the community,” she notes – “and about acceptance of it, in general. Of kinks. Also this femdom thing, women who are dominant and everyone can accept it – and men can be weak, and not everything has to be black and white… That’s something I want to improve. For other women also to accept – or see – their dominant side.” Her work, in its way, has a feminist aspect. The future is female.
And what of her own future? Can she see herself settling down, or at least finding someone? “Right now, I could not think about it. Also, to be in a relationship…” She shrugs, as if to say ‘Not that easy’ – and besides, the world is changing. Younger generations “have more relationships with their ChatGPT or AI than with actually a real person… You can go to brothels now where there are only robots, [acting like] women”.
A dominatrix in a changing world: a world where gender roles will be different, perhaps, where women will become more empowered – not just sexually but also independent and entrepreneurial, like her. Also, perhaps, a changing Cyprus where the fetish scene will become more established, as indeed seems to be happening. “We’re at the start of something.”
Guys in slave gear – will that ever be a thing here? On a leash? Dressed in a waitress costume, with bikini and high heels? “For me, it’s okay,” shrugs Jenna. “I don’t know how acceptable it is for others.” She pauses, then grins: “It’s fun, for sure!”. I’m not sure our waitress would agree with her.
