When a robber broke into her house while she was webcamming a client, a dominatrix who sells her services for in-person and online sessions through OnlyFans was forced to chase him down.
When a robber broke into her house during a webcam session, a dominatrix was forced to chase him away with a golden stiletto, she revealed.
Kaz, who goes by the online handle Kaz B, has built a successful career as a dominatrix, where men pay her to perform various tricks and kinks both in person and online through her OnlyFans account.
During a recent appearance on the Shaun Attwood True Crime podcast, the dominatrix revealed that she frequently stores her work equipment in her mother’s garage, and that she has dealt with enraged wives who catch their husbands in the act.
Even more shocking, Kaz described a break-in at her home while she was conducting a webcam session with a client.
The professional mistress recalled being half-way through a webcam session with a paying’slave’ when the incident occurred.
“So I quickly put some clothes on and said, ‘I’m sure I’m imagining this, I’m sure there’s nobody down there, it’s just my imagination,” she recalled.
Kaz explained that she first assumed the rustling noises she could hear from the floor below came from one of her cats entering through the window, but that her perception quickly changed.
“Then I heard the cats bolt down the stairs in various directions, and I thought to myself, ‘yeah, something isn’t quite right here.’
“I just thought to myself, ‘I’m probably being paranoid, but I’ll grab something just in case.’
“I had these big gold platform heels with a heel on them, so I just picked them up and crept slowly to the top of the stairs, and there’s this guy there in a grey hoodie just staring back at me.”
Kaz said she raised her stiletto and charged, yelling, “Get out of my house!” The pair froze for a second before Kaz said she raised her stiletto and charged, yelling, “Get out of my house!”
“It was one of those situations where it could have gone either way,” Kaz continued. “Fortunately, he turned around and legged it.”
“He bolted from the house, and I figured, hey, I’ve come this far, I might as well keep going.”
“Don’t come back!” she yelled as he dashed around the corner.
Snaps uncovered on social media show Monica Sulley – who was reportedly made a lead guiding commissioner in July this year – dressed in a black bondage-style dress with high heels and gripping a whip.
The picture, taken in a corridor and posted to the 58-year-old’s Instagram page, has the caption: “Now behave yourselves or Mistress will have to punish you”.
Bus driver Ms Sulley oversees the Rainbow, Brownie, Guide and Ranger groups in Southwell, Nottinghamshire.
Another picture shows the Girlguide leader wielding what appears to be a fake assault rifle with a holstered handgun hanging from her waist while wearing an all-black outfit.
In a third photo shared on Twitter, Ms Sulley posed in a fairly low cut top with the caption: “Boobs, or did you want to see more?”. She was seen in a further picture clutching a sword.
Girlguiding bosses have now launched an investigation into Ms Sulley’s posts.
Angela Salt, the CEO of Girlguiding, last night shared a statement saying the charity is “aware of concerns raised”.
“The safety and wellbeing of our members is our absolute priority,” she said.
“We follow rigorous recruitment and vetting procedures, have clear policies, and a volunteer code of conduct which volunteers are expected to follow to keep our members safe.
“Girlguiding is aware of concerns raised.
“We are looking into this as a matter of urgency and will provide the necessary support and action in line with our compliance procedures.”
Ms Sulley has since deactivated her Instagram account and made her Twitter account private.
Miranda Kane, who worked as a sex worker for ten years, has opened up about her job, detailing everything from ejecting clients to the administrative side of her job and customer interactions.
The secrets of a former plus-sized dominatrix who sold sex in London have been revealed, including why she kicked out punters and the long hours of admin.
Miranda Kane, who worked as a sex worker from the ages of 22 to 32, once called a client a “w***e” and ended a session halfway through.
“I’m not there to be called those names,” she told MyLondon. “There’s nothing on my website about doing that.”
“That’s their brand or kink for some sex workers, and that’s fantastic.
But they just assumed they’d be able to get away with it with me.”
Miranda, who is now a comedian, writer, and podcaster, also revealed that paperwork took up a whopping 80% of her time.
“If you’re an independent sex worker like me, you need to make sure you have a decent website,” she said.
“Being a sex worker taught me so much about marketing; I know all about metatags, search engine optimization, and analytics; it was all part of my day.”
“I had to know: what keywords are people finding me under?” she continued. “Am I on the first page of Google if I google ‘plus-size London escort? If not, why not?”
Miranda saw the sex industry change dramatically during her time as a sex worker, with recessions, austerity, and skyrocketing tuition fees driving people to the industry.
“There were about 12 plus-size sex workers in London when I started, and we were all friends; we had the market cornered, and we even agreed to charge about the same.”
“However, if you google ‘BBW [big beautiful woman]London escort,’ you’ll come up with something like 33,000 results.”
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Although it’s common to assume that gamblers are disrespectful of the women they’re paying for, Miranda claims this isn’t always the case.
She claims that in her personal experience, people who pay a lot of money for an hour of her time are “quite like women.”
Miranda would call her client before the meeting for some small talk and to go over the details.
“They’d always say, ‘Just…like… the usual,’” she explained, “and they never wanted the usual, whatever that was.”
EXCLUSIVE: Femme Fatale, an ambassador for the sexting platform Arousr, has discussed the most popular kinks and what they really mean about your personality
Harvard hosts ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ BDSM tutorial, ‘Orgies 101,’ anal sex workshop
Harvard University students are once again hosting Sex Week activities after taking last year off due to the COVID pandemic.
Among the slate of workshops scheduled for the weeklong, student-organized event is “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” billed as an “Intro to BDSM.”
“BDSM is a term used to describe aspects of sex that involve dominance, submission and control,” according to WebMD.
Bondage restricts a partner with “ropes, handcuffs, or other restraints,” while sadomasochism refers to “pleasure that a partner may feel from either inflicting pain (sadism) or receiving pain (masochism), either physical or emotional.”
Another workshop is called “What What in the Butt: Anal 101.” Harvard students have made a habit of offering anal sex tutorials during previous Sex Weeks, as The College Fix has previously reported.
Other topics to be tackled this year include porn, talking dirty in bed, fetishes and “Orgies 101.”
And “anyone with a uterus” is invited to a seminar about freezing eggs for free to preserve future fertility, it states on the Sex Week Facebook page.
According to the Sex Week calendar of events, about 20 different workshops and panels will comprise the festivities, which launched Monday and runs through Sunday.
Sex Week is hosted by the student organization Sexual Health Education and Advocacy Throughout Harvard College, or SHEATH.
Its co-president, Andie Turner, told the Harvard Crimson: “We include events that are as inclusive, diverse, encouraging of open dialogue as possible for students who both have come to Harvard with little to no sex education in their hometowns, which is my case, or students that had grown up in families or communities that have much more of an open discourse with regards to sexuality, sex intimacy, but just want to further their knowledge.”
UK – A woman who had a kilo of cocaine in her handbag as she flew home from a promotional trip for her work as a dominatrix has been cleared of drugs smuggling.
Simone Smith, 31, was carrying drugs worth an estimated £80,000 when she was stopped by Gatwick Airport border agents as she stepped off a plane from Antigua to the UK.
Smith insisted she did not know about the cocaine until its discovery – under an airline blanket in her handbag – and believed it may have been planted on her before or during the flight.
She was charged with trying to smuggle cocaine into the UK, but a jury acquitted her on Thursday following a Southwark crown court trial – nearly three years since her arrest.
When she was stopped at just after 6am on January 16, 2019, Smith told officers: “I don’t understand, I’ve got nothing to declare, I don’t understand what’s happening to me”.
USA – The return to live music continues to be a wild one. Months after news of a Turnstile mosh pit pooper, we now have footage of a lead vocalist taking time out of a festival set to urinate on an incredibly willing fan.
As Loudwirepoints out, Brass Against — a New York-based outfit who aim to “inspire social and personal change” through both original songs and covers of Tool, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden and more — fully stole the show with the golden shower yesterday (November 11) at the Welcome to Rockville festival in Daytona Beach, FL.
Fan-shot footage from the event circulating online — which is absolutely NSFW — sees frontwoman Sophia Urista positioning herself over a fan lying face up onstage while Brass Against play a cover of Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up.”
After dropping her drawers and repeating the line, “I think I heard a shot,” the rocker proceeds to relieve herself on the fan — and the crowd goes wild. The recipient then gets up off the stage and pumps his fist for the raucous onlookers.
Urista’s urination gave a whole new meaning to “livestream,” as Welcome to Rockville’s organizers had allowed for online viewing in celebration of their 10th anniversary. You can view the footage at your discretion here.
Urista and Brass Against are set to support Tool on tour in 2022, and while we recommend reading up on venue bathroom policies, or packing a raincoat, you can find those dates here.
The professional domme first became involved in the sex industry when she was 18 and has also worked in strip clubs and as a cam girl.
Out of all the services she provides, foot fetishes are her least favourite.
She said: “I hate foot stuff but I get paid so much for it.
“I hate someone sucking my toes, but they do not want to get kicked all the time so you just have to suck it up.
“Feet are such a common fetish. I do not touch their feet, they are the ones worshipping me.
“Massaging and sucking them [her feet] are the things you get the most.”
Her main source of income is working in a Bristol strip club, but she’s also spent time working in the sex industry abroad – and has previously done “full service sex work”, more commonly known as prostitution.
Carmen – a woman in her 20s – said some of her clients for dominatrix work want to be insulted and others want to be beaten up, sometimes to the point where they pass out.
She has a wide range of clients and said there’s a variety of reasons why people request her services.
“Different people want different things. I just ask them straight what they want and then I can just say if this is something I can provide or not.
“You have to be direct because otherwise you can put yourself in a dangerous situation, as well as wasting everyone’s time.”
Carmen said she finds most of her clients online, advertising on adult work websites and also via social media platforms such as Twitter.
They normally go to a hotel the client has booked and she will only go to their house if she has met them a few times.
Some bookings are just for an hour or two while others can last up to seven hours if the client wants to take her out for dinner or to go to bars, adding that some like to show her off.
Everyone has got a different fetish or kink. Carmen
“I used to see more clients, but it takes a lot of time and energy,” she continued.
“It is mainly regulars that I do now. I only do it [dominatrix work] a couple of times a month now.
“If you get on with the client, you can have fun and have a lovely evening. It is like any other job.”
Carmen said 90 per cent of her clients for dominatrix work are men, but gets some clients who are non-binary or trans as they feel safe with someone who is also LGBTQ+.
She said her regular clients are the ones that are more well off and that their ages start at late 20s.
“If they are just booking you for a couple of hours, most people already know what they want to explore,” she continued.
“It is just their kink – everyone has got a different fetish or kink.
“I think it is very important for people to be able to express them [their fetish and kinks] in a consensual and safe manner.”
Carmen said she has never had any problems while working as a dominatrix, but that she takes some safety precautions such as sharing her location before a booking.
If the client is willing to give it, she will ask for ID, she continued, and she also takes a deposit of up to 50 per cent, before adding that these days she does not need to take a booking if she is not comfortable with it.
MAY AS WELL GET PAID
Carmen first became involved in the sex industry when she was 18, working in a strip club in the north of England.
However, she only did it for a few months at that point as she was not prepared for it mentally.
“It was too much,” she said. “I did not have the right tools to navigate it and I also looked very young.
“I started full-time again when I was 22 or 23. In between, I worked in hospitality. For the amount of harassment I got in bars, I thought I may as well get paid for it.”
Carmen said that initially she was just working in strip clubs, adding that she likes the performance side of the job and that getting used to the other dancers and the unwritten rules of each club are the hardest aspects.
When returning to Bristol in her mid 20s, Carmen became involved in more sides of the sex industry.
It was around this time that she started working as a dominatrix, which does not involve penetrative sex. Instead, she offers services such as ‘Goddess worshipping’, spit play and ‘water sports’.
Carmen said that the amount of money she makes is really variable so it is wise to try to save as much as she can in the good times.
She said she also performs all over the UK and Europe, with her shows including pole dancing, burlesque and cabaret.
Performing is her creative outlet, she continued, and she enjoys it best when she can do something really different. At the moment, her ‘Magic Mike’ performance is her favourite as she gets to play with gender and have fun.
Her plan is to go travelling again soon who sees herself working in the sex industry until her mid-thirties when she would like to start working as a pole-dancing teacher.
WORCESTER — Opening statements are expected Monday in the trial of Julia Enright, the Ashburnham dominatrix accused of stabbing a former classmate to death four years ago inside a treehouse that was outfitted with restraints.
The case is set to be called at 9 a.m. Monday in Worcester Superior Court after a jury was seated Thursday.
nright, 24, is accused of murdering 20-year-old Brandon Chicklis of Westminster, a former boyfriend, and leaving his body by the side of the highway in Rindge, New Hampshire, wrapped in trash bags.
Prosecutors allege Enright, a phlebotomist who had a side business as a dominatrix, lured Chicklis to a treehouse near her home and murdered him to satisfy a growing urge to kill.
The woman, 21 at the time, had a number of “deviant” interests, prosecutors allege, including sexual cutting and bloodplay. Eight days before Chicklis was last seen alive, Enright tried and failed to bribe Planned Parenthood to allow her to keep a fetus she aborted, they allege, so she could “play with” its bones.
Enright had a fascination with animal bones, prosecutors say, and routinely placed dead animals in bags or cages so she could use their bones to make art after they decomposed.
Authorities searching her home found vials of blood, a used condom collection, numerous knives and a “wet specimen,” prosecutors have said.
The prosecution and defense last month argued for hours about how much evidence jurors should be able to see. The defense argued much of it was irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial under the law, while prosecutors argued it was relevant to, among other topics, Enright’s mental capacity and motive.
In rulings this week, Superior Court Judge Daniel M. Wrenn issued line-by-line judgments on much of the proposed evidence.
Because some of the rulings referenced evidence contained on specific pages of documents that have not been publicly released, it is not possible to glean from the rulings all the specific evidence that was approved or excluded.
The rulings do make clear that statements Enright made about her love of bone art, certain dominatrix photos, photos of knives seized from her room, and a red-ink drawing of a dominatrix and a person tied up would be admissible.
Prosecutors have said the treehouse where the murder took place featured a system of restraints.
Also admissible are photos authorities took in Enright’s home of vials of blood, “specimens,” and a “dominatrix outfit and paraphernalia.” Photographs of “plastic tubs with animal carcasses in various states of rotting” will be allowed, too.
Excluded items include photos of “a bucket of organs” and “a number of carcasses with the organs showing, as well as a video of the same with the defendant licking blood from a body part and a photograph of someone holding an organ.”
Judge Wrenn also ruled that a number of writings and journal entries Enright made were not admissible. It was not clear from the ruling which specific statements were excluded.
Wrenn also issued rulings this week ordering some redactions to Enright’s police interrogation, including some questions or accusations from police he deemed unfairly prejudicial.
Wrenn said jurors can see Enright discussing topics that include certain sexual acts she performed with her boyfriend, she and her boyfriend cutting each other, sexual practices “including knife play” and her dominatrix business.
Enright’s lawyer, Louis M. Badwey, had argued those discussions should be excluded, saying there is no evidence Enright engaged in those types of activities with Chicklis.
Assistant District Attorney Terry J. McLaughlin had argued for their inclusion, noting that Chicklis had been stabbed as many as 13 times.
Enright’s boyfriend, John Lind, is expected to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if called to the stand at trial.
He has not been charged, and told Wrenn on the advice of a lawyer last month that he had a Fifth Amendment privilege given the anticipated nature of the prosecution’s questions.
Aside from the “deviant” information at issue in the trial, prosecutors have several key pieces of evidence, including DNA matches for Chicklis’ blood in the treehouse and in Enright’s car.
A 2015 graduate of Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School, he was working for a local HVAC company at the time of his death. He enjoyed camping, hiking and the outdoors.
UK – KENT – Melissa Todd is a bright, engaging, articulate, well-spoken married mum-of-one who attended Boris Johnson’s old college at Oxford University.
She is a newsreader for Thanet-based Academy FM, edits the Broadstairs Beacon newspaper and also runs a theatre company. Oh, and she’s a dominatrix who, not to beat around the bush, charges £100 an hour to give men a damn good spanking.
“I get some very very odd requests,” she admits. “I was told to park on somebody’s hands. I didn’t do that. I thought where the hell has that come from? I’m rubbish at parking.
“He wanted me to be in my car, singing along to the radio while he was screaming in agony. That was odd.”
And who are we to argue?
A stripper from the age of 19, Melissa made a career change 11 years later.
“By the time I was 30,” she explains, “I thought I didn’t want to become a ridiculously ancient stripper so I thought I’d hang up my g-string and pick up a crop and start whacking people instead.”
Today Melissa supplements her “one-to-one disciplinary sessions” with posing for photos or making videos of a very adult nature.
“I sound like this and I look terribly demure,” she explains in her middle-class tones. “I sound like an average mousey housewife.
“But there are so many negative stereotypes around sex work and it just seems to be getting worse and worse – ‘they’re victims, pathetic and corrupting society’, and all the rest of it, but they’re just people, with lives and stories.”
In an effort to try to challenge the perception of the sex industry Melissa has written a book – released on November 16 – called My Body Is My Business. Based around “a fictional framework”, it draws heavily on her own experiences.
Now 45 and having lived in Thanet since 2003, Melissa is bold and fearless in the career she has chosen. Incredibly, she even convinced her mother to follow in her footsteps.
“She was a dominatrix as well,” she admits.
“I corrupted her. She got made redundant in her mid-60s and thought ‘I could do that’ and she was really good at it. She was very good at role play too.
“I was working out of her house, as my son was a bit younger then, so she’d often hide upstairs with a baseball bat just in case, so she’d hear it all happening. And she thought ‘wow, this is brilliant – £100 an hour, why am I messing about?’ And they absolutely loved her.”
Speaking to Melissa is a rather disarming experience. The image of the exploited sex worker falling victim to the depravities of men seems a long way from what she has experienced and the genuine enthusiasm with which she speaks of her chosen career.
“I’ve honestly not seen any exploitation in 26 years,” she says. “I’m sure it’s out there, but its certainly not the only story.
“Most of the film companies I work for are all run by women – and that’s not a choice I’ve made. I’m happy to work with men, but all the spanking content is being made by women currently so I just don’t see any exploitation happening. It’s certainly not been my experience at all. And I think I would have seen it.”
To be clear, she offers “no sexual services at all” adding: “It’s just a good whacking. All the sex happens in their head.”
Happily married, her husband thinks her sex career is “hilarious”and her son – now an adult – is well aware of how his mum earns her income.
Yet safety remains a concern. She recently tweeted about one encounter with a new client: “Always an anxiety-inducing moment when a new man ties you up. This one decided to tell me he was a policeman just as he gagged me. Maybe that’s meant to reassure.”
In the light of the Sarah Everard case, it’s chilling in many ways.
“I was genuinely nervous,” she admits when I ask her about it. “I hadn’t seen that man before, so it was probably a bit idiotic really to allow him to tie me up. But he had worked with other girls that I knew. Of course you are putting yourself in a vulnerable position. I completely trusted him actually. And I wasn’t suspended from a ceiling so if I needed to get away, I could have wriggled free. It was mainly for a photo shoot.
“But there is always a bit of ‘oh Christ, is this is going to be the day I die’ but so far, those who like spanking tend to be lovely, they really do.
“It’s a fetish which tends to belong to clever, creative people, as obviously turning pain into pleasure takes quite a lot of brains and imagination. I’ve always been fine and hopefully will remain so, but yeah, I probably should have been a bit more sensible.
“It was only when he told me he was a police officer I thought ‘oh no!’. But he was lovely.
“Most of the problems I had have been with women. If I’m going to get any abuse it tends to be from women on stripper-grams. My agent always used to say if you need the loo on a stripper-gram job use the men’s as the women will punch you if they get the chance.
“I had stones thrown at me by women when I was working in Southall. Men are always very happy when you’re naked, is my experience; women are very cross!
‘Men are always very happy when you’re naked is my experience; women are very cross!’
“What’s the problem? I’m just making a living. I don’t know why they’re so unhappy.
“I’m not the enemy. There’s nothing special about me. I’m not particularly attractive, I breast-fed for four years so my breasts aren’t even worth seeing, I’m just using what I’ve got to have some fun and make a living. The idea I’m going to try and steal your husband is like a nursery worker wanting to steal your kid. You’re just using them for cash. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”
Melissa got into the sex industry as a student.
“I was at Oxford University reading philosophy, politics and economics at Balliol College, Boris Johnson’s old college, and I just hated it. I didn’t fit in. I was a really shy girl from an Essex comprehensive and it just wasn’t the right place for me at all. You need to be very confident and out-there to do well at Oxford and that wasn’t me. So I decided to take a year out.
“I saw an advertisement in the Evening Standard saying ‘dancers wanted’ and promising up to £600 a night, no experience necessary. I thought that sounded perfect as I have no experience of anything, I love money and I like dancing. I was so green I turned up for the audition in leg-warmers. I thought it was going to be something like Fame.
“The auditions consisted of walking on stage, getting your breasts out and walking off again. There was no routine to learn. I didn’t get it that time, but the next time I got the idea – borrowed some stockings and underwear, went back on and got the job.
“I loved it. I loved the camaraderie, the sequins and the glitter balls and the champagne. And I never looked back.”
That first job was at the famous The Windmill strip club in Soho.
“It was only meant to be a year but I never stopped,” Melissa explained. “You just get used to the compliments, the fun and the money. Obviously, that was exciting. I never quite got to £600 – I used to chat to people too much I forgot to hustle. But I was making £200 a night, so that’s £1,200 a week, which in 1994 for a 19-year-old was an awful lot of money.
“I bought a house, I learned to drive, I gave my mum some money because she was skint. I just liked the lifestyle and enjoyed showing off.
“They had very strict rules in place, bouncers everywhere; when you did a table dance you had to be three feet away from the client and no touching. It was very hard to get into trouble really. There was a house mother who looked after us, made sure we didn’t get too drunk and gave us sandwiches. It was all terribly sweet actually.
“There were all sorts of women doing it. There were lots of Australian backpackers doing the world tour and financing it through stripping; lots of students and older women, single mums, women trying to set up their own business – there was someone trying to set up a florist company but she couldn’t make it pay so she was lap-dancing by night.”
So what did her parents make of her career choice?
“They were very relaxed about it,” Melissa remembers. “Despite my accent I don’t come from a respectable background, so there was no expectation I should do anything steady or sensible.
“My mum sang and danced in cabaret all over the world, and thought my making money by showing off was a very sensible plan. My dad drove a black cab and used to pick me up from the Windmill at 3.30am every night, where we would have a friendly competition as to who’d managed to collect the most cash during the evening – usually it was him!”
After moving to the Sunset Strip Theatre in Soho, Melissa met “a chap who came looking to recruit girls for spanking magazines”.
“He auditioned me in the back of a shop; he gave me a spanking and I thought this is quite fun,” she recalls.
And thus her move out of stripping and into the world of domination began.
Needless to say, she’s had some odd requests – other than the previously mentioned one about parking.
Does she sometimes wonder just where on earth these desires come from?
“All the time,” she admits. “If they just want a standard beating I get that because I like spanking as well. But I get some very, very odd requests.
“I genuinely like my clients. Many are my friends, we hang out, I’ve counselled them through the death of their parents and the birth of their grandchildren. I think it’s incredibly brave to come to a stranger and say ‘I’ve got this weird fetish, I need to do this, can you help me?’.
“I might just laugh, or not understand or get it wrong. It’s a privilege to help, genuinely. I know that sounds like a lie, but it’s true.
“Do I enjoy it? I love it. I really do. It’s really creative. I like performing. I like spanking people. It’s really fun. It’s like a therapy really. A release for them as well as for me – it’s just brilliant.”
And Melissa hopes her book will go some way towards removing society’s knee-jerk despising of those who work in the industry.
“I’m really hoping to challenge those stereotypes and see that sex is just fun,” she says. “It’s not terrifying, it’s not dangerous, I’m not corrupting the universe. I’m just having a laugh.
‘Sex is just fun. It’s not terrifying, it’s not dangerous, I’m not corrupting the universe. I’m just having a laugh…’
“It’s probably about 5% of my life and 5% of my clients’ lives. But it just gives a bit of glamour and glitter to what, let’s face it, can be a pretty mundane, tedious way of getting through it.
“It’s just a giggle. To take it seriously is insane.”
Melissa Todd’s book, My Body Is My Business can be pre-ordered by clicking here.
USA – American writer, professor Melissa Febos is best known for her debut book ‘Whip Smart’, a memoir which was published in 2010. In her memoir, Melissa opened up about her unconventional job as a professional dominatrix, a work which she did while she was studying at The New School. The book was critically acclaimed and it was followed by the essay collections ‘Abandon Me’ in 2017 and more recently ‘Girlhood’, which was published in India in September 2021 by Bloomsbury. While ‘Abandon Me’ was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, her third book ‘Girlhood’ became an instant bestseller in the USA. As the title suggests, ‘Girlhood’ is about what it really means to be female and what it means to free oneself from others expectations. “It is in part by writing this book that I have corrected the story of my own girlhood and found ways to recover myself. I have found company in the stories of other women, and the revelation of all our ordinariness has itself been curative. Writing has always been a way to reconcile my lived experience with the narratives available to describe it (or lack thereof). My hope is that these essays do some of that work for you, too,” Melissa writes in the prologue of the book.
American writer, professor Melissa Febos is best known for her debut book ‘Whip Smart’, a memoir which was published in 2010. In her memoir, Melissa opened up about her unconventional job as a professional dominatrix, a work which she did while she was studying at The New School. The book was critically acclaimed and it was followed by the essay collections ‘Abandon Me’ in 2017 and more recently ‘Girlhood’, which was published in India in September 2021 by Bloomsbury. While ‘Abandon Me’ was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, her third book ‘Girlhood’ became an instant bestseller in the USA. As the title suggests, ‘Girlhood’ is about what it really means to be female and what it means to free oneself from others expectations. “It is in part by writing this book that I have corrected the story of my own girlhood and found ways to recover myself. I have found company in the stories of other women, and the revelation of all our ordinariness has itself been curative. Writing has always been a way to reconcile my lived experience with the narratives available to describe it (or lack thereof). My hope is that these essays do some of that work for you, too,” Melissa writes in the prologue of the book. Read an exclusive excerpt from Melissa Febos’ latest essay collection ‘Girlhood’ here:
KETTLE HOLES “What do you like?” the men would ask. “Spitting,” I’d say. To even utter the word felt like the worst kind of cuss, and I trained myself not to flinch or look away or offer a compensatory smile after I said it. In the dungeon’s dim rooms, I unlearned my instinct for apology. I learned to hold a gaze. I learned the pleasure of cruelty. It was not true cruelty, of course. My clients paid $75 an hour to enact their disempowerment. The sex industry is a service industry, and I served humiliation to order. But the pageant of it was the key. To spit in an unwilling face was inconceivable to me and still is. But at a man who had paid for it?
They knelt at my feet. They crawled naked across gleaming wood floors. They begged to touch me, begged for forgiveness. I refused. I leaned over their plaintive faces and gathered the wet in my mouth. I spat. Their hard flinch, eyes clenched. The shock of it radiated through my body, then settled, then swelled into something else.
“Do you hate men?” people sometimes asked.
“Not at all,” I answered.
“You must work out a lot of anger that way,” they suggested.
“I never felt angry in my sessions,” I told them. I often explained that the dominatrix’s most useful tool was a well-developed empathic sense. What I did not acknowledge to any curious stranger, or to myself, was that empathy and anger are not mutually exclusive.
We are all unreliable narrators of our own motives. And feeling something neither proves nor disproves its existence. Conscious feelings are no accurate map to the psychic imprint of our experiences; they are the messy catalog of emotions once and twice and thrice removed, often the symptoms of what we won’t let ourselves feel. They are not Jane Eyre’s locked-away Bertha Mason, but her cries that leak through the floorboards, the fire she sets while we sleep and the wet nightgown of its quenching.
I didn’t derive any sexual pleasure from spitting, I assured people. Only psychological. Now, this dichotomy seems flimsy at best. How is the pleasure of giving one’s spit to another’s hungry mouth not sexual? I needed to distinguish that desire from what I might feel with a lover. I wanted to divorce the pleasure of violence from that of sex. But that didn’t make it so.
It was the thrill of transgression, I said. Of occupying a male space of power. It was the exhilaration of doing the thing I would never do, was forbidden to do by my culture and by my conscience. I believed my own explanations, though now it is easy to poke holes in them.
I did not want to be angry. What did I have to be angry about? My clients sought catharsis through the reenactment of childhood traumas. They were hostages to their pasts, to the people who had disempowered them. I was no such hostage— I did not even want to consider it. I wanted only to be brave and curious and in control. I did not want my pleasure to be any kind of redemption. One can only redeem a thing that has already been lost or taken. I did not want to admit that someone had taken something from me.
His name was Alex, and he lived at the end of a long unpaved driveway off the same wooded road that my family did. It took ten minutes to walk between our homes, both of which sat on the bank of Deep Pond. Like many of the ponds on Cape Cod, ours formed some fifteen thousand years ago when a block of ice broke from a melting glacier and drove deep into the solidifying land of my future backyard. When the ice block melted, the deep depression filled with water and became what is called a kettle-hole lake.
Despite its small circumference, our pond plummeted fifty feet at its deepest point. My brother and I and all the children raised on the pond spent our summers getting wet, chasing one another through invented games, our happy screams garbled with water. I often swam out to the deepest point—not the center of the pond, but to its left—and trod water over this heart cavity. In summer, the sun warmed the surface to bath temperatures, but a few feet deeper it went cold. Face warm, arms flapping, I dangled my feet into that colder depth and shivered. Fifty feet was taller than any building in our town, was more than ten of me laid head to foot. It was a mystery big enough to hold a whole city. I could swim in it my whole life and never know what lay at its bottom.
An entry in my diary from age ten announces: “Today Alex came over and swam with us. I think he likes me.”
Alex was a grade ahead of me and a foot taller. He had a wide mouth, tapered brown eyes, and a laugh that brayed clouds in the chill of fall mornings at our bus stop. He wore the same shirt for four out of five school days, and I thought he was beautiful. I had known Alex for years, but that recorded swim is the first clear memory I have of him. A few months later, he spat on me for the first time.
When I turned eleven, I enrolled in the public middle school with all the other fifth-and sixth-graders in our town. The new bus stop was farther down the wooded road, where it ended at the perpendicular intersection of another. On that corner was a large house, owned by Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985. Early in his career, Ballard had worked with the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and it was during his deep- sea dives off the coast of Massachusetts that his obsession with shipwrecks was born. Sometimes I studied that house—its many gleaming windows and ivy-choked tennis court—and thought about the difference between Ballard and my father, who was a captain in the merchant marines. One man carried his cargo across oceans; the other ventured deep inside them to discover his. I was drawn to the romance of each: to slice across the glittering surface, and also to plunge into the cold depths. A stone wall wrapped around Ballard’s yard. Here, we waited for the school bus.
I read books as I walked to the bus stop. Reading ate time. Whole hours disappeared in stretches. It shortened the length of my father’s voyages, moved me closer to his returns with every page. I was a magician with a single power: to disappear the world. I emerged from whole afternoons of reading, my life a foggy half-dream through which I drifted as my self bled back into me like steeping tea.
The start of fifth grade marked more change than the location of my bus stop. My parents had separated that summer.
My body, that once reliable vessel, began to transform. But what emerged from it was no happy magic, no abracadabra. It went kaboom. The new body was harder to disappear.
“I wish people didn’t change sometimes,” I wrote in my diary. By people, I meant my parents. I meant me. I meant the boy who swam across that lake toward my new body with its power to compel but not control.
Before puberty, I moved through the world and toward other people without hesitance or self-consciousness. I read hungrily and kept lists of all the words I wanted to look up in a notebook with a red velvet cover. I still have the notebook. “Ersatz,” it reads. “Entropy. Mnemonic. Morass. Corpulent. Hoary.” I was smart and strong and my power lay in these things alone. My parents loved me well and mirrored these strengths back to me.
Perhaps more so than other girls’, my early world was a safe one. My mother banned cable TV and sugar cereals, and made feminist corrections to my children’s books with a Sharpie. When he was home from sea, my father taught me how to throw a baseball and a punch, how to find the North Star, and start a fire. I was protected from the darker leagues of what it meant to be female. I think now of the Titanic—not the familiar tragedy of its wreck, the scream of ice against her starboard flank, the thunder of seawater gushing through her cracked hull. I think of the short miracle of her passage. The 375 miles she floated, immaculate, across the Atlantic. My early passage was a miracle, too. Like the Titanic’s, it did not last.
CANADA – We can all admit that Kim Petras is the princess of electro bubblegum pop, but we also must admit that she is an artist who is not afraid to showcase her stance on social issues. Instead of just posting an Instagram story defending sex workers utilizing OnlyFans as a new source of income, Kim, being the bold fearless artist she is, showcased her beliefs on the VMAs red carpet. Can we get a signature Kim Petras “Woo-Ah” in here?
See more and larger photo’s and video’s: Etalk.ca.
“At that time, the OnlyFans stuff was going down where they were banning sex workers,” Kim explained. “I am very sex-positive. The world needs sex workers, and the world needs sex. Anything that’s ‘taboo’ and considered as that by people, I want to push that and put that on the red carpet and be like ‘this can also be beautiful.’”
At the awards, Kim rocked a unique piece by the London-based designer, Richard Quinn. The look incorporated an intricate beaded dress that showcased a giant cross on the chest over top of a dominatrix black latex full-body suit.
At the time of the 2021 VMAs, OnlyFans announced it would be banning material deemed as sexually explicit. When the news started to make waves, many celebrities and influencers showed their support towards the sex industry, which caused OnlyFans to retract their statement only six days later via Twitter.
WATCH MORE: Fashion Friday – Kim Petras
“I spent my entire childhood on my computer dreaming of being a part of the world I wanted to be in and being an artist,” she said, reflecting on how she’s always dreamed of performing at the VMAs.
“Moving to LA with $500 by myself and then now performing at the VMAs – it was all worth it. It came true and that’s such a beautiful thing.”
Not only did Kim make a statement that night, but she also made history by being the first-ever transgender woman to perform at the coveted award show.
VMAs aside, Kim is dominating 2021 by making appearances at Lollapalooza and the fashion event of the year, The Met Gala. This year, she wore a Collina Strada dress paying homage to the designer’s inner horse girl by wearing a 3D horse on her chest.
When Kim Petras isn’t turning heads on red carpets, she is making the electrifying bops we truly need for our souls. She finally released the music video for the end-of-summer party anthem “Future Starts Now” and she gave us what we needed without leaving a drop.
“I’ve been working on being a good songwriter and would write ten songs a day after school.” A lot has changed since writing songs in her childhood bedroom. With her new musical era, she says, “this music deserves to be heard by as many people as possible and I think this is the right moment.”
When speaking of the process behind making the music video, “I need to climb the Eiffel tower and dance on it. That’s just an image that I had in my brain that I needed to happen no matter what.” We expect nothing less and that’s why we love you, Petras.
UK – Sherry Lever, aka Mistress Sofia, says she launched her career as a professional dominatrix after her ex-husband left her in financial difficulty. She turned her conservatory into a kinky ‘play room’ and the rest is history
A gran thought to be Britain’s oldest dominatrix has told how she turned her conservatory into a kinky ‘play room’ after struggling to pay the bills – and she’s doing better than ever.
Sherry Lever, also known a Mistress Sofia, says she was left feeling “financially embarrassed” after her marriage to her husband of 25 years broke down.
At the time, she was working as a chef, but wasn’t earning enough to pay off crippling debts.
That was 12 years ago. Luckily, Sherry, a self-confessed sadist, soon chanced upon her special talent – dominating men.
Now 70, she’s one of Britain’s most popular dominatrixes, with a legion of fans and admirers.
She runs her business from her home in Swindon, Wilts, where she invites “subs, slaves and sissies” into her ‘play room’ for sessions ranging from 50 minutes to overnight stays.
Speaking to The Daily Star, she said: “I have a play room. I don’t call it a dungeon – that would be too pretentious as it was previously a conservatory.
“A sub is a submissive. He likes to be dominated. He likes to do what he is told.
“A slave is a little more intense. They like to serve. They have no say it. They literally do what they’re told.
“A sissy is someone who likes to be dressed in a maids outfit and put to work.”
Sherry insists none of the sessions are sexual and her subs, slaves and sissies are not allowed to touch her – unless it is feet worship.
Men pay to be told what to do by Mistress Sofia. That can include housework, like cleaning the toilet or painting part of her home.
“Sessions can last as long as they want. They can stay overnight but if they do they will be locked in my metal cage,” she told us.
“Most commonly a session lasts an hour – unless it is foot worship and then it will last 30 minutes, as an hour is an awfully long time to have someone worshipping your feet.”
Sherry has told how she stumbled upon her talent and new career by chance.
“I was looking for a way out,” she said.
Sherry was watching TV one night when she saw a documentary about girls having ‘phone sex’ for money.
“I found it very funny and I actually managed to find one of the participants on social media and got in touch with her,” she said.
“She gave me all the help I needed and I found a company to work for and I started doing the phone lines. The pay was absolutely dreadful but it was better than nothing at the time.”
Despite the bad pay, Sherry realised that most of the calls were interested in some sort of domination and as time went on, she realised she was quite good at it.
“Callers started to believe I was a real dominatrix,” she said.
“Before I knew that they started asking if they could book sessions with me. Obviously calls are monitored and you’re not allowed to give out or take information.
“But some of my callers would give me their information even though I said I couldn’t take it.
“I’d say I was ignoring it but actually scribble it down with a pen.
“Then I’d get in contact with them and that’s how I started doing sessions.”
NEW ZEALAND – Mary Brennan, the country’s most outspoken former dominatrix talks about her life from fish ‘n’ chip shop owner to dominatrix, and her relationship with sex and her body. Katie Harris reports.
Unburdened by the shackles of social stigma that dog her industry, Mary Brennan is a true maverick, says childhood friend Geri.
“She is a force to be reckoned with – a force of nature and someone who lives in the world at large,” Geri tells the Herald on Sunday.
And it shows.
At a time when traditional brothels have to compete with porn, subscription site OnlyFans and the impact of covid lockdowns, Brennan pulls up her boot straps.
As the madam of Funhouse, an upmarket brothel in Wellington, she now trains workers in the art of being a dominatrix.
But her success in the industry hides a secret. A self-confessed introvert, Brennan isn’t a fan of sex.
She suffers vaginismus, a condition that can make sex painful and impossible for some.
“I’m actually naturally quite introverted. But I’ve trained myself to not seem like that, because of what I do.”
Dream job
Police officer, pilot or TV star are often jobs cited as the dream job for children, but even as a Catholic schoolgirl growing up in Eastbourne something inside of Mary always knew sex work would be in her future, even if “full service” wasn’t possible.
“I was fascinated by Mary Magdalene and I remember the priests and everyone saying she was a prostitute and because I had four brothers, and she used to hang out with the apostles and I thought, ‘wow, it can’t be that bad, she’s hanging out with all the boys’.”
Her first brush with sex work came at 18, when she and a friend applied for jobs at a massage parlour.
However, when they arrived a sign on the door stated all massages were “fully nude” and the girls made a U-turn.
She turned to hospitality, managing restaurants in London from 1988. To get a visa to stay there Brennan married her best friend Brent Robb, who was gay.
“It was like was the perfect relationship because we could never have an affair on each other. He was in and out of relationships and I used to have little drunk one night stands. But, you know, sex couldn’t ever come between us.”
The couple moved back to New Zealand in 1993 and ran a fish delivery business and later a fish and chip shop in Manaia.
The was destroyed by fire – Brennan maintains it was an arson attack – which led Robb to move to his brother’s farm in the Waikato.
Brennan moved to Martinborough and turned back to the industry she had first been drawn to as an 18-year-old.
She began managing a Wellington brothel part time in 1995 and was soon promoted to manager of two city brothels. Under her guidance, she tells the Herald, the brothels soon became the biggest and busiest in the capital.
“I’m a people manager, that’s what I do. It’s one of the things that made me a really good dominatrix.”
Brennan says she always had a strong belief in human rights for sex workers and clients.
“You know, there’s a lot of clients whose lives are enriched by being able to see sex workers and for that to be in a really safe and decriminalised environment.”
Over the years, Brennan’s worked with friends in the disability sector, trying to marry up the services of sex workers to disabled people who want them.
Spending time with someone who makes you feel special, she believes, can help clients leave feeling like “a million bucks”.
Professionally, she was excelling, but heartbreak came knocking when Robb was diagnosed with cancer. Brennan quit her jobs to take care of him.
After he died she returned to managing brothels and met a woman who was working as a dominatrix.
Brennan went into business with her in the early 2000s – even selling an investment property to boost the business, but things turned sour.
“I lost absolutely everything, got really sick because I was so stressed, the whole thing fell apart.
“I guess I thought that she was a superstar. But she wasn’t, I’d just never seen a dominatrix before.”
Brennan was deep in debt but decided to start again. She and her flatmate began renting out their spare room for sex work.
“So she was working and I had the phone number, and people were ringing me and saying ‘would you do a dominatrix session with me?’ No, I can’t. I couldn’t do it.”
Eventually, she came around, and the clients she started with instantly booked her again, and again, one was a weekly regular for three or so years after.
For Brennan, being a dominatrix was validating, satisfying, heart warming, fun and financially rewarding, but it couldn’t last forever.
“I stopped because the business in general became too busy and I am first and foremost a business woman and second a dominatrix.”
She says it was time to step away, bowing out at the top of her game, and “leaving them wanting more”.
While she was operating her clients didn’t know she had vaginismus, that she didn’t like taking off her clothes, or that she was not “relaxed sexually” about a lot of things.
“I have enjoyed sex from time to time. But it’s not something that I, you know, that’s part of my life now.”
Instead of hindering her work, she says these restrictions actually made her a lot more skilled because she had to compensate for what many “doms” would do naturally.
“I had to be a lot more inventive to make sessions exciting and because when I first started, I would see a client and I’d throw everything I knew at them.”
Two weeks later, they’d be right back, calling to book in another session.
Some, Mary says, would ask her to wear skimpier clothing like stockings and suspenders but this was a flat no.
Wearing “thunder pants” during a session was more her look and helped reassure her former partner nothing else going on.
“No way you’d get naked and strip down wearing them.
“I also wore tights, black thick tights. And if I was doing anything with a strap on, I’d wear little black boy shorts I put over it, like I had about 18 layers of protection.”
Working as a dominatrix gave her a deep understanding of humans, of men in particular, and how simple she says they are – which she says has affected how attractive she finds men.
“I haven’t seen anybody for about 15 years that has made me go ‘woah’. You know, it’s just, this is nothing.
“Once that veil of illusion is stripped away, then there’s kind of nothing exciting anymore.”
Providing BDSM services, Geri says, is Brennan’s way of helping people live out their desires.
“And they’re not all missionary style, and they’re not about a man having a very big ejaculate.”
Advocacy too is a large part of what Brennan does, speaking up on the rights of workers, and the issues and stigma they can face.
When Brennan tells people what she does for a living she says they often remark that she’s not what they expected.
“It’s like what did you expect – someone a lot harder, a lot colder?
“If you judge sex workers, just don’t, they’re just people, just human beings.”
Although managing brothels has been a huge part of her life, Brennan’s never been a full service sex worker. But there was one client she slept with for money.
“He was a barrister at the time and then once a week he’d come in and you know, usually book someone, but he’d always come into the office and say, ‘what about Mary, how much to see Mary?'”
This was typically met with laughter, however, after some time she did sleep with him but it was for a lot more money than usual, she says.
Over Brennan’s years in the industry, sex work has morphed significantly from it’s dark alley predecessor, disrupted by the proliferation of online pornography, OnlyFans and camming.
“When I started in the industry the only porn was in a magazine, so you’d have to go to a shop, it’d be in a sealed plastic bag, you know, people have the stash under the bed, or in this sheet or whatever. Now everything’s online,” Brennan says.
Clients also have more than just “one option” when it comes to buying sex now days, so brothels have to work even harder to get people in the door.
To combat diminishing in-person sex clientele, Brennan only takes about 5 per cent of the women who apply for sex worker roles, something she describes as a “business model judgment”.
“If they’re not going to get the work, their confidence will go through the floor and there is somewhere for everybody, you know, and I try and give as much information and advice and guidance to everybody who applies to me.”
Adding more services to their repertoire helps, so she now advertises things like sensual massage bookings, which are now relatively common.
The Covid-19 pandemic has hit in-person sex businesses hard: while the online sphere boomed traditional spaces have been forced to close doors for rolling lockdowns, if not permanently.
NZ Prostitutes Collective national organiser Dame Catherine Healy told the Herald the situation was still unfolding and with Delta it’s uncertain what the future of brothels will look like.
HIV was also a tremendous challenge, she says, but the industry adapted and a strong safe sex culture was built up.
“The industry wasn’t a casualty to HIV transmission, but Covid, with Delta, is certainly something different.”
With the most recent lockdown Brennan says her workers have more of an understanding about what is going on.
“Funhouse women are resilient and smart. They are also generally frugal and good savers, and pay tax so like other self-employed people are eligible for the wage subsidy.”
When sex work was decriminalised in New Zealand in 2003 sex workers and clients were able to operate without fear of legal action.
Before the law change, brothels were advertised as massage parlours, and staff had to figure out what kind of service a client wanted – without putting themselves in too much risk.
“So you know, someone would come in, and they would pay, say, $40 to the agency, and choose the lady from the lounge, and then they’d go through to a room.”
If a client “just wanted a massage”, Brennan says the worker wouldn’t get paid.
Responsibility for bounced cheques or ensuring clients paid correctly also fell on the workers.
Victoria University of Wellington senior lecturer Dr Lynzi Armstrong studies the impact of this and says the most significant change is that workers now have rights in this country, “which is extremely unusual, unfortunately when we look at what’s happening in other countries”.
“Having those rights has been so powerful in terms of interactions with clients.”
For five years after the law reform, Brennan was on the parliamentary review board, and she’s still a vocal advocate of sex worker rights.
“What happened with our decriminalisation, as opposed to what’s happening around the world when they’re trying to come up with rules and laws, is that sex workers were allowed to be part of a process.”
At 60, she sees her life and the things she’s gone through as a mixed bag, and often very left of centre compared to many people’s lives.
“But those experiences have made me the person that I am and given me the confidence and knowledge to do what it is I know I am here to do. I consider myself very lucky.”
USA – Between the cold, clinical nature of a doctor’s office and all that poking, probing and prodding, there’s a special sort of anxiety attached to a medical examination. That is, unless you have a medical fetish.
While many people would be happy to never set foot in a hospital again, members of this BDSM subculture are more than pleased to hear the slap of latex against their provider’s wrist or feel the cold diaphragm of a stethoscope on their chest — so much so that they incorporate it into their sexual practice via porn or roleplay. Given that there are so many different types of tests, treatments and exams, medical fetishists are spoilt for choice when it comes to procedure play, which can range from getting a cast or dressing up as a nurse to receiving a gynecological exam, catheter insertion or enema administration. Rather than going to an actual clinic with a licensed medical professional, they instead go to a dominatrix‘s dungeon to try and get “pregnant” from fake semen injected up their rectum.
At least that was the case for medical play specialist Mistress Odette during a recent client session in her dungeon, which encompasses a main room, a full medical laboratory and plenty of tools. And though some may be taken aback by this kind of “edgeplay” — or sexual activities that push safety boundaries — as Dr. Mark Griffiths explained, medical fetishism is “quite inclusive and wide-ranging,” as it can encompass sexual attraction to medical professionals, nurse roleplay and bodily examinations or procedures.
But what exactly is the appeal? For the most part, medical play is about the dominant-submissive relationship between a medical professional and their patient, who is relegated to a “patient, specimen or subject” while being examined by an authority figure. According to Mistress Odette, her patients get aroused by the power dynamics attached to an objectifying medical gaze that’s only concerned with dissecting a body in order to provide a diagnosis. And the result is a complete disregard for your individual autonomy, seeing as how your “health and wellness is being mediated by someone else,” which is something Mistress Odette can play on through things like small penis humiliation.
For most of her patients though, the implication that their naked body is “dirty,” “toxic” or “infectious,” especially while she wears personal protective equipment, can also be a huge turn-on, even when she’s not performing procedures like an enema. However, she said it’s all part of processing a client’s insecurities and facing their fears head-on. Because while they’re being rejected on the surface, Mistress Odette said that many medical fetishists use this sort of scenario in order to “take some kind of charge over something that they actually feel like hurt them in the past” by being the one who chooses to eroticize it.
“Doctors hold this power over us […] They can heal and free us from pain or they can tell you that you’re sick and dying.”
This can also be a form of worship. Though instead of the fascination and reverence inspired by a goddess, it’s an awestruck kind of fear elicited by a human who, quite literally, determines whether you live or die. And as Mistress Odette said, there’s something about being a little scared that can turn you on.
“[With doctors] we give them this extreme and direct access to our bodies in really terrifying ways,” Mistress Odette said, adding that it’s all about the sexual humiliation a patient experiences when “giving up their bodily control.” And what’s particularly interesting is that she also has many doctor clients who, she believes, enjoy the power reversal when someone else is occupying the position they’re usually in. “Doctors hold this power over us, and can alienate us with their knowledge and [clinical terminology],” as Mistress Odette explained,
“They can heal and free us from pain or they can tell you that you’re sick and dying,” she continued, before saying that her doctor clients like experiencing the helplessness that can sometimes come with being a patient who only interacts with doctors in their “most vulnerable state.”
Echoing this sentiment is Kyle*, a college student from Ohio who’s particularly interested in cardiac exams and orthopedic braces, as they insinuate a level of powerlessness. Additionally, he said that these particular fetishes are also rooted in real life, such as the hot male nurse treating his hypertension, which sparked Kyle’s interest in watching his heart rate respond to arousal. Meanwhile, his attraction to casts comes from the brace he had to wear in high school as a gay man attracted to the “more athletic guys” who’d also wear support braces.
“The thing that turns me on the most is the vulnerability of it. If you are wearing a cast or brace then you are restricted in movement and could possibly be subject to the whims of someone else,” he said, adding that it’s “almost a softcore bondage scenario,” because it restricts movement and you can see “someone athletic who is vulnerable.”
Much like Kyle, a friend of Mistress Odette’s named Medical Slave* explained that there’s something incredibly sensuous about being hooked up to monitoring equipment and being played with when she’s “sedated into a twilight state.”
“The feeling of being sedated makes the body just let go and enjoy it even more,” Medical Slave said, clarifying that she doesn’t like to “engage in anything that leaves marks or permanent damage,” which is one of the things Mistress Odette likes to make clear to her patients.
Despite having received a lot of unofficial training from doctors and nurses, Mistress Odette won’t engage in anything that causes “lasting harm,” especially since “the stakes can feel pretty high” and “the techniques prohibitive, because the rules and protocols in the medical fetish scene are strict” — even though she gets asked “almost daily whether [she] will castrate people.”
“I don’t do anything that’s irreversible. That’s a hard line,” she said, though she will do things like suturing “people’s balls over their dicks,” since you can “take the sutures out and go back to your office.” However, irreversible procedures aren’t the only thing she refuses to do, as Mistress Odette also draws the line at fetishizing disabilities.
While disability fetishes aren’t something she encounters normally, she’s aware that acrotomophiliacs — or those who fetishize amputees and/ or want to cut their own limbs off — do exist, though she also thinks it’s different from other iterations of medical fetishism.
“It’s not super related to [more general] medical fetishism, because I think it has more in common with other fetishes that can be disempowering for the subject,” Mistress Odette said. “The ones that fetishize people who are different from them.” Even so, she still tries to “steer clear of people who like to fetishize bodies in that way, because that’s in the same vein of things like racial fetishism. That’s about depersonalizing someone else in a way I don’t love. Especially as able-bodied people who don’t deal with people fetishizing our bodies in that way.”
Kyle added that he’d “never enjoy” something that exploits someone who’s permanently disabled. “That is just not right, [but] my feelings are that casting and bracing are something that are usually short-term, not a lifelong disability,” he said. “I honestly wouldn’t enjoy it if I thought I was negatively impacting anyone or could be perceived as exploiting them.”
Somewhat similarly, the pandemic has also caused an uptick in COVID-related fetishism, which can be interpreted as problematic given the number of deaths related to the virus. However, this kind of play is still less common than you’d think, as even Medical Slave was surprised to hear about the phenomenon, saying that she “hopes there’s no one who truly wants to find someone with COVID to play with,” seeing as how it’s so dangerous. But as Mistress Odette relayed, she does have some requests for vaccine play, though it’s usually from people with a pre-existing interest in it.
“I definitely did like a roleplay where I was like a ‘bimbo vaccine.’ Like vaccinating someone, but instead of it protecting them against corona, it made them a silly little bimbo for me to take advantage of,” she said, before acknowledging that this also plays into “conservative insecurities.” But like she hypothesized before, COVID-related vaccine play could just be a way for people to face something they’re really afraid of, because this is a way to “take control of that fear through making it erotic.”
Granted, if there’s one thing Medical Slave wants to say, it’s that people interested in medical play should take it extremely serious and start slow with a professional medical domme or a trustworthy and knowledgeable partner given the potential dangers.
“I only play with medical or surgical assistants and physicians for that reason. It’s too much of a danger if not,” she said, adding that this is a safeguard for her as someone who’s into the more “extreme parts of medical play,” like sedation. But if you can do that, Mistress Odette says medical play can actually be therapeutic for some, especially those who are processing a related trauma.
“People are working through what they’re working through, like if someone has had a negative experience with a doctor and really wants to roleplay it out,” she said. “And if you’re turned on by it, you’re turned on by it.”
*Names have been changed for anonymity.
Welcome to “Sex with Sandra,” a column by Sandra Song about the ever-changing face of sexuality. Whether it be spotlight features on sex work activists, deep dives into hyper-niche fetishes, or overviews on current legislation and policy, “Sex with Sandra” is dedicated to examining some of the biggest sex-related discussions happening on the Internet right now.
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