At the first foot fetish party I ever worked (and really, the first sex work I ever did), I spent most of my time standing against a wall. There was a hallway, intersected by the dungeon rooms of a Manhattan loft space, where all the girls who had not yet been picked for a session would advertise themselves. I wasn’t advertising so much as being completely terrified, a shaking wall flower. More like wall socket, I was quite attached to that wall for the evening. So I used the opportunity to watch and learn.
I watched two Asian girls, covered head to toe in latex and PVC, humiliating this man in the hallway. Spitting on their boots and shoving them in his mouth, while he squirmed on the floor. Throwing their heads in the air and laughing. Being, well, mean. And rude. Openly.
I didn’t want to be in their position, per se, it looked kind of hard from my point of view. I felt more on his level than I did theirs. After all, I was so vulnerable and at risk, dressed in lingerie I felt uncomfortable with outside of a bedroom. How could I wear intricate outfits like theirs and still look so…actively untouchable?
Actively untouchable. That’s what I wanted to be, I realized. A part of the game, but better than the game nonetheless. I wanted to be special, basically, and I was hoping that in this world, there was a place to be special: just above it all. Little did I know there was no being “above the game,” in any aspect of life. You had to play to make it work. And when you played, you got involved, whether you intended to or not.
It’s so strange to me now, how I can never be that naive again. And I say naive because, well, I never felt very innocent. I always thought of myself a worldly and wise beyond my years. That’s what everyone was always telling me, anyway. But now, at 25, people have stopped telling me that because I grew up. I am the age I always strived to be, so the compliments on my maturity or sage nature have faded. I am left now with the knowledge that I knew really nothing about the world back then and had I, I might not have been so willing to dive into it.
I admired Dommes back then because they seemed to inhabit a space that I wanted, a space where men couldn’t tell you what to do and you didn’t have to be so angry all the time. So angry and so silent. I wanted to be cool and powerful instead. Self-controlled and controlling.
Being a dominatrix, in the end, though, just made me angrier. I saw too much of the way things really were to feel any comfort of my own. I wonder, still, how women in the sex industry can claim sometimes that they “love men, they wouldn’t do this job if they didn’t.” It always sounded so apologetic, like we should be grateful on some level that most men pay us hundreds of dollars to beat them privately, so that they can happily skip back into the world unencumbered by the burdens of their desires. The way I see it, if you don’t pity men on some level more than you supposedly love them, there’s no making it through. What’s so lovable about that sweat of desperation? And what’s so lovable about it ending up stuck to you, instead of them?
I wasn’t the one who got to go home at night all free of my sins, refreshed for the next day of work. I was the one who had to sit around with my client’s deep, dark secrets and try and process them through. Try and help. Some might regard that as having been my mistake in it all: my belief that my work was worthwhile in that way. I hold to this day that isn’t wasn’t. I still believe in the potential of sex workers to transform, create and empower: likewise, there is the potential to reinforce, whitewash and passively accept. After all, there’s no cause to romanticize the situation, either. Because in some ways, the image of the dominatrix duped me too: here I thought it was all too real. Turns out I also had at least one fantasy I wanted very badly to make come true.
