Dominatrix

Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon

Danielle J. Lindemann

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226482590
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Our lives are full of small tensions, our closest relationships full of struggle: between woman and man, artist and customer, purist and commercialist, professional and client—and between the dominant and the submissive.   In Dominatrix, Danielle Lindemann draws on extensive fieldwork and interviews with professional dominatrices in New York City and San Francisco to offer a sophisticated portrait of these unusual professionals, their work, and their clients. Prior research on sex work has focused primarily on prostitutes and most studies of BDSM absorb pro-domme/client relationships without exploring what makes them unique. Lindemann satisfies our curiosity about these paid encounters, shining a light on one of the most secretive and least understood of personal relationships and unthreading a heretofore unexamined patch of our social tapestry. Upending the idea that these erotic laborers engage in simple exchanges and revealing the therapeutic and analytic nature of their work, Lindemann makes a major contribution to cultural studies, anthropology, and queer studies with her analysis of how gender, power, sexuality, and hierarchy shape all of our social experiences.

1

Scripting Pain: Power Exchange and the Theatrical Frame

One night, I realize I’ve accidentally stepped on a man rolled up in a carpet. We’re at a Scene party in the basement of a restaurant in New York’s East Village. I approach the bar and put my foot on what I assume is a step, when I hear a faint “Oof!” The man is laid out in front of the bar, fully submerged in the rug, his face peering out of a roughly cut hole. I step off and apologize, but I am immediately “corrected” by a nearby domme.

“That’s okay, sweetie—he likes it!” She proceeds to kick the carpet repeatedly and with great force in her platform boots, while the other people at the bar look on with a mixture of nonchalance and delight. The man in the rug beams the whole time. I return to the table where I’ve been sitting.

“I just accidentally stepped on a guy rolled in a rug,” I tell the group of people who’ve brought me to the party.

“Carpet Guy’s here?” one responds.

Looking at BDSM interactions in contexts such as this one, in which dommes and subs perform these actions publicly, in front of members of the local Scene who are familiar with some of the key players and their attributes, it is easy to see that there is an element of theatricality to such practices. However, it is useful to conceptualize BDSM even in the commercial dungeon, where there are typically no “audiences” for such exchanges, as dramatic because such interactions also represent stylized enactment of relationships of power. In this chapter, inspired by prior work that has examined SM through a dramaturgical frame, as well as my interviewees’ own conceptions of their work as “theatrical,” I interrogate the role of control in the process by which dungeon encounters are “scripted” and subsequently enacted. Doing this illuminates the professional nuances of these relationships. Although the domme/client interaction is superficially organized as a unidirectional power relationship, it can actually tell us about the nuances of control within other service-industry interactions.

From the outset, rather than viewing control as a 0/1 proposition (one partner has it all and one has none), I reject the common contention among BDSM participants that the sub is the one with “the control” in a D/S exchange. I argue instead that the dominant/submissive interaction actually represents a heavily nuanced struggle for control, in which each party has some role in determining process and outcome. During the interaction prior to the session, in which they determine the parameters for the encounter, dommes and clients strive to “get over” on each other—a form of power exchange, I contend, that is belied both by the image of the all-powerful dominant and by the concept of the submissive who “really” directs the exchange. Looking at the process by which both domme and sub negotiate the encounter is useful in that it unfogs the dynamics of other professional relationships as well as the dynamics of the ethnographic interview process, bringing into focus the manner in which the researcher/informant relationship mirrors that struggle for power.

BDSM and the Theatrical Frame

When I conceptualize BDSM relationships as “scripted” performances, I am standing on the shoulders of other scholars who have applied a dramaturgical frame to these interactions, and I am also echoing BDSM participants’ own descriptions of their practices. Thomas Weinberg has theorized that sadomasochism can best be analyzed through what Erving Goffman (1974) terms the “theatrical frame,” crucial components of which are performance and make-believe. Weinberg explains that, within the theatrical frame, “various sorts of keyings are used by the participants,” including “those which transform what might appear to an outsider to be violence into make-believe or a kind of play-like behavior” (1983, 106).¹ When it comes to sadomasochism, what the uninitiated onlooker may view as brutal is perfectly reasonable to the participants themselves. SM, of course, involves pain, but it is an agreed-upon level of pain that has been pre-scripted and with which both parties are comfortable (Lee 1983, 185–86).

Using a theatrical frame to examine BDSM helps clarify why safe words are used; the dominant may interpret the submissive’s expressions of agony within the context of his role in the scene. A staple of BDSM, a safe word can be any term (like “pineapple”) that, when called out by the submissive during a scene, indicates that he does not wish to continue. Verbal protests, such as “Stop,” “That hurts,” or “Let me go,” may be misinterpreted by the dominant as part of a particular role-playing scenario, while a safe word unambiguously ensures termination of the session. One client explained,

You can define your safe words to be whatever you want, but most people just use “yellow” and “red.” “Yellow” basically means “I’m approaching the point of ‘I can’t take it anymore.’” “Yellow” is supposed to mean, like, “Don’t go any harder.” Because then you’re going to break my headspace, basically. Red basically means “That’s it. Scene done.” If you call out red, that’s it.²

As one pro-domme told me, “I usually will continue what I’m doing, and I don’t stop unless they safe word. I basically tell them at the beginning of the session that if they say, like, ‘No, stop’ or ‘It hurts’ then I won’t stop if they’re not using the safe word.”

It makes sense to think about BDSM as theatrical, not only because dramaturgy is such an apt conceptual tool for considering these exchanges, but also because the participants themselves often view their actions as performative. About half the pro-dommes I interviewed agreed with the statement that professional dominance is “theater” or a “performance.” I spoke with a Bay Area woman, for instance, who described “setting the stage” for sessions with props, lighting, a sound system, and even a fog machine. She added, “Essentially it is always performance art between you and the person you’re playing with.” A New York domme explained, similarly, “It’s a theater with an audience of one. You put makeup on. The nails, the hair. There’s a performance. It just happens to be for an audience of one. And there’s audience participation [laughs].” Even those interviewees who rejected the characterization of their work as theatrical generally added that there are aspects of theater, performance, or illusion to the exchange. Further, they used dramaturgical lingo to characterize the interactions; most referred to BDSM interactions as “scenes,” and some explicitly referred to the pre-session negotiation as a “scripting” process.³

Negotiating a Scene

When I discuss the “scripting” of a dungeon encounter, I am defining a “script” as the plan for interaction that is developed by one or both parties before the interaction itself occurs. The submissive has a certain degree of control over this process, even within noncommercial (lifestyle) BDSM.

However, which participant really controls a dominatrix/client interaction is not a useful question here, since the argument being made is that that these exchanges are mutually constituted. It is apparent, however, that the submissive has more control over the scene than an onlooker not keyed into the exchange might assume. The negotiation process prior to a session is directed toward, among other things, discerning a client’s interests and fantasies, so that these may be played out on the dungeon floor. In this sense, the client has control over the general course the scene will take. One Manhattan-based pro-domme told me that she begins this negotiation over the phone: “Usually when I talk to them, I get an idea of what their interests are—pre-screen people. Then they come in, and we chat for ten to fifteen minutes. I have a set list of questions that I ask that have kind of worked for me before.” Though some dungeons ask clients to fill out a form, she indicated that she does not:

I mean, I was just trained to interact with people. It’s much easier for me to see their reactions and to better understand where they are, and see how they react when they describe—you know, first I ask, “What are your interests? Let’s go over your interests.” They talk about that, and, you know, you look at where they linger and how they look when they’re talking about something. . . . Then I ask them about—it’s a very, very important question and not a lot of people ask this—“What’s the worst session you ever had?” And so then I know, all right, this is what’s important to him. And I’ll ask him what’s the best session he ever had. And in between the two of those things, and how he says it, I’m like, okay, now I understand.

Most informants told me that this negotiation process was geared toward determining a sub’s preferred activities and “triggers” (which words, props, or sensations especially excite him), as well as his physical and emotional “limits.”

In the Dungeon

Client tastes vary widely. Consequently, professional dominance is an extremely multifaceted industry. It would be a herculean task to construct a typology of all the requests pro-dommes get, but they may be generally organized into three ideal types: pain-producing dominant,⁴ non-pain-producing dominant, and fetishistic. These categories overlap; sessions commonly involve some combination of pain, dominance without physical pain, and fetish.

Scenarios in which the domme inflicts physical pain are often “corporal” sessions, in which she strikes the client’s body—for instance, by spanking, paddling, flogging, caning, whipping, or punching. Other popular types of pain-producing sessions that are not classified as “corporal” include electric stimulation, hair pulling, genital piercing, nipple clamping, and smothering—which, along with choking, falls under the rubric of “breath play.” A common session request from clients who prefer pain is “cock-and-ball torture” (CBT), which some use interchangeably with “ball bondage” (tying-up of the testes), and some apply as a general term for inflicting genital pain. Sessions involving dominance without pain infliction include practices such as body bondage, urinating on the client (golden showers), and verbal humiliation.

Another key aspect of pro-domme/client interactions is fetish. The women I interviewed had encountered clients with fetishes for shoes, articles of clothing, particular fabrics, body hair, and sweat, in addition to body parts and various scents. One client wrote “I love smelly feet!!!” all over his request form. Informants told me that “foot worship”—in which the client rubs, kisses, compliments, and/or washes the dominatrix’s feet—was by far the most common manifestation of a body part fetish, though dommes who specialized in wrestling also commonly added that they get requests for “muscle worship.” For those pro-dommes who are willing to do nudity, “ass worship” and “breast worship” are common. Other typical fetishistic scenarios include cross-dressing, “adult babies” (infantilism), medical scenes (in which the domme plays the role of doctor or nurse, sometimes performing an enema), and “transformation” scenarios in which the client wishes to be treated as an animal—most commonly, “pony play” and “puppy play.”

While many pro-dommes emphasized that there is no “typical” session, it is instructive to look at the sample of 305 client preference forms from a New York dungeon, to get a sense of some general trends in session requests. The table below tallies the items checked by clients on their preference forms, organized into the categories “like,” “love,” and “dislike.” The activity categories most “loved” by clients were submission to multiple mistresses (136 clients), foot slavery (117 clients), genital chastisement (105 clients), dildo service (105 clients), and mild to moderate bondage (101 clients). Slightly more people liked or loved being urinated on (126 clients) than disliked it (115 clients). These trends line up with reports from the women I interviewed; one dungeon domme, for instance, told me, “You couldn’t be a mistress without doing golden and dildo.”

Some of the patterns here we might expect from the media image of the professional dominatrix, especially as relates to her attire. Of 237 clients, for example, 159 indicated that they loved high-heel shoes; this was the category most “loved” by clients. And 102 out of 232 loved “exotic boots.” Some clients emphasized this point by writing in requests for stereotypical dominatrix gear—for instance, “high heeled thigh high leather boots (black).”

The corporal categories, however, tell a story that complicates the stereotype: most clients do not come to this dungeon to receive extreme pain. Some types of pain infliction, such as nipple torture and genital chastisement, were common, but when it came to acts such as spanking and flagellation, few clients requested “moderate to severe” pain. Only five clients loved moderate to severe flagellation, and only nine loved moderate to severe spanking. At least in part, this avoidance of “severely” masochistic acts may be a function not of taste but of the unwillingness to have evidence of the session left on one’s body. Informants told me that avoiding telltale marks was a common client concern, particularly for married men, and some clients specified “no marks” on their request forms. At the same time, this tally of client preferences indicates the extent to which sessions are a mixed bag and by no means always about physical pain, thus complicating the image of the brutal, whip-wielding dominatrix. It is telling, for instance, that one client specified on the “comments” section of his form, “No Discipline. No Pain. No Meanness.”

Interests, as expressed in client preference forms (N = 305)*

*Clients typically left items blank.

It would be misleading to flatten out this area of social life by limiting the analysis to only the most commonly requested practices, or to those that exist on a set form, in the same way that it would be misleading to focus on only the most outlandish stories. A good way to describe the world of professional erotic dominance is that outliers are commonplace. One dominatrix may encounter only a single client with a particular outlier request, but she will encounter many clients with outlier requests. A line I heard repeatedly from pro-dommes as well as from people in the Scene was, “There’s someone with a fetish for everything.” The following four dommes’ descriptions of the last session they had done before being interviewed underscore the great variation that exists in this industry:

I forced him to drink a lot of champagne. . . . It’s not an explicit thing, but a lot of our session revolves around this kind of playful humiliation, where he says—he’ll be like, “I love you.” [I say,] “Of course you do.” [He says,] “Do you love me?” [I say,] “Of course I do.” [He says,] “You’re lying!” [I say,] “Of course I am.” . . . You know, this whole banter where he’s like, “Oh! I loooove you!” and it’s just kind of very playful [laughs]. . . . It’s really a fun, silly—it’s just basically me making fun of him like that. Not in a really mean way.

The last session was with a pantyhose fetishist. I like those fetishists because they’re really easy to work with. I mean, he loves anything as long as it involves pantyhose [laughs]. So of course I have him wear them. I make a straightjacket out of them. I do bondage with them. I do cock-and-ball bondage with them. And then I’ll incorporate other kinds of SM play. So I’ll like tie the cock and balls up and then do other types of CBT or whatever, but it’s the combination of the fetish object with the other activities that he really enjoys.

This was a rare case where this guy had never even seen a mistress before, and he’s asking me to shit in his mouth. I’m like, “Are you sure, honey?” He’s that kind of fetishist that’s probably been thinking of it for fifteen years and just never did it. And he was into, like, ingesting some of it and having some of it on him.

It was a CBT session for two hours with a lot of ballbusting. He just wanted me to hit him in the balls over and over again.

Finally, there are sessions in which the dominatrix, paradoxically, plays the role of the submissive partner in the interaction. The most common example of a session in which the dominatrix is not dominant is a “switch” session, which can refer to a scene in which the dominatrix is the submissive participant (also called a “sub session”) or in which the two people arrange to “switch” in the mi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Scripting Pain: Power Exchange and the Theatrical Frame
• 2. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in BDSM Kindergarten: Dominatrix Careers
• 3. Will the Real Pro-Domme Please Stand Up: Art, Authenticity, and Pierre Bourdieu
• 4. Playing Make-Believe: Fantasy and the Boundaries of Commercial Intimacy
• 5. Whip Therapy
• 6. “Is That Any Way to Treat a Lady?”: (Re)production of Gender on the Dungeon Floor
• Conclusion. The Emperor’s New Leather Thong
• Appendix A. Methods
• Appendix B. Getting Collared: Pro-Dommes and the Law
• Appendix C. Historical Context
• Appendix D. Terminology
• Appendix E. Initial Contact E-mail
• Appendix F. Original Interview Schedule
• Appendix G. Final Interview Schedule
• Notes
• References
• Index