Domme School

Vice magazine recently posted an article describing several days in the life of a NYC pro-domme. The purported set-up was one of their writers following the domme with a view to becoming a professional herself. But the actual format is much the same as it always is for these type of articles, offering readers a chance to look at someone else’s weird and twisted lifestyle.

I’m in two minds about the article itself. On one hand the writer seemed to enjoy herself, and it’s certainly not written from a negative point of view. Coming from something called ‘Vice magazine‘ that’s probably not unexpected. However, I find it hard to imagine a vanilla but potentially kinky person reading it and thinking “Yes, that sounds like something I want to get involved in.” There’s an undercurrent of sleaziness that comes through to me, although I struggle to put my finger on exactly why that is. Perhaps its comments like this one.

The whole scene makes me feel like I’m an actress in a really bad porno. It’s pretty cool.

Having a session that feels like a bad porno movie definitely doesn’t sound cool to me. And in fact, setting the tone of the article aside, the main thing that stood out for me was how incredibly different my sessions are from the ones described.  I don’t role-play at all, and my interactions with the domme are both lighter (chatting and joking in early parts of the session) and darker (floating in subspace after some intense pain later on). I also tend to involve a lot more equipment and tools, utilizing everything from simple needles and clamps through to custom dungeon furniture. The type of play in the article sound like a kind of sexual community theater. Where I always feel mine are more like a cross between extreme sports and medieval torture.

That contrast led me to two different conclusions. The first was that it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming most people play in a way at least vaguely similar to your own preferences. I always get annoyed when non-kinky people pigeon-hole BDSM as simply leather, whips and chains, but I’m probably guilty of doing a similar thing at a different level. It’s easy to forget just how big the kink universe really is. The other conclusion was that a good pro-domme must posses an incredibly ability to shift quickly between different head spaces. I tend to think of the domme skill-set as being a highly technical one: How to do a rope suspension; how to wield a single tail; what’s a safe way to do cutting and piercing. I’m very aware of these kind of technical skills in each and every session. What I don’t see is the transition between sessions and the mental gymnastics needed to create new moods and session themes. Offhand it’s hard to think of another job that requires quite that level of versatility.

Image is taken from page 5 of Vice Magazine article.