Read Online Whip Smart: A Memoir by Melissa Febos - Free Book Online Page B

check the appointment book. Then it was a stop in the dressing room to say hello and drop off my belongings; the bathroom to wash my hands and, depending on if I had an appointment or not, pee; and finally the kitchen to stick my lunch in the fridge (I packed it from home regularly in the beginning). I would pick the peaches out of my muffin to eat first and smoke a cigarette with my coffee before putting my makeup on. I loved this routine as well. The morning chitchat in the kitchen, the opening doors, chores, and ringing phones, were all a soothing version of a work ritual that would have been much less enjoyable if they were a preamble to sitting at a desk.
    Due to the clients’ time constraints and the brisk efficacy with which the day crowd satisfied their perversions, day sessions were more often by individual appointment than the meet-and-greet, mistress-à-la-carte parade. Clients of this particular stripe attracted mistresses of an according one. Businesslike mistresses serviced the businessmen, women who had a straight-job cover to maintain, who took their calls in the bathroom so that their boyfriends wouldn’t hear the shouted conversation about dildos and bondage. “Lifestyle” dommes rarely worked the day shift: women who wore their domme personas to nightclubs, kept personal slaves (for bathroom scrubbing, luggage carrying, and other domestic uses), gave public performances, and carried on purportedly congruent personal sex lives. No, the extraordinarily grotesque or obscure fetishist did not excite the day-shifters the way he did the night-, unless he was also an extraordinarily generous tipper.
    The day shift paid heed to details like the high volume of thirty-minute sessions during the early afternoon, which, at 50 bucks a pop, paid more for your time and required far less of it endured witha single client. These half-hour sessions were frustrating to lifestyle dommes, who disliked them for the very reasons the others preferred them. It was explained to me early on by Anna, the statuesque Russian veteran (she had been at the dungeon for three years at the time that I started) with the inexorably perky breasts, flat stomach, and husky accent, that if I spent a good long time tying and untying the client and talking a lot, I could easily shave fifteen minutes off of a session. A thirty-minute enema session was Anna’s ideal: these clients spent most of it in the bathroom, leaving barely enough time to assume their preferred ejaculation position (legs suspended over head to target mouth and face, crouched over Dixie cup, et cetera), ejaculate (this was never required but more common than not), and run back to the office.
    Mistresses like Anna relied on a lot of hand jobs, which were the easiest way to control how quickly your session ended and to ensure that your client would return despite being cheated out of his full time. I didn’t see Anna as necessarily lacking the integrity of other dommes, who refused to stoop to hand jobs. It was all the same to her. The difference lay less in boundaries than value systems. To believe that it is a drastically more degrading act to jerk someone off than to shove your arm up his ass is, in a sense, to believe in the entire premise of the thing. It is to believe that subjugation resides in the submissive nature of an act, rather than the sexual. But if the fisted client desires that fist as much as another desires a hand job, how is submitting to one desire any more powerful than the other? And yet most sessions—if not all—were based on such paradigms, so many being a kind of inversion of misogyny, the subjugation of women reenacted by men on themselves. Our clients wanted to be dressed in women’s clothing and raped, molested, infantilized, humiliated, and physically abused. Did this kind of mimicry reinforce or subvert the power of these paradigms? The rationales and moral codes of the dungeon were complex beyond my comprehension, though I was promised by