Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (19 page)

Looking back to my early days as a dominatrix I realise now how young and naïve I was at that time. I had never played any sort of watersports games with a partner and didn’t even know that people wanted to do such things. It was the same with the anal play that many men wanted. I was completely in the dark. Obviously I knew that some women enjoyed anal sex but I’d never thought about men that way. It is not something that had ever entered into my consciousness, even though I had been adventurous enough to have experimented with rope bondage and had had these kind of play urges myself in the past. I was nowhere near experienced enough to understand all the options available. More importantly still, there was no internet then which might have opened my eyes a little. In this internet age, when every sex game and perversion known to mankind is freely available to view at the click of a button, people are nowhere near as innocent as I was then. Even so, people hear the kinkier side of some of my activities and do appear to be shocked. ‘Oh my God, how can you do things like that?’ some might say to my face. Behind the closed doors of their bedroom, however, I reckon it is a very different story.

I can’t deny, however, that there was an element of guilt
in those early days because I knew that my grandparents would have been ashamed of me if they had ever known what I did to fund my time at university. Whenever I went back to stay with them or just to see them for an evening I just felt, ‘Oh God, if they ever knew. It would disappoint them so much.’ I didn’t feel then – and don’t feel now – that I was ever doing anything wrong but I would have hated to disappoint them and I know my family would have had a big issue with my lifestyle.

By contrast, the woman who owned the brothel in which I was working thought that I was a very enterprising young woman. She ran five separate brothels and after a while I started doing receptionist shifts in each of them at different times. I used to answer the phone and leave my cards advertising my own domination services. She didn’t mind because she knew I would use her rooms and then give her a percentage of the fee. In theory it was illegal in those days for two girls to be working in the same ‘house’, but she never regarded the domination I offered as prostitution and so was happy for me to both answer phones and offer the occasional session as well. As the weeks went by, I gathered quite a following of clients who would call to ask for me by name and ask when I was next going to be on the premises.

It was all very amateurish but it sort of snowballed: what started as a simple daily sum of pennies in my hand started to grow into serious money. I would think, ‘Wow! I’ve got my maid’s fee and an extra £30. This is fantastic.’ I vividly remember the first day I left the place with £150 in my pocket, I felt like the richest person ever because I was only a student, I had no money, and now I had a maid’s fee and I was earning
more on top of that. Needless to say, I went shopping. There were all these things I needed, like trainers, and I bought this and I bought that and actually got a taxi back from the shopping centre because I had all these bags. It was my first taste of money – £150. I remember it well.

I discovered that with the receptionist work and the growing number of clients who wanted me to dominate them, making money was easier than I had imagined. But I always knew that working in the brothels was no more than a stepping stone, just a way to pay for life until I could graduate and find a decent nine-to-five career. The truth was that life can be unpleasant and dangerous for any girl in a brothel and the muddled-up status of our laws on prostitution offers little protection to the women who work there. Very early on I had an incident when a guy came in and agreed to pay for a session but then started demanding far more than I was prepared to give to any man. I would never have sex, and that was always made clear from the start, so when this guy started demanding more I told him to leave. He walked out quietly enough but then smashed a house brick through the window; I wasn’t hurt but it was a terrifying experience.

Soon after that I had another bad day when a client came in and stole the very first piece of equipment that I had bought with the idea of building up my own domination business. It was a V-string, an artificial rubber vagina that could be strapped around a man to hide his own genitalia and make it look as though he was a woman. A lot of the men who came to see me wanted to cross-dress and be made into a woman and so this bit of kit was a logical extension to the normal wigs and women’s dresses that helped me create the illusion they
desired. It was a big investment for my fledgling business, several hundred pounds as I recall, and it came with variable-coloured pubic hair to match different men and it allowed them to fantasise that they had a fully-penetrable vagina.

The guy who stole it had come into the room before I realised that he was seriously drunk and that there was no way I was going to session with him. I refused to take his money and told him to leave but he grabbed the V-string and ran before I could stop him. Dealing with guys who had been drinking all day and then decided they wanted a five-minute fling was an occupational hazard in those places. I had a lot of horrible, smelly, rude, drunk, arrogant men come to see me because the brothels advertised in newspapers and were at the bottom end of scale. They offered the lowest common denominator price-wise and so it is no surprise that they attracted the lowest common denominator people-wise.

As well as the sort of drunken, scummy bums who I had to kick out, there were other, more serious, dangers. Being ill one day saved me from a horrendous incident. I had been due to answer calls at one particular brothel but had to call in and tell them I was just too ill to work. That same day two guys forced their way into the building, raped one of the girls, and robbed the maid at knifepoint. It could so easily have been me. At around that same time there was a complete nutter, known as ‘domination man’ who visited several brothels where girls offered domination services. I can still remember his face to this day because he was on an ‘ugly mugs’ list that the working girls circulated to try and keep themselves safe. His modus operandi was to book a domination session and then beat the women black and blue when they were alone in the room. He
put at least one girl in intensive care before he was finally caught and sentenced to more than 10 years in jail.

So there were a lot of guys that were really not very nice at all, which is a consequence of working in an environment where the doors are open to all. Men call the number in an advert, you give them the address and they turn up at the door. Even though I found that those who sought fetish services tended to be more educated, intelligent and articulate people, it didn’t alter the fact that you are not selecting your clients, they are selecting you. It creates a very different clientele to the one I have now.

Back then, and in all the many contacts I’ve had over the years with ‘working girls’ – the euphemistic name for prostitutes – I’ve never come across any woman in the sort of forced-labour situation which seems to have obsessed the police and the popular press in recent years. I don’t doubt that there are the very occasional cases where girls are exploited by evil trafficking gangs, but the image that is peddled that this is all part of widespread organised crime is far from the truth. Do I feel there are woman exploited? I can’t say that I have ever seen it in any of the brothels I ever knew of, and ever worked in and answered the phones. Those girls were certainly not exploited. Some of course will be taking drugs but that is a very different problem and, again, most of them are not forced into it at all. Many of them are quite happy; like me they quite enjoy what they are doing, not all of it is doom and gloom. Depending on where they work, prostitutes can come into contact with decent, interesting people.

I certainly found most of my clients interesting in the days when I was building up my outcalls domination service
throughout the London suburbs. Clothing was an important consideration once my workload increased. I needed clothes that could cover whatever kinky outfit I was wearing underneath and could be versatile enough not to look out of place going into a private home or a London hotel. You wanted to go looking sexy and smart but not so sexy that the neighbours would stare at you, and not so smart that it just looked wrong. I used to wrestle with myself wondering should I wear a business suit, or should I wear normal clothes just to blend in as though I were a friend calling round to the house? It was a constant dilemma and I went through phases of trying out different things. At one stage I thought of putting a uniform on and just brazening it out on the streets but then I thought, ‘What if I get stopped by the Old Bill, having a uniform on? It could be disastrous’.

The worst time for outcall appointments was summertime because it was so much harder go dressed up in fetish-wear during the lighter, warmer nights. I tried to wear my boots so that I did not have to carry them with me, but they looked out of place in midsummer.

The other thing I didn’t like about summer was that it got dark so late that I would be arriving at places in bright daylight rather than in the dark. Summer nights made me stand out more. I would be heavily made-up and probably carrying a suitcase to the door as though I was moving in for the weekend – a young woman, about 21, wearing a wig. I just stood out. To try and blend in, I used to buy those bustier-type tops where the front would come to a ‘V’ with wider straps which would uplift you to create a bit of a cleavage. I would select ones in satin, like an electric blue satin with a black satin
skirt. It was a little like club-wear but you could just sling a corset and some boots on and it really dressed it up – daywear that looked sexy. It meant it was somewhere between the two and I could wear it in the summer although it looked eye-catching and smart enough to impress a client.

Frank, my minicab driver, had by now moved in with me at my new flat and we settled down to a rather sexless, dull but convenient relationship. He said he loved me but I think, in truth, it was a convenient pairing for him as well. He certainly liked the fact that I was earning a great deal of money. I did have feelings for him and he did have feelings for me but I never considered that it would be a life-long commitment. These days I try to wipe him out of my memory, not least because of the way he betrayed me at the end of our relationship. He could be very controlling at times and he did his level best to ensure that I kept my distance from my birth-mother and that generation of my family. ‘Don’t you realise what she’s done to you?’ he would say. ‘They all rejected you… you should reject them. Why should you have any contact at all?’ His dislike of my family was part of his manipulative, yet childish nature. He could be unpredictable, argumentative and insecure all in one; not a very attractive package. When we did have arguments he found a powerful way to threaten me. He knew that I was paranoid about my ageing grandparents finding out about my secret life of kinky sex. So he constantly threatened to tell them.

He didn’t have any moral objection to my work and seemed to have little jealousy about me meeting other men. He was certainly only too pleased to be accepting money to drive me
around from place to place but then would use threats to try and control me. I think in retrospect I only stayed with Frank for as long as I did because of that often-voiced threat to expose my working life to my much-loved grandparents. He was an arsehole excuse for a man but I truly feared that the shock might kill them so I put up with far more from him than I should have done.

Sadly, it was to end very badly.

CHAPTER 19

A NORMAL JOB

I
have never had any concerns about the morality of my work and have never felt that what I do for a living is wrong. In fact, I think I do a lot of good for a lot of people, and no harm whatsoever to anyone.

I am happy that I make people happy, even though the way that I make people happy may not be the norm. The satisfaction that I bring to people’s lives is not the norm, but I feel I do have an impact in a positive way on a wide variety of people. I can be an understanding ear listening to my clients’ desires in a part of their lives which their own partners or their closest friends might not understand or condone. I can be a reliever of the stress of their everyday lives. One of the nicest parts of my job is being told by men and women that their lives are the richer for having met me.

There did come a time however, after I had been doing
outcall domination for about a year, when I started worrying about the effect my chosen career could have on my family. My grandparents were still alive and I knew they would be devastated were they ever to find out about my work. I felt guilty when I looked at them, thinking to myself, if they knew my life and what I do to pay my way through university, I would be such a disappointment to them; and I would have hated to disappoint them. That was the time when I questioned my chosen path because I looked at them and I thought they are such a different generation, so much older than my parents should logically have been and therefore utterly divorced from my world.

My fears grew after a series of exposé stories in newspapers such as the
News of the World
publicly identified several pro-domme girls operating in London. I also knew that my job was gradually isolating me from friends and family. Nowadays I know, and count as friends, many of the women working as pro-dommes in the UK, along with a good few of my European and American counterparts. In the 1980s there were few other girls in my line of work and the need for secrecy kept us from even attempting to befriend each other. Now, I wanted to have a good stab at trying to do a normal job and have normal friends. The hours were crazy doing outcalls; it is all nights and you end up sleeping all day and just being out of society, isolated and out of a normal life and normal conversation and normal things.