Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (20 page)

Perhaps more importantly, I had never intended being a dominatrix to be my long-term career path. It was merely a way of making enough money to keep the wolf from the door whilst I studied for three years at university. Now I had
graduated, I had my degree (a 2.1, since you kindly ask, or did I mention that already?) and had been thoroughly trained for a future career in the media. I felt my life was full of future promise and was anxious to get started. It was time to put ‘Dominatrix Miss Miranda’ back in her box and let butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth Miranda, career girl extraordinaire, out into the limelight. It was time to get a ‘proper’ job.

My friends know that once I make a decision I can brook no delay in implementing it. So I cancelled my newspaper advertisements, told clients who called that I was no longer in business, and threw away much of my expensive equipment. I was determined to be ‘normal’, but the truth was, I could not quite bring myself to part with every single one of my toys. In fact, there are one or two items, including a favoured and much-used strap-on dildo and a couple of rubber outfits, which I still keep in my sexual armoury to this day. I was however determined to be normal. I had to be normal – a state I achieved only to find it was a horribly miserable state in which to be.

What I had not counted on in my rush to achieve respectability was that the media, where I chose to forge a new career, is one of the greatest bastions of nepotism left in the country. I soon found out that unless one had a mother or father ‘in the business’ or unless one was prepared to work for months as an unpaid ‘runner’, there were precious few ways of breaking into the tightly closed shop of broadcasting or films. By sheer dogged perseverance however, and by toning down my early ambitions to become the Director-General of the
BBC, I did finally manage to land a job. It was with a company which hired out equipment to television and feature film producers. ‘It may not be
Panorama
,’ I thought, ‘but it is at least a foothold in a competitive industry.’ I determined to be a dedicated and loyal employee; I knew I had studied hard and was willing to learn more; surely I could work my way upwards in this new chosen career? How wrong could I be.

My job was helping clients book the equipment they might need for any sort of filming activity. Our customers ranged from major film studios through to advertising agencies and commercial broadcasters. People would call seeking ‘dollies’ or ‘tracks’ for the cameras and I would ensure they were ordering exactly what they needed. There was little that was creative about my role, but it did at least mean I was using some of the filming knowledge I’d accumulated at university. I was enthusiastic, grateful to have found a toehold in the most competitive of industries and determined to be promoted and progress through the company hierarchy as fast as possible. Even though I say it myself, my ambition made me a first-class employee; I was always on time, was very efficient, very organised. Because I was always the first one into the office each morning I would take the heaviest workload of the day and also answer all of the many incoming calls for the hour or so before the part-time receptionist arrived at work. If I wanted food, I would call up to the canteen and they would bring something down so that I didn’t have to break from my desk and the phones.

For the first few months, I enjoyed the work and never complained about the workload. I was well-used to hard graft for long hours, even though this career was, of course, a
radical departure from the far more private work I’d been doing until then. Then reality dawned and I gradually realised that whilst myself and a couple of other girls were working like crazy, there was an entire team of male middle-managers who were doing nothing productive at all. On the contrary, they would often ruin the system by double-booking-out equipment for a glamorous project like a new feature film, with no recognition that the company bread-and-butter clients were being shafted at the same time. I used to find it utterly frustrating because I would be doing exactly what I was supposed to do but they would be causing chaos. I also realised that there was little chance of my being promoted because these guys were going nowhere; they were receiving good money and having an easy life whilst we did the work.

Bizarrely, the realisation that I was being exploited pushed me into working even longer hours – but this time for myself rather than exclusively for my employer. I had been working in the media for long enough by then to know that either working for nothing for months of so-called work experience, or using old-fashioned nepotism, were almost the only way of breaking into the industry. With a mortgage to pay and no family to help, I couldn’t afford to work for free and it seemed that even lowly researchers had to be related to established executives before they could gain an interview. With my family background, I was the least connected person imaginable. I had to come up with a plan. That was when I started getting into work even earlier and staying even later in order to look through the company’s extensive lists of contacts within a myriad of media concerns. Then, working at home in the evenings, I would write to each and every
company, often to named individuals from those contact files, looking for a job that might progress my career. Out of the 900 or so letters and CVs which I posted over the next few months I received a number of replies offering an interview. Quite a low number… well… to be precise… just two.

It was heart-breaking receiving rejection after rejection and seeing the ‘thank you, but sorry…’ letters pile up in my files. Even the couple of interviews I did get were dispiriting. One woman started by announcing: ‘Basically, we’re looking for a dogsbody.’ I still did my best to impress her but, inside, I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe that’s the way you kicked off my interview. You may be looking for your dogsbody, but I want a career.’ I knew that my experience was limited but I’d studied hard and I did have a degree; and I’d been interested in working in television for many years. When I was 16, I’d pestered to get work experience in the BBC newsroom, going out with news crews, going into the edit suites and then seeing how the evening news is put together. Talking to the cameramen convinced me that I wanted to be a camera operator – even though people tried to tell me it wasn’t a job for a girl. ‘It’s outside work and you have to lug all the equipment around,’ one cameraman told me. ‘You’d be better off thinking of something inside the studios that’s more suitable for women.’ Clearly, I thought at the time, the BBC’s anti-sexism training isn’t yet up to speed.

My equipment bookings job was paying me around £1000 a month before tax. That was just enough for me to survive on and pay my mortgage, although I knew I could once have earned that much cash in just one night. Even so, despite my growing dissatisfaction, I didn’t say anything or complain
because I was conscious that this was my very first ‘real’ job and I truly wanted to succeed. Then, some months later, I learned that one of the guys had been promoted to a junior manager position and that cut me to the quick. We had joined the company at around the same time, I knew he had a lesser degree than me, he was slightly younger than me and, most irritating of all, I knew he spent half of his time at work chatting to people in the warehouse whilst I was doing my job and making them money. I looked at the situation from every which way I could but, as far as I could see, the only thing my rival had going for him was that he was a man. All the managers were men; all the underlings were women. I had heard the phrase ‘glass ceiling’ before but it was still a shock to bump up against it.

Seeking some sort of recognition for the efforts I had been putting in, I asked for a pay-rise, but the idea was dismissed on the grounds that paying more to me meant they would need to pay more to others – which felt like no sort of a reason to deny me at all. Soon afterwards I handed in my notice. At the leaving interview I made it clear that I felt their company was anything but progressive for the female staff.

Out of a job and with no further offers of interviews, I might have been in trouble. There were a lot of people chasing too few jobs. Unlike many of my contemporaries, however, I did at least have Plan B.

CHAPTER 20

‘EVERYTHING GOES UP… APART FROM THE PRICE OF PUSSY’

S
tarting out in my own business as a professional dominatrix was both the most exciting, and the scariest thing I had ever done. This was my Plan B: to try and revitalise the domination work I’d abandoned when I found gainful ‘straight’ employment.

Unfortunately, I’d been so determined to leave my previous lifestyle behind me and build a normal career that I’d ditched most of the thousands of pounds worth of BDSM gear I’d collected for my outcalls business while at university. I had deleted the telephone numbers of clients from my phone and anybody who had called me had been told that I had given up my domination work for good. I faced rebuilding what had been a successful and thriving business from scratch but was utterly determined to succeed, one way or the other. If dominating men was how I was going to make my mark and
earn a good living, then that’s was what I was going to do. I had one big advantage: I now owned a flat which I had originally intended to rent out to supplement the meagre income from my media career. I’d originally bought it with its rental potential very much in mind. Now it was the ideal base for my domination future.

Despite my earlier experience in various brothels and my outcall efforts, I still had little real idea of my clients’ needs and requirements. I had been very much self-taught. I know now that most girls in my situation learned their tricks of the trade from older, more experienced Mistresses. All I had to guide me was my own genuine sexual interest in dominating men. However, ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’ and so I cobbled together a local newspaper advert for ‘Domination Services’ and waited to see what would happen. My best guess was that I might get a few freak calls, but that would be about it.

That was when my telephone started ringing off the hook.

From day one, my new domination career was up and running – fast. The phones rang; the men kept coming, and then coming back for more. I may have been inexperienced but I was clearly doing something right. Perhaps, most importantly, I was indulging many of my own interests. I can’t deny I got a kick out of my pro-domming and I enjoyed being as creative as I could be. That holds good to this day. To build any kind of BDSM scene you have to enjoy the scene yourself. Having a creative mind to build interesting scenarios, combined with my own interest in the fetish scene, were among the factors which brought me rapid success.

The other reason that the calls kept on coming was that there were at that time so few professional dominatrices working in London. It was very much a niche market with little serious competition. I like to think, though, that my strong work ethic was also a factor. Unfortunately, it is not always shared by all of the other girls who have since entered the profession. Unlike some, I pride myself on always keeping appointments and being available at the times when I have said I will be available; I never cheat people out of the time for which they’ve paid; and I work hard to give my clients the experience they desire.

In that era, it was also a lot easier to say what I wanted to say in newspaper advertising than it is today. I would use copy lines that would never be accepted by the more prudish newspaper industry now, such as referring to myself as the ‘notorious Mistress Miranda’ and mentioning sex toys and strap-ons and uniforms. The chance to boast about my wider range of services was important because so many potential clients wanted to go beyond just being spanked or caned. Many people seem to think that domination is all about corporal punishment of various kinds but that is far too simplistic a view. It was important to me to stress that I was not simply offering hard-core beatings, although I was happy to offer a black-and-blue beaten bottom if required. But many of my clients wanted simply to dress in women’s clothing or indulge in elaborate role-play. I tried to reflect those choices in all my advertising which brought me a lot of calls. So many that I could hardly answer them all.

My fledgling business did well from the start, which was slightly surprising because I was having to pick up a whole
new range of business skills as I went along – very much ‘learning on the job’ you might say. I worked out my pricing policy, for example, by studying the going rate for general ‘incalls’ in massage parlours and adding a bit extra to reflect the fact that I was offering an unusual service. One of my friends who ran a brothel would keep me up to date with current rates. ‘You should always charge more for the sort of domination services you offer,’ she would say. That’s why I soon went up to £150 for an hour, a price I maintained for many years. My pricing policy was, however, partly determined by an old saying within the adult industry: ‘Everything goes up, apart from the price of pussy.’

It is amazing that the sex business seems to be immune from the general impact of inflation. That means that even 20 years ago, when I was answering telephones in a London brothel, clients were charged £60 for what prostitutes call a ‘full personal service’. If you telephone any brothel now, a full two decades later, you will find it is
still
£60 for a full personal service. Other rates will also be much the same now as they were then: £30 for topless hand-relief, £40 for a full strip, and £50 for oral sex. I think that what has happened is that decades ago the shame accompanying prostitution meant that few girls dared to move into the game: now that society’s attitude has changed, more and more girls are willing to trade on their feminine assets for cash. That vastly increased supply has kept prices down.