As a 21-year-old student and novice dominatrix, Helena seems to do it all. She manages men’s egos and sexual satisfaction, maintains her Ivy League scholarship, and upholds a New York City social life that makes it all worth it.
She looks like every other girl on campus who wears mini skirts and sends think pieces as a way of flirting. Her acrylic nails are usually wrapped around a coffee-to-go from the Hungarian Pastry Shop, her favorite Upper West Side cafe. Darker roots are beginning to grow out from under her bleached hair. Her McNally Jackson tote bag—carrying a laptop, charger, lipstick, cash, sunglasses, a Columbia University lanyard, and almonds to snack on—goes everywhere with her. Helena is also not her name; it’s a pseudonym she chose for this article.
The money she makes in the dungeon partly fills her post-grad rainy-day account but mostly funds her social life. Helena’s been thinking about financial security a lot lately. As a writing major, she is torn between money and fulfillment. The clash between her middle-class upbringing and it-girl lifestyle doesn’t feel sustainable.
Once a week, Helena posts a carousel of updates on her private Instagram account. The pictures are mostly of her dinners out (a majority are Michelin starred) and the outfits she wore downtown, 40 blocks south of the Midtown dungeon where she works.
She lives for the espresso-martini nights she has with friends. The cocktails are not even at the table yet when she begins to regale them with stories from work, stories that are entertaining, embellished and censored.
Helena’s friend, in a sex diary for The Cut, calls her “the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
Culture magazines love to profile women who seem empowered but still subscribe to aspirational presentations of womanhood: white, skinny, sexual, and outspoken without being political. These pieces make young women the targets of unnuanced sex and sexiness messaging. Meanwhile, sex work is rebranded as a quick way for young women to make money: you’re in control, a day at the dungeon pays you the same as a week at a minimum-wage job, and most of all—it’s sexy.
Pro-sex work, like the terms sex-positive and pro-choice, is becoming an increasingly popular political badge to wear. The hashtag #ProSexWork frequently appears next to #BLM and #FreePalestine in Twitter bios. The sex work community on Reddit is, unsurprisingly, made up of many users who aren’t in the industry. And while many of these people rally around the idea of a marginalized woman in need of their support, there’s a new and different demographic entering the industry: younger, wealthier, and college-educated. Seeking Arrangement, a website that matches sugar babies with sugar daddies, reported in 2021 that more than 3.2 million users signed up for sugar baby accounts using their student emails.
College-aged girls are drawn to the allure of sex work and then learn its harsh realities on the job, without ever receiving proper training. What they’re left with is a complicated narrative that is difficult to fully embrace or reject. They’re neither empowered nor damsels-in-distress—just sexualized and alienated from their peers.
THE ONBOARDING PROCESS
Helena struggled with how to write the email. “To Whom It May Concern” didn’t sound right, and neither did “Dear.” She decided on “Hi.” She was writing to the dungeon where she works now to inquire about a job. After reading Whip Smart, Melissa Febos’ memoir on life as a college student-slash-domme, Helena was intrigued. A quick Google search: “BDSM dungeons near me,” returned the names of a few places.
Helena browsed their sites, closing and re-opening the tabs while texting her friends for encouragement. After her group chat agreed on which of her corset-clad girls’ night-out photos she should submit, Helena sent out the emails. One dungeon replied immediately, giving her a street corner and a time to meet—a classic “two call” system that is common in the drug and sex industries. She was nervous on the day of her interview and spent hours debating what to wear. She decided on an olive slip beneath a leather jacket.
“It wasn’t even like an interview,” she tells me. “I told them I had no experience and they were like, ‘OK, give us your measurements or you can take them right now.’ And then they just put my information up on the site.”
Her anxieties were not assuaged when, after the interview and on her way out of the dungeon, she met the bald Russian man in his fifties who runs the operation and gets a 65 percent cut of every $260 session. In the year she’s worked there, Helena’s only had a handful of conversations with him. Most of their interactions are rooted in a fundamental mutual agreement: Helena earns the dungeon money, and in turn, he leaves her alone. They communicate through awkward smiles, but all the girls, Helena included, resent him for the way he “plays God.”
Though he’s quiet, his presence is felt through his overheard phone conversations in rapid Spanish and the cameras he’s installed virtually everywhere—from the managers’ offices to the girls’ break room—except for rooms where sessions are held. He only speaks in English when he’s yelling, which is usually in response to a complaint. Clients have walked out from sessions because of how hot it gets in the summer. In the winter, the girls wear puffer jackets when they’re between clients on their 9-hour shifts.
Helena’s clients are mainly in finance or tech, like Ken, who after one session described to her the Hampton’s house he threatened to take away from his wife when she found out about his dungeon habit and tried to expose it.
“I Googled him after work and found pictures of his wife, who just looks so normal,” Helena tells me over dinner. “She’s stuck in a marriage that’s sexless and full of these secrets—he gets off in a dungeon twice in a week while she has a house in the Hamptons, and their kids don’t know anything”
“I don’t feel guilty for sessioning with him, but I do feel bad for the wife and the kids,” Helena adds.
Many of Helena’s clients have wives who are unaware of the weekly or bi-monthly session charges on their credit card statements, yet most clients don’t consider their time at the dungeon cheating. To them, the dungeon supplements their sex life in a way that makes their marriages sustainable. She has a lot of clients like Ken: married men who come in for sensual, not necessarily corporal, sessions.
“A corporal session is punishment—it’s sadistic, punitive, and pain-centered,” Helena tells me. “A sensual session is less mean. I’m playing the role of the teasing girlfriend. It involves a lot of smiling and looking seductive, where I’m pretending I’m into it.”
Some clients are in-and-out. Others, after 45 minutes of submission, need to talk. About their jobs, their wives, their triggers, their kids, their shame. A session at the dungeon is a lot like therapy for some clients, Helena tells me.
The relationship between a dominatrix and their client is about much more than power. Before each session, clients have two-minute “meets” to discuss their interests, triggers, and experience. Sometimes clients work with a regular girl and meet only with her. Others like trying out different dommes, looking for compatibility.
Picking a dominatrix is a little like speed-dating: disclose your deal breakers first and, if time permits, your go-to coffee order last. In establishing boundaries, clients often show dommes a side to themselves that virtually nobody else in their lives knows about.
The dungeon’s receptionists are its de facto managers. They resolve disputes and communicate girls’ complaints to “the Russian” but aren’t trained to support sex workers or deal with potentially dangerous clients. They are friendly and pick favorites though, so they fit right into the catty, hierarchical environment. While some dommes are the kind of people who bring snacks like Dunkin’ Donuts for everyone, the girls often still step on each others’ toes. “Even if you so much as, like, put someone’s bag on the floor, it can start something with a certain person,” Helena explained to me.
Helena catches me up on the latest drama: screaming matches over a regular customer switching to a new domme, girls leaving fake reviews of dommes they don’t like on the dungeon’s site, locker room faux pas that escalate. “The dungeon used to be way more combative,” Helena says. “This new girl accidentally put her cigarette out in a girl’s cup of liquor, and they almost got into a physical fight over it. The new girl emailed our boss, the Russian, to tell him the other girl had liquor.” Two of the most combative girls left recently, so it’s more peaceful. “Now my work friends and I tip each other into sessions so we all get paid, and we give each other weed, shots of Hennessy, and coke. It’s very sweet.”
It’s normal for dommes to be thrown into dungeons with virtually no training or support, and hostile relationships with the other dommes can isolate first-timers. While being emotionally exhausted, or even traumatized, may be expected as an occupational hazard in sex work, dommes don’t always know what they’re getting into. To prepare, Helena binge-watched Vice and Playboy videos on BDSM. She decided that her version of a domme would be a “bitchier and played-up version” of herself. Some clients prefer dommes who are newcomers to the industry and enjoy ‘topping-from-the-bottom’: showing a domme the ropes while playing the part of the submissive.
Helena’s first client, a tattooed 30-year-old from Brooklyn who looked a lot like Jonah Hill, was both timid and insistent. His kink was that he wanted to be used as furniture: A reading chair, a footrest, a lamp for the chair. After pretending to be a roast pig on a table, he then posed as the dining room table itself. He encouraged her with subtle direction, which eased Helena’s responsibility to not only control but also cultivate the session: “Oh mistress, don’t you want to use me as a chair while you read.”
Helena’s first few shifts were distressing. “Every time I was walking down the hallway to a session, I’d be like, what the fuck am I doing?”, Helena tells me. “Like the fight or flight thing. For any of the firsts, like pegging, I’m so caught up in the technicality and the: how am I going to execute this and still make it hot for you? There’s no room for me to be excited in those moments.”
Most of Helena’s firsts, like sounding and breathplay, happened during tip-ins, which is when clients tip a second domme to join a session mid-way through. Helena is usually paid 20 to 40 dollars for tip-ins, which last around 15 minutes, proportional to the base rate of 90 dollars for a 60-minute session. Breathplay is when a client’s airflow is restricted to enhance what the other domme is already doing to them. Sounding, another common ask from clients, is a form of medical play that involves the delicate act of sticking a thin metal rod up the urethra.
Helena is always honest with clients about her level of experience. The other dommes guide Helena when something is new to her, and the clients don’t mind since Helena is only supplementing the session for a short while—but that doesn’t remove the danger of having to perform precarious acts.
Once, during a tip-in, Helena was asked to fist a client, which she’d done before. But she wasn’t prepared for the extent to which he wanted the session to go. He wrapped her arm in black cling wrap to show her how far to go, and soon the faux-latex was up to her elbows. When she was done with the session, her arm was covered in blood.
“I was like, ‘Holy shit, you’re bleeding,’ and the other domme gives me this look,” Helena tells me. “And he was like, ‘it’s fine, just keep going… This happens all the time.” After the session concluded, Helena was cautioned not to talk about the experience. The other domme told her, “Take the bloody towels and wrap them in clean towels and then put them in the laundry by themselves with bleach.”
LEARNING THE ROPES
Some dominatrixes have to take training into their own hands. While there are plenty of quality resources available online, there are just as many sites that detour into misinformation. One of Helena’s coworkers co-founded The Taillor Group, a BDSM Collective and Domination School in Brooklyn, run by and for dommes. It’s a unique proposition: hands-on training by women who are not only into BDSM but have also worked in the sex industry.
In early February, Helena invites me to one of the collective’s classes, and I buy us both tickets for a rope tying workshop at seven pm on a Sunday in Bushwick. I’m armed with virtually no information: just an address and a note that says the event is “clothing optional” for men and clothing required for women. When I get there, I double-check my maps app and then the Eventbrite email; I am thrown off by how residential the neighborhood is. I buzz into the first unit of an apartment building.
After I am let in, I walk through the living room and past a fridge covered in polaroid pictures of twenty-something friends and lovers. I hang my coat on a rack outside of the bedroom door that I’ve been told the workshop is run out of, and head in. The subs are the first to arrive. They are all male-identifying, barring one female sub who shows up late. They are also all naked, falling into a natural segregation beneath the dommes.
The pro-domme running the workshop goes by Goddess Yasmina. She has tangled raven-black hair and her makeup is stark: thick winged eyeliner that blends into her pronounced mascara-laden eyelashes. Her crop top and cotton leggings are casual in a rushed sense, implying a laissez-faire attitude to how she’s perceived—the subs worship her and the dommes-in-training know less than her.
Once everyone arrives, she suggests we sit in a circle and introduce ourselves. “My name is Helena, my pronouns are she/her, and I’ve been working as a dominatrix at a Midtown dungeon since this past June,” Helena says. “I’ve done bondage in sessions, but it’s mostly guys who like the sensation of being tied up, so I don’t know the techniques of knot tying or anything like that.”
It’s my turn next. I copy an earlier domme’s introduction and rush through it, saying I am here out of curiosity. Others go around and say their pieces. One woman is an apprentice-in-training, while others are already pro-dommes looking to sharpen their skills. A sub wearing a collar introduces himself as Godric, belonging to Yasmina and there to be demonstrated on. Another sub has just gotten out of a years-long vanilla relationship and wants to step back into kink.
We first learn about the mechanics. Ropes made of jute and hemp are best for suspension because they don’t stretch and tighten as much with weight. Cotton stretches but has good friction, so it’s better for tying for restriction purposes.
The more important parts of rope play are safety, trust, technique, and communication. We learn safe words in English (green, yellow, and red respectively implying continue, proceed with caution, and stop), and in the case of ball-gags, American Sign Language (the letters y and n). Yasmina emphasizes the importance of asking partners about active and past injuries, triggers, and medical conditions.
“Now we get to the fun stuff, I learned this as a techie in my theater days,” Yasmina says, laughing. “Now you’re going to take your rope and tie knots at the end. These are your working ends.”
We start with the basics: coiling your rope, lark head knots, and daisy chains—standard rope settings that prevent tangling. In these moments, the workshop feels more like arts and crafts at summer camp than fast-tracked intimacy amongst strangers. After a bit of practice, I stumble my way into helping the other dommes, even Helena, catch up. Informal partnerships form between us: I turn to the domme on my left when I miss an instruction, and a sub directly across from me laughs with a fellow frustrated sub who has to keep restarting his chain.
We break into pairs. Yasmina yanks Godric, demonstrating slip knots and suspension ties from every angle. His arousal was both obvious and ignored by the room. I look at Helena, hoping to catch her eyes about the erection in front of me, but she remains unfazed. When I look around, there isn’t one set of raised eyebrows. Despite 20 minutes of safety and ethics conversations about boundaries, the etiquette of interacting with nudity remained a surprisingly untouched subject. Helena and I partner up for the remaining half hour. At this point, the class has already gone 15 minutes overtime.
In the Uber back to my apartment in Williamsburg, Helena and I compare observations, progressively lowering our voices once we notice that our driver looks back each time we refer to a sub’s erection or bondage. I ask her if my nervousness earlier was palpable, and she laughs instead of answering. She loved the workshop and wanted to go to another one.
Over the next several weeks, Helena sends me links to upcoming workshops she wants us to attend together: “finding the prostate,” “humiliation nation,” and “impact playdate” to name a few.
THE RIGHT TO SEX WORK
Ninety dollars an hour plus tips seems like a lot, but it’s difficult to price the emotional labor Helena performs as a dominatrix, from feigning interest in men who make her uncomfortable to hearing stories about their personal lives. Sex work also isn’t easy to talk about with her friends. The novelty of her stories is beginning to wear off, and some of Helena’s friends are tired of hearing variations of the seemingly same sexual encounters.
But if Helena didn’t talk about her clients’ strange kinks, she’d start feeling like they aren’t noteworthy. Her discomfort at her work would start to feel normal—ultimately stripping her of her voice and sexual preferences. “On the one hand, I kind of get it,” Helena texted me. “You can only listen to someone talk about something that you have no way of relating to for so long,” she says. “But where does that leave me?”
Helena, who usually shares everything about daily absurdities at work, prefers to omit the more harrowing days at the dungeon from her narrative. On one particularly stressful day, a client asked a domme to take off her clothes. When she declined, he charged at her. The client later called the receptionists and threatened to report the dungeon to the police. “What were we going to do, call the cops about it?” Helena asked me. “She waited for a while and then went out the freight entrance.” While they waited the client out, the girls gave the domme pepper spray and a knife, along with instructions on how to use them to protect herself.
Helena later told me that despite being very scared, she knew at that moment that her privilege provided her a sense of protection that many of her coworkers did not have. Other dommes—older, not white, not students, and some of whom had been previously incarcerated—had virtually no other safety net.
Christina Tesoro, a New York City-based sex work affirming therapist, tells me that community is one of the most important resources a sex worker can lean on. “I think having friends and family who know what you do and are supportive of it is a really big protective factor,” Christina says. “Because the isolation of sex work and the needing to have a double life is incredibly stressful for a lot of people.”
Christina was working as a rape crisis counselor at Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center while stripping at a club nearby. For Christina, dancing was just a job. Her community was comprised of her friends, many of whom were or are sex workers, and a queer cruising Facebook group. Stripping supplemented her income and then allowed her to go back to school. When she graduated with a social work degree in 2019, she began working at the practice she’s at now, catering to sex workers and clients in the kink community.
Social work school taught her a lot about human psychology, but her time in the sex industry is invaluable for the work she does now. “In social work school, there was an option to take the human sexuality elective, but sex was not part of general social work education at all,” Christina recalls. “It was very clear from my experience as a sex worker why social work should really use that as a focal point.”
Christina explains that the line between violence and consensual BDSM activities is fuzzy. That ambiguity takes an emotional toll on those in the sex work industry. “There are certainly traumas that people experience on the job, which might look like violence from customers, lack of support from clubs or dungeons; stalking is something that sex workers deal with and sexual assault,” Christina says. Sex work is illegal, so a domme who feels she has been wronged doesn’t have anywhere to turn. “There is not really any recourse if you are hurt on the job without outing yourself.”
Destigmatizing sex work is sticky territory. Within feminism, there is a divide on whether sex workers are empowered by their work or exploited by it. Anti-prostitution feminists say that sex work perpetuates the patriarchy by normalizing the subordination of women. Other feminists accept sex work as simply another form of labor and strive to improve their pay and working conditions.
The ideal twenty-first-century career, where one loves and feels fulfilled by their job, introduces pleasure as yet another variable in evaluating the moral and political merits of sex work. “I think sex positivity to me usually has more to do with pleasure,” Christina says. “And to me, sex work has very little to do with pleasure. It has to do more with survival and economics.”
The pro-sex work approach, while well-intentioned, sometimes glamorizes sex work and risks diminishing the danger and violence sex workers face. This approach unintentionally censors the very people it wants to help; sex workers are left in a position where any complaint about their jobs contributes to the narrative that they are victims. Complaining about their “empowering” roles may thereby delegitimize both their careers and their feminism.
Christina argues that society needs to rethink the very basis of consent when it comes to work that involves sex. “You have to work to make money, to be able to meet your basic needs. I think most often people are uncomfortable with the moral aspect of sex work,” she says. There is little room for complexities in these conversations. Sex workers are either depicted as cut-throat, kicking men while in strappy stilettos, entrepreneurs, or as helpless victims.
Being paid for sex at work might be more validating than not being paid for sex outside of work. In romantic relationships, women traditionally provide more emotional labor than they receive. Increased sex positivity encourages women to have casual sex, but women’s place in society is not advanced by equality in the bedroom alone.
Helena seems annoyed when I ask whether her feminism has been changed by her career. “It’s made me a little bit more cynical with feminism,” Helena says. “Is it superficially empowering, or are you actually feeling like there is more power being added to your day-to-day life and conditions? Real power would be if I felt like I was being treated the same as men all the time.”
RELATIONSHIPS OUTSIDE OF THE DUNGEON
When she first started working as a dominatrix, Helena had a hard time separating the way she perceived sex at work from sex in her personal life. She first noticed this while on a date with Oliver, a 23-year-old investment banker she met on Bumble.
In the three months that she’d been sleeping with him, their relationship continued on a friends-with-benefits trajectory and settled into a comfortable, albeit detached, intimacy. And then a few weeks after starting her job, in the middle of a date with Oliver, she couldn’t stop thinking about her sessions from earlier that day. She didn’t want to be distracted by clients, but every time Oliver leaned in for a kiss, an image of “Furniture Guy” or “Mental Dental Roy”, a client who likes getting his teeth pulled, popped into her brain.
Memories from work still intrude on her sex life, whether she’s on a date or fantasizing alone, but she’s gotten better at pushing them aside. Harnessing that ability has required establishing boundaries, one of which is distinguishing for herself the difference between enjoying a work session, versus enjoying a private sexual encounter.
Feeling comfortable with a man and pleasing him is enough for Helena to feel like she did a good job at work. Clients, though playing the role of the submissive, are in control in that they go to the dungeon for their own pleasure. Wanting to see Helena satisfied, or choosing to believe that she is, is ultimately about their own satisfaction.
“A session can be fun in the context of my job but not so fun that I derive sexual satisfaction or pleasure that makes me want to do it outside of work,” Helena tells me. “I just can’t imagine myself ever seeing a client at work and then wanting to do my job for free with him. I’d maybe domme a guy I was dating but to me, that just feels different.”
So I was surprised when in early October, Helena told me she was going on a date with Mike, a patron of the dungeon. Mike is well-adjusted, attractive, and funny. He’s also the only client she has felt a connection with, so when he booked a second session, she agreed to give him her email address—the first and only time she’s allowed her job into her personal life, and in this case, her inbox.
Mike is an actor who lives in suburban New Jersey. His day-to-day consists of commuting into the city for auditions or to film the roles he gets. At 47, he usually plays good-looking dads or seasoned detectives. His work is not his life, he often says. It makes him just enough money to afford the finer things, like dinners and drinks with his friends, most of whom are married with children in the suburbs. And booking sessions at sex dungeons, which he’s been doing for the past 20 years.
They grabbed late-night drinks at a dive bar, and after two hours of tequila-sprites, he put her in a cab back uptown. Tipsy and euphoric, Helena spent the car ride reveling in the fact that nobody at the bar knew who they were. To them, Helena was probably a young attractive blonde dating an older man for money. This was partly true, but she felt sexy harboring the secret that days earlier, he had worshiped her on the floor of a dungeon.
Mike is the only person who knows Helena in both of her worlds. It allows their sessions to be intimate, feeling more like a dance between two people than a fantasy she is fulfilling. “I think he excites me because he’s older and can teach me about certain things,” Helena texts me. “But I’m also hesitant. We’re both people obsessed with permutations of power and control.”
While Mike considers traditional dating dynamics different from dynamics within the dungeon—dommes are harder to trust, he told me—he finds that there are some similarities. Booking a second session with a dominatrix is like asking a girl out on a second date; both imply interest and a connection worth pursuing, except at the dungeon he’s able to pay away rejection. It is because of those similarities that he’s begun to look for more equal relationships with dommes, which is often complicated by the exchange of money. You can’t pay somebody to reciprocate your feelings, but you can pay somebody to perform them.
“I was on Tinder for a little bit and it ended up being just like these kinds of random, weird hookups,” Mike tells me. “I’m looking for something more or something deeper. I think as soon as you go back to a domme, like a second time, it’s sort of like when you go on a second date, you know. I feel like it spills over. It’s pretty similar, and the money, it’s just another exchange of energy.”
For their second date, Mike wanted to surprise Helena. They agreed to meet uptown. Helena liked being seen with him in the outside world, and she told him that as they kissed on a rock overlooking Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park. She felt content, laying in the grass, while Mike made spiked hot chocolate on the burner stove he’d brought with him.
But as she watched him steer the rowboat they later rented, when the gray strands in his dark brown hair caught the light, something felt off. Gone was the exhilaration of being with a client in plain sight, a man who knows the ins and outs of her day job—the whole day had felt too vanilla, too earnest. Cutting the date short, she told him she had to run to meet a friend. After a little protest, Mike gave in and asked if he could call her a cab.
As they walked to a busier street, he was visibly nervous. Unsure of whether he should offer his arm to support her wobbly steps in knee-high boots, or what their relationship amounted to, he shoved his hand in his sweatshirt pocket. Helena, steps ahead of him, was also overthinking. She hadn’t agreed to a relationship—so why, if she wasn’t sure about him, did she want to kiss him?
She said yes to another date. Confused by what her unease meant, whether it was an aversion to intimacy as such, or to intimacy with him, she wanted to both leave and continue to see where things would go with him.
During one of our meetings, Helena showed me her texts with Mike. He sends her articles about celebrities in age-gap relationships (a google search link on Ben Affleck, and more recently, a Yahoo piece on Leonardo DiCaprio and his girlfriend, Camila Morrone). She replies that she doesn’t want a boyfriend 20 years older than her. Their connection is cosmic, he tells her. She agrees but says she wants them to be the kind of friends who hook up occasionally and go to fetish parties together. They decide to agree to disagree for the time being.
Their next date started with dinner at a lively bistro in Tribeca, continued at Nurse Bettie, the Lower East Side burlesque bar, and ended at Mike’s apartment in New Jersey. Mike told Helena he wanted to wait to have sex with her, and she was relieved she didn’t have to say it first. When she woke up, hungover, an hour before her class the next morning, Mike got her a $45 Uber back into the city. A pattern emerged. Mike sends Helena a barrage of texts about what the night meant to him. Helena asks for space, then texts him to make up. A few steps forward, a few steps back.
It’s easy to get confused following Mike and Helena’s relationship. But their relationship is more simple than what their day-to-day, minute-to-minute updates imply. She has a hard time telling him no because even though she’s a domme, he’s still 47 and she’s still 21. He seems enlightened, and his confidence that comes from being older and white and a man can distort Helena’s perception of things. He likes pursuing her, and she likes being pursued. And when she doesn’t like being pursued, he bulldozes past her reluctance, and she eventually submits.
The sex work industry hinges on the boundary defined by the exchange of money. Despite attempts to separate sex at work and in her personal life, Helena has found a worrying number of similarities. Sex with a guy she’s dating can still be focused on male pleasure, seen as successful only if the man is satisfied. It becomes sex work when Helena is paid.
Mike and Helena’s relationship transgresses that line. If they’d met outside of the dungeon, their relationship would constitute an exchange of emotional value, not money; it would be Mike’s maturity for Helena’s seeming naivety. He would find her sweet, and she would find his experience reassuring. But instead, Mike wants more, and Helena has a hard time advocating for herself in the face of Mike’s wants. So she kisses him on dates, and he pays for sessions where they do many things and don’t kiss. When a relationship like theirs occurs outside of the dungeon, it is almost always the sex worker who suffers, punished financially for enjoying their job.
Helena wants the normal private life of a 21-year-old. For all her domme experience, her only significant relationship was a high school boyfriend. She sees herself with somebody her age, pursuing studies in politics or English, who she can argue with about Elena Ferrante’s depiction of female hysteria. “I just like the light he sees me in,” she tells me, explaining why their relationship has continued despite being on vastly different pages. “I guess I also just feel like a lot of his creepiness is misguided and correctable. We are very much just friends though, I would not domme him recreationally.”
Mike has spent less time conceptualizing his perfect partner. Over time, he has developed new and creative ways to frame asking Helena for free sessions as him mentoring her sexual exploration. Once when proposing that they switch their domme and sub-roles for the benefit of her education, he argued that because it wouldn’t be his kink—why should he pay?
“I think as I’ve become more confident in myself and understanding of the dynamics of BDSM, I’ve had better relationships with dommes,” he told me over drinks in early November. “Whereas when I was there just sort of for my own satisfaction, the bond was never there, because I wasn’t mature enough to really coddle the relationship.”
Mike has been going to dungeons since his mid-twenties, and the early years felt a bit like hitting puberty again. He was first officially introduced to the BDSM community after happening across an ad for a Midtown dungeon in a newspaper being handed out in Times Square. By the time he had his first session at 26, he was more excited than nervous—feeling both young and ready for the new experience.
“I didn’t even really know what I wanted,” Mike recalled to me over a bar game of shuffleboard. “Sometimes I felt younger than I actually was, but it was very exciting. I remember being ready for the session and being naked and on the ground, looking under the door because I heard heels walking by, and it was just a really thrilling, exciting time of exploration of sexuality.”
A HARD JOB TO FOLLOW
Helena has the kind of confidence that can only come from being young and financially secure. Before domming, she anxiously checked her bank account during dates in case the guy asked to split the check. Now, she not only knows he’ll pick it up, but she has the reassurance that she could pay for the meal ten-fold. That is a hard feeling to let go of.
She isn’t sure if she wants to follow in Mike’s footsteps: twenty years in the BDSM scene and no long-term relationship to show for it. Helena missed out on the student experience. There will be no stories of college sweethearts and living on ramen noodles to reminisce about. Dating somebody her age and learning not to see relationships as transactional will be an adjustment. She admits that she doesn’t know the full effect her job will have on the rest of her life.
What she does have is access to a world underneath everyone’s noses but easily missed when looking straight ahead. Men intimidate her less now. She understands people, all people, better. She has grit and emotional intelligence. She navigates unthinkable situations with a strength she couldn’t access a year ago.
Arguably, working as a barista or hostess like her college-aged friends wouldn’t give her much more, and probably even less: half the paycheck, and diminished confidence after being berated instead of worshiped by customers. But confidence and financial security are not one and the same. When she doesn’t have the dungeon, the paycheck, and the men at her feet, she’ll still be left with lessons, yes, but also a gap in her sense of self.
“I think my job has definitely complicated my relationship with men,” Helena tells me. “Maybe it’s just because like, I can’t help but extrapolate work to outside.”
But she also worries that she isn’t critical enough of her job because of how well it pays. There’s a reason why most of the dommes at the oldest dungeon in New York City are under the age of thirty. And it’s probably also why the dungeon doesn’t need to train dommes. It is so normal to be left to their own devices that no two sex workers have the same experience or perspective. It’s a lethal combination of confidence and vulnerability in younger sex workers like Helena that makes them less likely to question the dangerous aspects of the job.
Sex work is just a job, but for Helena, it is the bedrock of her lifestyle. She plans to quit the dungeon when she graduates, she tells me, but she soon backtracks and corrects herself. She prioritizes “a capital n, Normal, job” but could see herself reducing her hours at the dungeon and staying there as a side-gig.
She says she’s become more assertive and that even if her newly afforded lifestyle doesn’t stick, her confidence will.
“On the one hand I wouldn’t want to date someone who wouldn’t accept the job,” Helena tells me. “But on the other hand, I also don’t think I’d want to date someone who would accept the job. It’s like that Mark Twain-Groucho Marx quote, I don’t want to be part of a club that would have me as a member.”