Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story (21 page)

Hence, ‘everything goes up apart from the price of pussy’.

Self-conducted market research helped me decide which services I should offer to attract more clients. I scoured other
adverts in newspapers and on advertising cards to see what domination delights my competitors were offering. I would look at them to check out what they were offering that I wasn’t. Then, whatever it was, I wanted it – I wanted to be able to do it. I noticed, for instance, that one woman mentioned ‘electrics’ and I thought I ought to do the same. The problem was that I didn’t have the faintest clue what ‘electrics’ might involve. I feared that plugging my clients into the mains supply might soon reduce my customer base, but what else could she mean? I soon discovered that she was using a form of electric exerciser that delivered a safe level of current through pads or wires to different parts of the body. A client’s nipples, arse, cock and balls are all favoured locations for a short, sharp zap of electricity. The sensation is much like the static electric shocks that we all suffer once in a while in everyday life. The difference is that these shocks hit you over and over and over again and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. It sounded like fun! I duly researched the possibilities until I found something similar, saved up to buy as much of the equipment as I could possibly afford and practised until I was perfect.

Nowadays I pride myself on having the most comprehensive range possible of electrics boxes and the plugs, pads, clips and leads to deliver a little – or a lot – of pain. Many of my clients love to suffer the treatment, and the act of having an electric ‘butt-plug’ roped into place is often the first stage of their complete submission to my will in any session. It’s humiliating and uncomfortable to have their anal sphincter penetrated – it makes them slightly fearful of the discomfort and pain I can induce at the touch of a button –
and once their interfering hands are tied out of the way, it puts them completely at my mercy. All in all, the perfect start to a consultation with me.

My acquisition of the electrics boxes (I now keep at least half a dozen of them around the dungeon at any one time) perfectly illustrates one of my business strengths – and weaknesses – all in one go. I love gadgets and have to have everything new as soon as I see it. It’s a character trait that probably goes right back to my teenage years. Thinking back to when I was about 16, I would see pictures of icons such as Madonna in PVC or leather fetish clothing and think, ‘Oooh, I want to look like that.’ Unlike some other teenage girls I didn’t see pictures of white wedding dresses and wish it was me. I saw black corsets and thought, ‘That is what I want to look like.’ Even if I was not a pro-domme Mistress I would still want to dress in that way. For me, this has never been a job, it’s a vocation. But such acquisitiveness is a double-edged sword for my business: it puts up my costs a lot but also means that my clients can expect something fresh and different with every visit.

In my early days, with a limited income from a limited number of clients, I had to make do with whatever equipment I could get. I was such a novice that I didn’t even know where I might buy the type of specialist equipment that nowadays graces all of my rooms. So my bondage equipment was very basic and a lot of it was homemade. My partner knocked a few things together out of some wood, including a bondage bench by the simple expedient of screwing some leather straps onto a fold-up, portable massage table. Unfortunately both his DIY skills and the lightweight table were rubbish. I had one client
who was quite big, and in mid-session the table collapsed: hugely embarrassing, as you can imagine. It didn’t collapse completely but just cracked under his weight. Luckily he wasn’t hurt, but he was mortifyingly embarrassed. ‘I am so sorry I have broken your table. I am really sorry,’ he kept saying. I felt bad for him and tried to reassure him that I wasn’t angry and it hadn’t been his fault, but he wouldn’t stop apologising and was still distraught when he left. For ages afterwards I was certain that I had lost him as a client but then he turned up again out of the blue. The transformation was amazing. He told me he had lost four or five stone in weight from exercising and eating more healthily after the massage table disaster. It was a powerful recommendation for the ‘Miss Miranda diet plan’, if not for the quality of my equipment.

That incident prompted me to take a new look at my business philosophy. I thought: ‘This is ridiculous. I have to have stronger stuff, better equipment.’ Perhaps I shouldn’t be trying to make do and mend. Perhaps I needed to have faith in myself and invest properly in the future. I realised that any business needs to constantly invest in itself to succeed. It’s a philosophy that I have followed to this day and have never regretted. The consequence was that my next purchase was a high-quality, metal-framed, revolving bondage rack that cost me far more than I could really afford at the time. I needed it to be strong enough to cope with the heaviest clients, and be free-standing so that I could take it with me if I ever moved premises. It has been with me ever since and now, almost two decades later, still stands in the suspension room of my London dungeon, even though it is the piece of equipment I probably use least of all. The reason for that is that I have
learned from experience that you need to be careful of locking clients into an upright position. I have never harmed any of my clients but I have learned of the very real danger they might faint.

Men and women do faint in my chambers from time to time and I am always meticulously careful to ensure that any bondage positions I use will keep them safe and secure if that happens. Even before they arrive at the dungeon they may have taken tablets such as Viagra which can lower their blood pressure, or ‘poppers’, tiny inhaled doses of amyl nitrate which have a similar effect. Nobody should ever consume a combination of the two but I have no control over what they may have used before they walk through my door. More frequently, my clients may wish to be wrapped in multiple rubber or leather layers that can make them hot, even within my air-conditioned rooms. Add in the fact that they’re excited and nervous and want tight straps across their chest and it’s not surprising that people can easily faint. They all almost always say ‘I’ve never fainted before’, but it take just a second for your body to decide that it wants to shut down and lay flat to recover. Everyone comes round again mega-fast but they do have a range of reactions. Some feel just a little bit woozy, while others yell as though you have tried to kill them or something. It’s just the panic of being out of control. It is also the reason why I rarely use bondage with clients standing up.

I learned that lesson in my early days when a large man suddenly fainted whilst standing upright on my revolving bondage rack. He was strapped in securely and going nowhere, but the way in which he slumped down meant that a strap was forced up underneath his chin. I was thinking, ‘Oh
my God, how am I going to get him undone.’ The guy was out cold, a total deadweight, and it was taking all my strength to try and lift him. Then I realised that I also had his feet tied to the rack. I somehow had to hold him up and release those ankle straps as well. It was terrifying but somehow I found the strength to keep the pressure off his neck and release safely. He wasn’t hurt and came round immediately without ever knowing what had happened. But I vowed never to go through that experience again. Now my clients’ safety is always at the forefront of my mind. I may be paid to hurt or humiliate them – but the truth is that, with the rarest of exceptions, I enjoy their company and like them all.

Many of my clients enjoy the texture of rubber but one of my first customers had a stronger obsession than most. ‘Rubber Ian’, as he called himself, was a married man with an obsessive rubber fetish to rival any I have ever seen. He was memorable because he was the only rubber client I had ever had who took his fantasies home and played them out in front of his long-suffering spouse. His wife thought he was barmy because he would put on rubber outfits and traipse around their home in rubber boots, rubber suit and rubber gas mask. He would just sit at the breakfast table in his rubber gear, or put a hood on, watch TV, or do his crossword. What I found fascinating was that his wife would leave him to it. She did not know that he visited me, but she knew that he went to ‘professional ladies’ to dress in his beloved latex. And that was all he did: dress up himself and ask them to dress in rubber as well. He would always bring items for me to wear in our sessions and it gave him a thrill to see women in rubber while he was dressed in a similar way. He didn’t seek any sexual
contact. He wasn’t a young man and, although he used to touch himself through all his layers of rubber, he never relied on me to give him any form of relief.

I still have some of the rubber hoods and a cape that he gave me all those years ago. He was such a regular client but then one day he just stopped calling and I never heard of him again. It is one of the oddities of my profession that people can become influential in guiding me towards a better understanding of a particular fetish desire, and then suddenly vanish from my life. I wondered for some time if he had died or just moved away: I never have much knowledge of clients’ ‘normal’ lives outside of my dungeon.

There is a popular but totally inaccurate image of the type of men who visit a dungeon. Some people might look down on them because of their sexual tastes, but I would never do that; how could I when I share most of those tastes myself? They are pictured as ‘dirty old men in raincoats’ but the reality could not be more different. Most of my clients are educated, intellectual and in positions of power and responsibility. The truth is that they have to be as successful in order to be able to afford my time. I think I’m worth it but I can’t deny that visiting my chambers is a rich man’s hobby. Many turn up in the smartest of business suits rather than dirty rainwear, although I do see the occasional man in a raincoat. That is probably, however, because he has come to me with the specific intention of donning a raincoat as part of a fetish game. They’re a popular fetish item and I keep a range in stock, in different materials and many different sizes.

The cost factor alone dictated that from the age of 20 or so
onwards I was meeting much older men whose lives were all so interesting. Obviously they were mostly successful businessmen whose lives had taken them down career paths far removed from any that I might have considered. None of their jobs would have been open to a girl like me from the sort of family background from which I came. How else would I ever have interacted on an equal – or dominant – level with men who ran big businesses, or who practiced law, or who benefitted from the most expensive of public-school educations. I was a girl from a London council estate; these were a different class of people to any I might ever have met with lives that were way off my scale.

And I was not just meeting these men as you might meet them in a social situation; they were opening a window into their very souls. I see people in an intensely intimate way that they probably never reveal to their loved ones or to anyone else. I’m privy to their most coveted fantasies and fears, and possible pleasures, they have been dreaming about all of their adult lives: the secret situations and stories which they have never dared to share with their wives or their closest friends. Their most kinky and ‘perverted’ lusts and hidden desires. Given the importance that sex plays in all of our lives, it is like opening a door into the most intimate part of their minds.

Even further than that, I get to see both the private and the public sides of my clients. Once a man has trusted me with the secret side of the his life, once I have seen him wriggle in pain at the stroke of my riding crop, or gasp in discomfort as my entire fist slides into his arse, there is little he won’t share with me. Many men want to chat about their everyday lives and relax after an orgasm has washed away the cares of their day.
For me, that recovery time is a vital part of the process. I welcome the chance to potter around tidying up equipment we might have used, coiling ropes or putting intimate toys into the steriliser, whilst still talking to my client. He or she needs time to slowly wend their way back into the ‘real’ world beyond my doors and I am happy to share that with them. It is astonishing what confessions they will make about their lives in those afterglow moments; I hear of their secret sexual affairs, their business decisions and their cherished hopes and plans. That is why you will never hear from my lips the real names and identities of any client who has ever passed through my door in the past 20 years. Once they get to know me, my clients know that my discretion is absolute. Just like Vegas – ‘what happens in my dungeon, stays in my dungeon’.

I was learning on the job and constantly adapting my services as my client base grew. At that time of my life, still a young woman, everything was experimental and exploratory. I gathered tips and techniques from my clients all of the time: ‘I want you to be stricter with me…’ or, ‘Please be colder and more clinical, nurse. Tell me this treatment is exactly what I need.’ The variations were limited only by my clients’ desires and my imagination. This was a marked departure from my earlier outcalls work. When I was dominating men in their homes or hotels I had to work a lot harder with my voice, simply because I didn’t have much equipment in my travel bag. So, I would use almost exclusively verbal clues to build up the scenario my client desired. If they wanted a ‘naughty schoolboy being punished’ scene I would have to create the schoolroom scenario and the strict headmistress in their
heads, building up the story and the fantasy in their minds until they and I were living the part together.

As soon as I had my own premises and a dungeon to work in there was no longer such a need to imagine the scenarios. I had the necessary paraphernalia to hand to bring their fantasies to life. I discovered that there was a vast range of role-plays that would turn men on. I didn’t always have to scream or shout or make them crawl on the floor kissing my boots. Some men wanted a gentler, more imaginative sexual experience that I could now offer with bondage equipment, fetish clothing and creativity.