Volume 2 #14 (April 7-13, 1999)

Kitty In Charge

Readers keep asking us whether professional dominatrixes are real. We sent a reporter to find out.

BY INBAL AHARONI

In a quiet Pensacola neighborhood, on a quiet Pensacola street, there sits a home. In the twilight, it looks like any other home, almost quaint and definitely unassuming. Cars park out front on the road's dirt shoulder. A group of children walks down the street, completing the picture of an average neighborhood on an average night. But inside this nondescript house, Kitty is in charge--the boss--hard at work in her grey dungeon.

Candles flicker.

"All right," Kitty orders. "No talking."

Duncan obeys--not that he has much choice. He faces a wall, hands and feet bound, spread-eagled in chains and leather restraints, a collar around his neck. A leather blindfold covers his eyes and a black velvet scarf is wrapped loosely around his head. He wears only a black thong.

Kitty runs her nails down his baby-oiled back. Duncan moans. She rubs a swath of fur along his shoulders, then rakes her nails down his sides. She scratches his legs and his lower back. Red welts have begun to develop. Duncan enjoys every second. She pricks him with a porcupine quill and teases it along his thighs. He moans again.

Kitty steps back and surveys her collection of accoutrements. She selects a whip and again, turns her attention to Duncan. Gently, she caresses his butt. Then, she begins to flay him lightly.

"Oh, you love that rubber thing, don't you?"

Duncan moans and strains against his restraints. She whips his butt, then moves to his back and shoulders.

Slap.

"Ohhh."

Slap.

"Ohhhh."

Slap.

Kitty is a professional dominatrix, and today, Duncan is her submissive. He is, she tells him, "being a good boy for our visitor." But it is clear that Duncan likes being punished and being a "good boy" is not necessarily the role he is attempting to fulfill.

"Everyone thinks I'm a prostitute," Kitty says, when describing the general reaction to her professional calling. Duncan's 'No Fear' ball cap is pulled low over her hair and she looks more the college student than prostitute or dominatrix.

"I've always had a problem because I've always known I was a sexual deviant--as other people define me. I've been doing kinky things since I was a small child," Kitty explains. "I mean, Freud would have a heyday with me."

The same premise of being different applies in the case of the dominatrix and the submissive, Kitty says. "That is the point of a dominatrix--to take you to places you haven't been before."

A true dominatrix, she explains, is not a lap dancer with a whip.

"I dominate people for a living," she says. "They come to me to be dominated because they can't get it from their wives. It's just like any other therapy. I work out people's kinks. Some people have jobs of total power. Sometimes they want to step out."

So, like Duncan, they call on Kitty.

"I come here to please my mistress," he says. "But also, to gain gratification."

Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns by Philip Miller and Molly Devon defines S/M as employing "various techniques to put one partner, the submissive, in a position of helplessness and vulnerability, and the other, the dominant, in a position of command and authority. Bondage, sensory deprivation, flagellation, verbal dominance, behavior modification, and mind games are some of the tools the dominant uses to control the submissive and guide him through an erotic experience."

S/M and sex are two entirely different things, Kitty is quick to point out, but most people don't seem to get this.

"The problem here is people can't understand sex without penetration and without some nasty cum shot to the face," she says. "If you're having sex during your professional encounters, that's prostitution."

To the S/M participant, being the dominant or the submissive is what turns them on.

And while dictionaries define sadism as the getting of sexual pleasure through the domination, mistreatment or hurting of one's partner, Kitty emphasizes the difference between an acted sadist and a true sadist.

"A real sadist is someone like Jeffrey Dahmer," she says. "It doesn't end in one hour."

In S/M, rules are laid out ahead of time.

"You may go over certain things that you're accepting of and certain things that you're not accepting of," Kitty says. "When you talk, you know where it is you feel safe and where it is you don't feel safe. You're trusting the person to--hell--to hurt you and at the same time, not to hurt you."

Kitty also says there are certain things you may not even know you like that you find out as you go.

"I'm an asphyxiation freak," she says. She learned this while playing around with a former boyfriend and a collar. "I just kept asking to have it pulled tighter. That is a really scary thing. That's such a rush. You're life is in their hands and that's a love deeper than most sex in this world. That's just heaps and loads of love and trust for that person, while real sex has just been blown to the level of pornography and I don't even have to know their name."

Until there is some level of understanding of S/M in the mainstream, Kitty figures people who are interested in the practice will be hesitant about coming out into the open and getting educated. This is a problem, she says, because S/M, when done incorrectly, can be dangerous.

It's also an annoyance, because until people do learn about S/M, she will continue getting calls from men seeking prostitutes.

"If you don't know what it is that I do," she cautions, "maybe you should gather some information before you go calling a professional dominatrix. They don't respect me as a business person and they don't respect it as a business, because they don't know what it is."

And while S/M is not sex, it is still an extremely sexual thing.

"It's a whole different concept," Kitty explains. "It's a different type of intimacy--this is what we have dreams and get hard-ons about."