Idol Gossip

“Ethically, I consider scene confidentiality equivalent to doctor/patient.”  And that is the biggest, steaming pile of crap I ever handed anyone—and myself.  New York in the Naughty Aughtys was rife with wagging tongues. It was almost as if I was in each sessions.

I was as guilty as the next domme at times, but in no way they worst and certainly not in the worst ways—demoralizing other dommes, giving away sensitive information.  Conversely, times arose when staying above the fray bit me in the butt.

Typically when a new slave entered my lair I asked them certain questions including their experiences—including negative experiences.  A lot of times slaves would immediately mention names.  “I don’t need to know their names.  I’m just getting a psychological profile of you to better understand you before we play.”  Early on, I spent a considerable amount of time deliberately trying to suppress names with the experiences, but I found that a new sub, trying to do his best, would become frustrated thinking he was already disappointing me.  I let that go after a while.  It wasn’t just that, however.  The lowest common denominator in bonding is mutual disdain for someone else.  It wasn’t long before I knew wayyyyyy more about my colleagues than I ever would have wanted. 

There was a lot of sycophantic, “You’re soooooo much better than her,” kind of thing going on.

Wait? I'm not?

Of course this wasn’t relegated to just the “slaves” trying to curry favor.  In NYC there were a lot of guys who saw a bunch of dommes at any given times.  Sluts? Sure, but such is the nature of the beast. Then, there would be a lot of, “Hey, you know who I just saw? I bet you can’t guess what she did?” Smarmy? Perhaps.  On the other hand, if you have a funny story about a dominatrix you saw, who else are you going to tell except the other dominatrix you see?  Are you going to pop into work after lunch and tell your co-workers about how you were in panties, tied up, covered in piss, and this rockin’ hot domme totally cut a big fart in the middle of the session?

Being a domm, aside from the houses—don’t even get me started about what goes on with a bunch of sex workers sit around with nothing else to do but gossip, is mostly a solitary profession.  You do your marketing on your own; you email and field phone calls on your own; you session, most of the time, alone with your client.  Most of this you can’t share with your friends who aren’t directly in the business. None of this can be shared with your family. (I came out to my family as a pro-domme when I turned 30 because I hated lying to them, but we had a “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.” policy. Sure they were supportive as much as the could have been, but, man, they didn’t want to hear about any of it.)  Chances are, if you’re a pro-domme then you are only seeing your colleges in passing except for maybe a class or lunch once or twice a month.  Then it all comes out.

If you just had someone pay you a silly amount of money to force-feed them Vasilne or chase them around with slices of cheese because they were turophobic, who, the hell, are you going to tell about this who is going to understand?  You can’t tell your boyfriend half of it because you’re still trying to convince him that you are a caring person taking people safely to dark places and your clients aren’t total absurdist deviants.  You can’t tell your vanilla friends because, quite frankly, you grew tired of being the eccentric freak show at cocktail parties and want to do everything in your power to squelch that mentality. You can’t even tell slaves or other people in the fetish scene, because they just don’t know how to handle that in the context of being a pro-domme.

The slave gossip comes out in these coffee klatches of dommes as well.  Everybody knew who was doing activities out of their league and hurting their clients.  Everyone knew who was giving “extras” in sessions.  I find the social phenomenon of this FACINATING.  Forget the Internet or what the perception the collective has of what is legal or not, this social group created the boundaries of what a session was and was not.  I had requests to session topless and honestly couldn't care less about people seeing my nipples, but would never risk my status with my peers.  I’m going to contradict my other post about Real Dommes, in saying that I was okay with that on some levels.  I didn’t want to have exposed breasts evolve into breast worship being a typical request or then hand jobs as a standard.  I will admit to benefiting from that phenomenon because my limits fit into what was accepted. (If this dynamic interests you read Michel Foucault’s “Panopticism.” You’ll never get over it.)

Yes, gossip can be a depraved societal-glue, but we all know it can cause harm and hurt feelings.  I had one colleague use gossip as an emotional shield, and, at times, a weapon.  There would be random moments in our conversations when something might have made her insecure and she would make it a point to talk about my former client so-and-so who now sees her and bought her such-and-such.  I knew this was a knee jerk reaction and probably due to my own self-aggrandizing, so I tried not to contradict her. I never saw them as my or her clients, and refrained from reminding her that those “slaves” still went around and saw everybody.  I should have done something about it, perhaps because that insecurity, I believe, led to her “gas-lighting” me later on in my career.  Slaves talk and want to tell you how much better you are than others.  It is just talk and should be taken with a boulder-sized grain of salt.  I never told her the things others said about her because I never took it seriously when I heard them.

Just as much as the gossip kept the dommes together and “in check,” the gossip in NYC became a serious problem affecting actual safety.

Part of the equation of being a professional domme is being a professional and having to put oneself out there, subject to critique and scrutiny; the other part is the clients’ discretion. When you step back and take a look at it, dommes are going into a private, secluded room with a man they might only know from a brief phone call or email correspondence.  When you look right at it, there are a lot of insincere clients who waste a dommes time over and over until he is banned, where his only real punishment is that he has to move on to the next domme. So there never could be the doctor/patient confidentiality.  We aren’t doctors in an office. We’re women alone on the fringe of society.  So we would have to group together on-line to protect ourselves and create a black list of time wasters and, scarily enough, dangerous clients.  The problem with this is, no one can keep their damn mouth shut and all attempts to do this have failed.

Several years ago I was a member of a private NYC Domme-centric yahoo group dedicated to dommes giving references and heads up about time wasters and potential dangerous clients.  I tried to be active and contribute as much as I could.  One time a person, who I knew, asked about a certain client whom I had seen.  I never had a problem with him, but he was a known emotional predator, a real psychological baddy, who got off on leading dommes down a prim-rose path until they found themselves completely helpless.  To keep it short, he had done a lot of damage to people I knew quite well in the past.  I said as much.

At that time I had become pretty good friends with a kinky escort not privy to the yahoo group because, well, she wasn’t a real-enough domme.  Apparently she saw this guy, who in turn asked her, “You know M. Why is she saying all these bad things about me on this group for pro-dommes?” This was LESS THAN 3 DAYS after I posted the information.  All the domme handles on the yahoo group were vetted as actual NYC dommes. Heck, I knew 99% of them.

I’ve been a part of several of these groups off and on, but I’ve never had any faith in speaking privately.

I’ve been burned being on the outside of gossip as well.  In my high and mighty phase early on I ended up working with some, well, interesting characters.  There were several dommes I hired at Luxuria where I received several warnings such as, “Don’t hire her, she’s out of her everloving mind!!” “Oh, it can’t be that bad. We’re all quirky.  That’s why we’re dommes.”  I didn’t want to get lost in gossip and hearsay; all of them had great reputations.

Oh, when I think about that time in my life, I want to go back to my former self and give myself a pat on the head, some warm milk, tuck my young self in bed, tell me to get a good sleep, and wake up with better ideas.

I probably would have still done it.  I'm stubborn like that.  Proof in point, a few years later when I had my private place on Wall Street and I decided to cut back on the stress of sessions and rent to a domme or two.  There was one domme who I was warned about, repeatedly, about having no real social skills, but I chose not to listen.  Her discretion and, frankly, noise level did not work for me, but the final straw was when she showed up with a friend to hang out at “the studio” and waiting for a slave come over to give them pedicures. This wasn’t a session. I didn’t mind if they just hung out, did I? I could get a pedicure, too!  Lucky me.  See this was also my home.  I lived upstairs.  Most people didn’t even know there was an upstairs and I was perfectly happy with that.  I turned off the TV and didn’t cook while someone else was in session downstairs so I didn’t disturb them.  This was a big inconvenience and getting a free pedicure was not a deal.  I could get a professional pedicure for $12 and having a slave get his jollies with my feet seemed more like me giving a free session.

Did I ever learn my lesson? Probably not. I think dealing with talk is an ongoing process.

Listen or don’t, gossip is going to get you.  It’s out there pulling people together and pulling them apart.  If you think what happens in session is totally private, really, you might as well have a FaceBook page about it.