In the attempt to turn BDSM into a business that follows rules, optimizes conversions, and behaves like every other modern service industry, something strange happened. It became ghetto. Which is almost impressively counterintuitive for a lifestyle that was supposed to be countercultural in the first place.
What was once deviant, strange, theatrical, and deeply human now often feels flattened into branding, intake forms, faux-corporate etiquette, and weirdly punitive admin. I sometimes wonder whether I am still living a lifestyle or just maintaining a persona. Am I a dominatrix, or am I a luxury-facing customer service representative with a corset and a tax ID?
I talk to other dommes who have been in this world as long as I have, or longer. Three of us, on separate occasions, talking to different people, all arrived at the same exhausted conclusion: we are disillusioned. We are apathetic. The scene is not fun anymore.
Not for us prodommes, and definitely not for the submissives.
One of my subs, who has been in the BDSM scene for over twenty years, put it perfectly: “It’s not fun anymore. And I’m sending a stranger my LinkedIn.”
That line should be framed somewhere.
The other Mistresses and I have always squinted at the way some dommes “screen” potential subs, as if they are applying for a position at the CIA or trying to lease a penthouse in Tribeca. Employment verification. LinkedIn. Cross-referenced identities. Amateur detective work dressed up as professionalism. The three of us agreed on one thing immediately: we do not want your LinkedIn. It does not matter who you are. You are getting on your knees and kissing our boots.
That, to me, was always the point.
And making appointments has become its own special nightmare. In trying to keep up with the trends I see from other New York, New Jersey, and touring dommes, I find myself just as vexed as the potential sub on the other end. It is the worst algorithm ever created, and unlike everything else in modern life, this one cannot be automated, delegated, or outsourced to some virtual assistant in another time zone.
We have to talk to people. We have to use discernment. And, astonishingly, we have to be nice.
For Christ’s sake, the rudeness.
Not from the subs. From the dommes.
If we are going to insist on turning this lifestyle into some kind of girlboss, ghettoized, pseudo-luxury service business, the bare minimum would be basic manners. You do not get to posture as exclusive and then communicate like an overworked receptionist at an urgent care. A potential sub is still a person. More to the point, he is a paying customer. If the fantasy begins before the session, then contempt disguised as “screening” is not mystique. It is just bad business.
And then there is the upcharging.
Upcharges for “extras.” Upcharges for same-day sessions. Upcharges for breathing wrong, apparently.
What extras?
All of my subs understand that I am a traditional dominatrix. Anything remotely GFE-adjacent is not an option and never will be. And yet I have recently received requests from excellent, genuinely submissive men asking if I offer it, even though I not only do not advertise it, I explicitly state that I do not offer it.
Apparently, other dommes do offer it. They just offer it quietly, behind the scenes, after loudly advertising the opposite.
Thanks, girls. Really.
That kind of bait-and-switch does not just blur boundaries for those of us who practice traditional BDSM. It also muddies the water for escorts, many of whom are openly kink and fetish friendly. Those are overlapping worlds, yes, but they are not identical worlds. BDSM can absolutely include eroticism, fetish, ritual, humiliation, physicality, and psychological intensity. But when every line gets blurred in private while being denied in public, nobody knows what anything means anymore. Subs get confused. Expectations get distorted. Boundaries become harder to communicate. And the rest of us are left cleaning up the mess while sounding like the unreasonable ones for being clear.
That is a different and much longer rant, but it is all part of the same problem.
Then there is the absurdity of the same-day appointment surcharge, which seems to be based on the fantasy that men are somehow capable of scheduling their erections two weeks in advance. I tried that practice. It is stupid. It made me look stupid. It left a bad taste in people’s mouths, and not the kind that turns anyone on.
So I am not doing it.
If I am not traveling and I am just in Jersey City, puttering around my apartment, reading a book, reorganizing my day, or deciding whether I am going to be productive or beautifully useless, I do not see a problem with playing without some theatrical emergency surcharge attached to it. If I am in the mood, I will stop what I am doing. If I do not want to play, there is not a number high enough to suddenly make me want to. That is actually one of the few parts of this profession that still feels honest.
But if I am around and enjoying myself, I would love the opportunity to play.
You just have to be patient. Give me ninety minutes. That is it.
Not a hostage negotiation. Not a luxury concierge deposit structure. Not an application packet. Just enough time for me to shower, get into leather, and decide how cruel I feel.
My complaints are not unique. They mirror what I hear from more experienced submissives and from prodommes with five, ten, fifteen years under their whip. Everyone says some version of the same thing. The administrative bloat has become more exhausting than the actual kink. The branding has gotten louder while the substance has gotten thinner. Everyone is so busy trying to look legitimate that they have forgotten how to be interesting.
And that, more than anything, is what feels tragic.
BDSM was never supposed to be vanilla with better lighting. It was not supposed to become a bureaucratic maze of payment processors, hidden menus, performative boundaries, fake scarcity, and oddly joyless women treating every inquiry like a compliance violation. It was supposed to be weird. It was supposed to be intimate in its own perverse way. It was supposed to have danger, theater, seduction, wit, and at least some sense of play.
I do not want a sanitized, optimized, SEO-friendly version of deviance. I want the real thing.
I want to live my weird little lifestyle in peace and only worry about the IRS.
Everything else is vanilla. And boring.