WORLD MISTRESSES

It’s perhaps a funny way to measure my interest in kink. I’ve been kinky for longer than this, my earliest erotic proclivities all involved some aspect of female dominance, even if I didn’t understand them as such at the time.

But it wasn’t until 1990, my freshman year at Brown University, that I realized my fantasies had names and even accessories. That was the year a group of us piled into a car and drove from Providence, Rhode Island to Waltham, Massachusetts on a pilgrimage to Vernon’s, a cross-dressing boutique that also carried sex toys and a smattering of BDSM gear, where I bought my first pair of nipple clamps.

Vernon’s was situated on a stereotypically quaint small town New England street, made quainter by the arts and crafts fair happening that particular weekend. We navigated through the tables covered with quilts and apple pie and into the non-descript shop, windows blocked out with pink paper and a rose painted on the door. The front room of Vernon’s was sparsely stocked with high heel pumps in very large sizes, waist cinchers and padded panties, breast forms and gaffs, and a cosmetics counter with high coverage foundation, three shades of coral lipstick, and strips of false eyelashes. The back room had more sinister stuff, black leather paddles and riding crops, long tailed whips, and in a glass cabinet rows of nickel-plated nipple clamps on shiny silver chains.

The clover clamps were both the most ornate and the firmest grip in the case, and while my friends twittered and gawked and bought condoms and lube, I pulled out $16 for the clamps, which felt like a fortune, a ridiculous luxury. I wore those clamps with pride off the epaulet of my leather motorcycle jacket, at ACT UP and Queer Nation actions, but also to my classes and in the quad. Gay boys would run up to me in the library, clamp their nipples through their t-shirts, and follow me around the stacks like puppies on a leash. It would be a few more years before I would see a leather pride flag and the inside of a dungeon, but I knew then who I was and what I wanted.

I started playing professionally in San Francisco in 1995, and began teaching on the topic out of my own passions and fantasies, and a deep commitment to the practice of BDSM for health and happiness. When practiced well, BDSM is a ritual of intimacy that requires intelligence, responsiveness, and communication. People come to BDSM for any number of reasons, but at the root of them should be a sense of adventure, connection, catharsis, and fun. All erotic exchanges should be grounded in mutual consent, and the practice of BDSM can elevate this ethic into an art form.

• Adult Babies
• Bondage
• Caning
• Couples
• CP (Corporal Punishment)
• Cross Dressing

• Electrics
• Fire Play
• Medical
• Nipple Torture
• Spanking
• Whipping