Free Whip Smart: A Memoir by Melissa Febos Page A

was a sleepover party, a persona parade under whose playful atmosphere lay a scrupulous network of social politics and pathology. Here were the women for whom the job was not a substitute for an imminent, socially acceptable one. Here were the new girls: the coeds not yet out of their teenage rebellious phase. To them the job was a badge of cool, congruent with their recently acquired taste for nonconformity. They rarely stayed long, usually a maximum of six months. Here were the ex– strippers and escorts, girls from Harlem and the Bronx, neither prepared for nor satisfied with the cut in pay andincrease in labor (of a certain kind). The majority of them quit or were bullied out within six months as well. But the demographic that most interested me among the night-shifters was the “lifestyle” dommes. Predominantly college educated, they capitalized all words referring to themselves and other mistresses (She, Me, Mistress, Her, We) and required it from their clients (You). They posted regularly not only from the computer in the office on our Web site’s official forum but also on various other S&M community boards, both locally and nationally based. They attended and organized seminars, conferences, parties, and performances, taking pride in their work, so that it became craft. Dominatrices certainly come in the “sluts with whips” variety. This was actually an unfortunate nickname that our dungeon garnered among the serious New York dominatrix community. The name referred to our allegedly liberal hand-job practice, though I doubt we were any more guilty of it than any other dungeon, just looser lipped and less concerned—the day shift at least. The spectrum of domming is broad, with strippers in fishnets at one end and women like Lena at the other.
    If anyone was my mentor (Autumn aside, as she and I so quickly became friends and equals), it was Lena. In those first months she was an idol, a larger-than-life symbol of what I thought the job could be; she seemed to exercise real power. My first sight of her was in the dressing room, as I arrived for the night shift. The mountain bike she rode from Sunset Park, Brooklyn, was parked in the hallway, shining beneath the wall sconces, as out of place as a cell phone in a period film. She stood fully nude before the mirrored lockers, dark curls dripping water onto her full breasts and down her tattooed back as she patted handfuls of baby powder between her legs.
    “Hey, Ma,” she greeted my reflection. “Just shaved. Keeps it dry, no ingrowns. Antiperspirant works, too, but who wants to smear aluminum on their pussy, right?”
    I was a goner. Mouth agape, I would watch her verbally humiliate her clients with a semi-automatic mouth, punctuatinginsults with a hand just as fast across their faces. That first night, I watched her terrorize a man until a pool of urine formed on the floor between his feet. He nearly wept when thanking her as she walked him out to the elevator, tucking two hundreds into her broad hand. She taught me how to chalk the ends of my bullwhips and floggers so that I could practice hitting a mark from three yards away, and tricks such as, when being fellated by a slave, to announce that you’re about to come while yanking his head off the strap-on by the hair and spitting in his face. I saw her fuck them like a man. Lena never took her clothes off, or gave hand jobs. She was meticulously clean, exact in all her methods. Each of her sessions was a complete narrative, a performance unto itself; she would no sooner have cut a session short than take one that didn’t interest her. Her slaves were utterly devoted, and despite (or perhaps because of) her brutality, there seemed to exist a genuine regard between her and them. I discovered years later that she made $85 a session instead of $75 like the rest of us. She raked in the money, sometimes pulling five or six sessions a shift ($85 × 6 = $510 per day, which doesn’t include tips, ranging anywhere