Female sex workers in an East Bay BDSM dungeon
By Cassie Harwood
*No sex takes place at the establishment in this story, and neither the proprietor, nor her employees condone unsafe or unethical activities in the work place. Also, at the request of its owner, the name of the SM establishment in this story has been withheld.
A light-green two-story home sits on a corner in a more or less peaceful Oakland neighborhood, where the sidewalks are lush with foliage and the streets are dotted with speed bumps that compel cars to drive carefully down each road. Compared with the chaotic hustle of the traffic-lighted cross street a few blocks up, this is a relatively relaxed community.
The house on the corner—inconspicuous if not for a thin layer of pale white paint on each of its windows—blends right in with the neighborhood’s early 20th century-style architecture. But aside from its shaded windows, something else distinguishes this house from those around it, and almost every other house in the city for that matter. This is the home of one of the East Bay’s few BDSM parlors.
BDSM—an acronym for a long-winded coupling of fetishistic practices including bondage and discipline, dominance and submission and sadism and masochism—is hardly anomalous in the Bay Area. If San Francisco’s annual Folsom Street Fair, a notoriously flashy celebration of leather and BDSM that drew between 350,000 and 400,000 people this year, is any indication, the subculture has a visible following.But not everyone is so overt about his or her fetishistic fancies. For some, the urge to be tied up with rope or trampled by a high-heeled shoe is a much more private compulsion—one likely hidden from friends, co-workers and even spouses. Hence the impetus behind the business: a five-bedroom “house of bondage,” as some like to call it, where around two-dozen female employees offer a smorgasbord of discreet erotic services to an almost exclusively male clientele.
From 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week, customers can make appointments by calling a number listed on the house’s Web site, which also offers a menu of dominatrices and their services that range in intricacy and extremity, and include bondage, breath play, foot worship, flogging, role-playing, tickling, trampling and much more. The list is longer, perhaps, than the length of rope needed to tie up a willing client.
What transpires behind the house’s closed doors is undoubtedly physical, sometimes painfully so, and is undeniably sexual in nature. Still, no actual sex is allowed. Sage Travigne, the proprietor of the operation, is adamant about this rule. No sex. Clients can “assist themselves in that area,” she says.
Most hour-long sessions at the house cost $160, of which employees earn a percentage for each client they see, starting at 50 percent and increasing the longer they work there. Services that entail extra preparation and cleanup—like brown showers, one of the more extreme offerings, where one person essentially defecates onto another’s body or into his mouth—are more costly. Travigne says there’s a health risk in ingesting such substances, even if the person it comes from is disease-free. But that doesn’t stop clients from requesting it.
A call for submissives
BDSM, or SM for short, is largely based on a negotiated dynamic of dominance and submission, and for those who embrace it, enacting those roles can be arousing even without conventional methods of sexual contact. According to employee Louise Gerarde, a 44-year-old self-described “dominant” who has worked at the house for a year and a half, some customers are satisfied just to feel a woman’s feet rubbing across their face.
Jay Wiseman, author and long-time member of the Bay Area SM community, writes in his book, SM101, “Not just SM folks, but a great many ‘normal’ people combine some aspects of domination and submission with their sexuality.” He says the difference between ‘normal’ people and SM practitioners may be hidden deep inside peoples’ brains, but regardless, he writes, “There are elements of domination and submission connected with the sexuality of many people who do not identify as being into SM.”
About three-fourths of the men who patronize the house want to be dominated, according to Travigne. In the scene, they are called “submissives,” and each has his own specific fetish: some want to be spanked, others like to be verbally humiliated or coddled like a child, and others prefer to be locked in a cage and left alone altogether. This puts the female employees in a predominantly authoritarian role—giving them physical and even emotional control over male clients to an extent not necessarily reflected in the outside world.
Sean Davis—a 50-year-old San Francisco resident with a wife, a teenager, and a management position in the banking and finance industry—has gone to this particular house of bondage about six times and visited the East Bay’s other BDSM parlor twice as many. Davis, who withheld his real name to avoid being identified by family and coworkers, describes himself as a “quasi-alpha male” and a “control freak” in everyday life.
Ten years ago, when he discovered an affinity for putting vegetables in his nether regions, Davis knew that his wife, whom he says is “traditional” when it comes to sex, would be unwilling to assist him with his newfound kink. “I just know that on a deep level she wouldn’t be interested in this, nor would she approve of me doing this,” he writes in an e-mail. “For her, sex is something special between a husband and wife.”
With this knowledge, along with a persistent urge to satisfy his fetish, Davis booked his first appointment with a professional dominatrix, a red-haired woman in her early twenties whom he recalls fondly. “I found it pretty mind-blowing that for $80, I was able to basically negotiate and communicate with a lovely young woman for us to be alone for 30 minutes, and for me to explore some activities that in my ‘real world’ would never be possible,” he says.
Davis’ wife doesn’t know about his fetish—or that he’s been paying money to have it fulfilled for
the past decade. He doesn’t consider his activities “cheating, per se, because there’s nothing I am doing with another woman that she’d like to be a part of.” He admits that his wife probably wouldn’t embrace this line of reasoning, but concludes that there are “vast differences between men and women.”A survey released in 1998 by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, an organization that advocates for the sexual and privacy rights of consenting adults, found that 51 percent of people surveyed from the SM community are male and 40 percent are heterosexual. And of those men who visit the house, Gerarde says, “A lot of people who come here have rings on their fingers.”
Maybe because she’s into SM herself, she empathizes with men like Davis. “You can’t always get everything you need at home,” she says frankly. “And you can’t always really open up to your mate that you need something that’s abhorrent to them—you can’t risk changing their image of you.”
William Henkin, a San Francisco-based psychotherapist with a Pd.D. in human sexuality, says there’s little acceptance in society for submissive men, especially in a sexual context. “If you talk to a lot of [professional dominatrices], you’ll find that a good number of their clients are extremely high-powered men in their other lives—CEOs, professionals, professional athletes—very macho, very ‘guy guys.’
“But they’re in control all the time, and sometimes they’d like to not be in control—or they’d like to not be in control a lot more than sometimes—but they don’t get a lot of support in our culture, so one place they can do this is with a professional.”
A markedly marketable service
Travigne recognized the need for such professionals in 1994, after two years of working as a dominatrix. At 21, she started her bondage business in a one-bedroom apartment in Berkeley. Fifteen months later, when the small space proved too tiny to meet the high demand for the trade, she relocated to Oakland, into a house across the street from her current spot.
Ten years later, the light-green house on the corner went up for sale. Today Travigne is paying off the mortgage and has fashioned its five rooms to accommodate her kinky clientele.
There’s the “worship room,” a darkly hued space complete with an altar and a giant wooden cross; the “pink room,” popular for classroom role-play because of its big wooden desk and more mirrors than the average history class; the “executive dungeon,” which boasts an intricate metal bed frame fashioned with hooks for hanging rope; the “red room” for the silky red fabric that hangs from the walls; and lastly, the “green room,” which looks innocuous enough—until you open the armoire, which is filled with wigs and womens' clothing—a cross dresser’s candy store.
In an interview with Travigne in the pink room, she describes how owning her own space has given her the freedom to modify it. “Like doing effective soundproofing so that the neighborhood can’t hear the whole, ‘Smack, smack, Thank you Mistress’ kind of sounds when they’re on the sidewalk in front of the house.” Even during the interview, the low moans of a man in mid-session squeeze through the wall of the next room. The wall shudders and the floor shakes from what sounds like a heavy chain hitting the wooden ground.
As a business, the house depends on discretion. Just as customers are concerned with keeping low profiles, the women who run the house are wary of flaunting their operation to the neighborhood.
Legally binding
Employees of the house routinely pick up trash around the property to keep it presentable for both neighbors and clients. They avoid explicit conversations about work when they smoke cigarettes on the back porch in their down time. And when someone shows up for an appointment, after he rings the doorbell once and steps inside the windowed patio, the front door swings open by a seemingly invisible force.
As a rule, the women, or “mistresses,” as some call themselves, stand behind the door as they open it, in case the sparse or tight outfits they wear for appointments should raise the eyebrows or the suspicions of passersby.
The house isn’t altogether unknown to the larger community. About twice a year Travigne throws parties at the house that spill out into the fenced backyard. The partygoers—generally employees of the house, people in the SM scene, or friends of the two groups—chat as they snack on food and sip beer from kegs. First-time visitors are usually offered a tour of the house's elaborate interior.
Such events aren’t necessarily designated for SM activities, but there’s no lack of fetish-wear among the guests, some of whom, men included, come outfitted in corsets, leather and fishnets.
Travigne readily acknowledges that even if she isn’t selling sex, per se, her business isn’t entirely legal, but she has an attorney who advises her on the legalities—and illegalities—of the house. Travigne says it’s likely that the police know what goes on inside the house but that, as long as she keeps it somewhat discreet, they’re not likely to bring charges against her.
Part of the reason she hasn’t had any problems, she says, is due to the “friendly political climate” of the Bay Area. She tells stories of a similar operation that was busted over a decade ago, and more recently, an independent dominatrix who was arrested for prostitution. In both cases the charges were dropped—most likely, she says, because a jury would have had a hard time reaching a guilty verdict in cases involving consenting adults.
In her book Come Hither: A Commonsense Guide to Kinky Sex, sex therapist Dr. Gloria G. Brame writes, “Compared to other sex workers, [professional dominatrices] are at a relatively low risk for legal harassment. While prostitution is a crime in forty-nine states, there are no laws that say you can’t accept money to make someone lick your boots.”
Local laws against prostitution prohibit “lewd acts” in exchange for money or other forms of compensation. “Lewd,” means any flesh-on-flesh contact with genitals, backsides or female breasts that causes sexual arousal. So technically speaking, if a paying customer touches an employee’s breasts during a session and gets turned on as a result, a law has been broken.
What this also means is that less direct forms of contact, like paddling someone’s back, don’t fall into the definition of prostitution. David Michael Bigeleisen, a San Francisco defense attorney who has represented sex workers, says, “If a guy gets flogged on the back, or on the buttocks, or on the thighs—or anything like that, and he gets excited by it, more power to him.” He says street prostitution is the most commonly prosecuted in the area.
Travigne seems more concerned with battery laws, which outlaw even some non-violent physical contact. Because of high instances of domestic violence cases where victims might hesitate to press charges, she says battery laws can be used against even self-proclaimed consenting adults. As a precaution, all clients at the house must sign a waiver certifying that they are participating on their own free will and are using the facilities at their own risk.
Bigeleisen says battery is a non-issue for BDSM houses if the contact is consented to, but while Travigne wishes that were the case, she doesn’t believe the law would approve of the beatings and floggings that are an everyday occurrence at the house. “I mean, there are people out there who are really being battered for real,” she says with a hint of frustration. “So why bother with this? This is victimless.”
Dominatrices, mistresses and switches
The women who work at the house are each unique in terms of their style, their history and their reasons for being there. They are students, artists and entrepreneurs. Their clients call them mistresses, “dominatrices,” or simply “dominants.” But among themselves, they use affectionate names like “babe” and “sweetie.” It’s common to hear someone within the group refer to her co-workers as “the gals.”
Some are married, others are polyamorous, and others still are uncommitted to anyone at all. Some of them are active in the larger BDSM community, while some just like the money that comes with the work. Those who don’t like the job don’t last. You might know one of them, but you might not guess what she does for a living.
For the purposes of this article, the women who have agreed to be interviewed have asked to be identified by their professional monikers—the names they use with their customers—and in some cases have used a different name altogether. Though those who have opted to share their stories have been unnecessarily open about their experiences working as professional dominatrices, they are not equally enthused about being identified by unsuspecting friends and family.
***
Outside the house, it’s a cold day in Oakland: the kind of day where rain is imminent as gray clouds gather in droves. Inside, Lenore Bates, an endearingly elfin 30-year-old who has worked here for three years, is doing paperwork at a desk in the house’s office. All around her, the walls are pasted with photos of smiling men and women in various stages of dress and undress. Behind her, a big wooden file cabinet with dozens of little drawers is pressed against the wall. This is where client records are kept: accounts of every flogging, beating, teasing and titillating act that has transpired in the house.Bates is jotting down notes in a planner, but a closer look reveals she’s also doodling clouds and other girlish shapes with some of the myriad of colored pens fanned out in front of her. She’s been answering the phones—one of her many tasks—and mentions that one of the employees called earlier in tears. Her dad discovered where she works and is not happy about it. “It’s been a crazy few weeks,” Bates says with a small sigh.
For many of the staff, the issue of parents is a touchy one. Even those who have good relationships with their progenitors don’t necessarily feel comfortable revealing what they do for a living. Some evade questions about where they work. The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom’s 1998 survey of the SM community found that the majority of respondents withheld their sexual proclivities from friends and family, fearing judgment and discrimination. Only 28 percent of those surveyed were “out” about their lifestyles.
Bates’ parents live up north, in Washington, which so far has helped her efforts to dodge the question. “I think if they called me on it I would admit it,” she says with some thought. “But I would never just bring it up.” The last time her mom asked, she told her she was working for an answering service.
Overt drama aside, business has been relatively slow lately, as it has been most everywhere: a result of the fledgling economy. The house’s $160 session-fee undoubtedly weeds out any clientele without some means of disposable income. A page in the office planner shows the appointment slots under each other girls’ names are mostly unfilled. Granted, not all arrangements are made far in advance. Many are only a phone call away.
The telephone rings. Cielo, a 21-year-old woman with short dark hair and distinctive streaks of black eyeliner painted across her top lids, enters the office to answer it. It’s 1:30 in the afternoon and a client is calling for a same-day appointment. She talks to him briefly, confirming the time and details of his session, and hangs up. “We’ve got a cock-and-ball torture at 2:30,” she says casually. Bates giggles.
Few topics are taboo in the house. The girls banter unabashedly about work and life, to an extent Gerarde says was always missing from her female friendships. “When we talk about f***ing it’s pretty raw,” she says bluntly. When Gerarde speaks, it’s with a mixture of eloquence and f-bombs. “Here it’s very natural, and we’re all happy to talk about that stuff for the most part.”
Back in the office, Bates is still shuffling papers when the phone rings again. This time she answers it. One of the gals is calling out sick. That leaves only Gerarde on the night shift. Bates speaks to her co-worker with the obligatory deference that is a formality with any call-out conversation: She tells the voice on the other end that if she isn’t feeling well then yes, she should probably stay home. And then Bates offers to cover the shift.
When she has to reinstate her offer, it’s obvious that the girl on the other end has politely refused it. But Bates—who has been working since 9:30 this morning—insists. “You don’t owe me nothin’ sweetie,” she assures her sick co-worker before hanging up the phone. “It’s going to be a long day,” she laments. But she has clearly done her friend a favor, and besides, she can always use the extra cash.
On back pains and gay boyfriends
Shortly after the call-out, Gerarde shows up for her shift, all bundled up for the cold weather. Inside the kitchen, she pulls off a leopard print jacket to reveal yet another layer of outwear: a short, fitted black trench coat, which she leaves on. Even her boots, which stretch halfway up her calves, are reinforced with long white socks that reach up to her knees.
At 44, Gerarde is older than most at the house, but her long brown hair and distinctive facial features make her stand out. “Louise” is not her real name, and “Gerarde” was adopted as homage to her long-time crush on “Joe Gerard,” a character on the show Rhoda, a Mary Tyler Moore Show spin-off.
As it turns out, Louise Gerard, with no “e,” was also an author from the 1930s who wrote exotic romance novels with aptly racy titles like The Harbour of Desire, and Secret Love. “And I’m sure that wasn’t her real name either,” the contemporary Gerarde notes.
Gerarde spent 15 years as an artists’ model before coming to work at the Oakland SM house. For over a decade she posed for private artists and at art schools across the Bay Area: from private colleges like CCA to the junior college campuses of the Peralta district. Now, besides working at the house three days a week, she runs a small clothing shop in Oakland.
In a somewhat raspy voice, she apologizes for her grogginess and explains that she had a long night with her gay boyfriend that left her back feeling sore. She grabs a quart-sized bottle of cranberry juice from the fridge and takes a seat at the kitchen table, just as Cielo walks through the room, now wearing a silky black robe over black stockings and a ruffle-y black bodysuit. The rest of the house is quiet except for the low hum of the dryer.
Gerarde explains that her “gay boyfriend” is a gay man she’s been seeing since June. She laughs when asked if they’re monogamous. The relationship is very much polyamorous, she says, and largely based on their mutual interest in SM.
“We’re hot for each other,” she gushes. Their dinner or movie dates usually dissolve into rough sex and role-play, and last night was no different. They had planned to watch a movie, “but that didn’t happen,” Gerarde says. “That did not happen…” Her sentence trails off and her eyes grow distant. Whatever did happen is the source of her soreness today, but she looks smitten when she talks about it.
When it comes to SM, Gerarde likes to be dominant. She likes to administer corporal punishment through caning or flogging, and she likes sitting on submissive partners, essentially smothering them with her body weight. “I’m one hell of a sadist,” she admits. “I really do like to hurt my partners.”
When she talks about pain—whether it’s the feeling currently throbbing across her back or the sting she gives a partner with a whip—she speaks about it in restrained terms. Humans can take a lot of pain, she explains, as long as their bodies are not actually being injured.
“What is pain?” Gerarde asks rhetorically. “That was always my problem.” As a little girl, she was confused when a nurse, after giving her a shot, asked if it hurt. Gerarde remembers being genuinely confused by the nurse’s concern. She replied, “Well, I feel it. Is that what you mean?”
Safe, sane and consensualIf BDSM conjures up images of wild, unpredictable fetishistic romps in the minds of the uninitiated—where whips crack with reckless disregard for their targets and high-heeled boots stomp relentlessly upon flesh—sessions at the house are actually somewhat restricted by verbal client-employee “contracts.” Rough details of sessions are negotiated beforehand, so that a customer shouldn’t arrange to be flogged and show up expecting to be suspended from ropes.
Such codes of conduct, followed in the house and also by much of the larger community, do more than protect people during SM acts, but potentially lend a degree of discipline to a practice deemed dangerous by critics. Three words—safe, sane and consensual—are the maxim of responsible participants.
Wiseman’s book, SM101, explains that in the world of SM, where the boundaries of pain and pleasure are constantly being blended and pushed, “going too far” means doing anything that causes great damage or death, even with consent. He also cautions that SM, particularly bondage, is the riskiest form of sex—one made more risky by inexperience.
Some aspects of SM can be quite complicated—from tying intricate knots for bondage to knowing just how hard and how much to hit someone—and engaging in practically any form of SM without the right know-how can be disastrous or even deadly.
Safe practitioners of SM establish a “safe word” before cracking the whip, which can be uttered when a scene becomes too physically or emotionally intense of painful. But such precautions aren’t a guarantee of safety. An article by Ph.D.’s Kurt Ernulf and Sune Innala, “Sexual Bondage: A Review and Unobtrusive Investigation,” published in 1995 in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, warns that even a safe word can fail if someone gets so caught up in the act they forget to use it.
One evening during her shift, one of Bates’ coworkers frantically called her and some other employees into the worship room, where a customer, crucified with rope to a wooden cross on the wall, had passed out. While the unconscious man hung limply from the cross, losing circulation to his limbs, the women quickly began untying his hands.
“My boss had said to always untie the legs first, because a lot of times if you untie their arms first they’ll just fall over,” Bates remembers. Luckily, she and her coworkers quickly rectified their order of unknotting, and the customer was safely freed from the wall.
Each room in the house has a first aid kit, stocked with a BDSM safety manual for dominatrices in a bind. “We are taught proper methods,” says Bates, “because there are places you’re really not supposed to spank or hit people. Like in the kidneys or in the spine. We’re not trying to be dangerous, and that might sound crazy, but there are safe ways to play with people.”
When she hires someone, Travigne puts her through a three-hour demonstration on technical aspects of the trade. Each newbie also starts by sitting-in on the sessions of more experienced women, joining in only when she’s ready.
“Some gals take to it like fish to water,” Travigne says. “Others want to sit and watch for several weeks or even months.” But ultimately, she is adamant about the fact that no woman is forced to do anything that makes her uncomfortable. New employees are given a checklist and asked to mark ‘yes’ or ‘no’ next to a number of activities. Over time, as a person’s boundaries change, so does their repertoire.
“I certainly don’t want anyone to come here and do anything that’s going to be upsetting for them,” Travigne says. “If it’s not pleasurable for you then you won’t last long. This job is so emotionally intense that if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, it’s not going to work for you.”
***
Cielo, who hasn’t settled on a surname, started working at the house in June. At 21, she’s the youngest woman there. And with only six months’ experience, she’s still learning the ropes.Her black hair is styled short and tucked behind her ears, and a small silver ring hangs from her septum. She’s small, doesn’t take up much space, and when she sits on one of the house’s many beds to talk about her job, her feet dangle inches above the floor. To see her sitting there in the house’s most modestly decorated bedroom, it’s very easy to forget what the space is used for.
Cielo isn’t expecting any clients just yet, and she’s dressed-down in tight grey jeans and a black, patched-up sweatshirt. It’s a definite switch from the silky black outfit she donned a few days before. But it’s still early—about 11 in the morning—and only a few minutes ago she was sitting in the kitchen, eating a breakfast of salsa and tortillas with some of the other women.
Before she was hired, Cielo’s experience with BDSM was limited to the mild face slapping and hair pulling she and her last boyfriend had used as tools to break up the sexual monotony of their three-year relationship. She remembers feeling conflicted by her newfound kinkiness. She recalls: “Back then, when I was in this relationship, which ended right before I started working here, I was thinking, like, ‘Damn I’m sick!’”
There’s plenty of debate over the cause for concerns like Cielo’s. The American Psychiatric Association, in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, includes SM in its definition of paraphilias, essentially likening the practice to a diagnosable disease: “Paraphilia: Repetitive sexual activity involving real or simulated suffering or humiliation, as in whipping or bondage … [including] such specific types as fetishisms … sexual masochism and sexual sadism.”
The manual was revised in 1994 to render a “paraphilia” like sadomasochism as a diagnosable dysfunction only when forced on a non-consenting partner, or in cases where the desire causes someone “marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.”
Organizations like the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom have fought for the APA’s further refinement, or even removal, of the definition. In a statement, the pro-BDSM organization argues that there is no evidence that BDSM-related paraphilias cause people dysfunction or distress, and that any negative symptoms are only the result of discrimination and social stigma attached to alternative sexual behaviors.
Cielo says the six months she has worked as a professional dominatrix have quelled any worries about her sexual deviance. “Coming in here made me feel like, no, there’s nothing wrong with me,” she says confidently. “Other people indulge in different kinds of things, and this is what I like to indulge in.”
In terms of BDSM-related sex work, Dr. Henkin says there’s nothing inherently good or bad about partaking in the trade, as long as someone chooses the vocation freely. “A lot of people come to me out of the alternate sex and gender communities,” he shares. “Partly because they have reason to believe that I will not automatically assume that what they do is the problem.”
“People from these communities—including pro-doms, call girls and strippers—come to talk about the same things everybody else comes to talk about. Depression, anxiety, work issues and relationship troubles.”
Community bonds
While there are a number of kink-friendly clinicians like Dr. Henkin in the Bay Area, the women at the house also have a strong support net in each other. Nearly all of those interviewed speak to the strong sense of community they have found in a house full of females.
Cielo, whose friend Akira works at the house and suggested she work there too, said the job has changed her relationship with women. As a fashion school dropout and a self-described tomboy who felt disenchanted by her classmates’ concern for couture, she has had trouble relating to women in the past.
“I didn’t usually like girls,” she admits. “A lot of those girls were just so stereotypical. But I feel like that’s because I was involved with a certain community there that I feel like I didn’t really fit in with, while here you get girls who are more open about a lot of things.”
She says her co-workers possess a degree of self-respect that allows them to be more open. “You actually hold a relationship with these people. Not like a non-dimensional one. You actually get to know them. The more you work here you actually make some really strong bonds and you have some really intense conversations—and you meet some really fucking cool people. Nobody puts up a front here.”
After the conversation in the green room, Cielo wanders into the backyard, where some of the gals are sitting around, smoking cigarettes and joking around. A dog is sprawled lazily on the wooden porch, receiving occasional belly rubs. The sun has come out and the morning’s grogginess is starting to fade.
A few weeks before, Travigne spoke about the importance of maintaining a positive environment in the house, where so many different people and personalities come together under such intimate conditions. “I think we really need to work together and be there for each other,” she said matter-of-factly. “Society thinks we’re fucked up. All we’ve got is each other.”
