Hear the audio version here:

“I saw your website. I really like it. I also saw the….uh…slut stuff.”

That was one of my neighbors. I was irked but not mad. “Slut” was less an accusation, and more just the word available to him. But I’ll never stop finding it ironic that I am actually paid to tell men no, you CANNOT have me, and that this still falls into the category of “slut stuff.”

Because being a slut is recognizing your own sexual agency. Telling men you are not worthy of me is to acknowledge that someone is. And that I will choose. And that I may very well choose to have lots and lots of amazing sex with someone I have a preference for.

There is only one way to not be deemed a slut: Be married to a man who controls your body. That’s it. That’s the only way. That is the defining difference.

At the end of the day, though, no matter the laws, no matter the cultural norms, a woman does control her own body in the moments she is not being physically overpowered. This leaves even the married man with a trad wife under lock and key suspicious of her potential sluttery. That we are alive makes us sluts.

Which, of course, has frightening implications for a world that hates sluts. Because to hate women who are sexual is to hate women, full stop. It’s a little like hating women who shit or pee or eat or sleep. You can twist yourself into knots trying to not be like “that kind” of woman. But you never will be. Hatred of sluts is a hatred of your very drive, origin and existence. Sex is (duh) the source of life. To hate sex in a woman is to hate that women are alive.

Which perhaps clears up why so many men are resentful of women who have sex with them. Why so many men want to kill women who have sex with them, or choose to have sex with someone else.

Because if women are given the impossible task of not having sexual agency and to be fully controlled by another human being, men are given the impossible task of being in control: In control of their emotions, in control of destiny, in control of the women in their lives. Which, of course, are all things that they don’t really have control of. When women make their own choices, it seems to these men an accusation about their lack of control. We call this “emasculation.”

But it’s important to note: This is cultural, historical, systemic. What it is not is natural. Sex makes us feel twisted inside because of our relationship to it in this time and place. It’s a fucked up relationship. But it’s fixable. One day.

When it comes to “Do we do what we do because of nature or nurture?” I fall squarely on the side of nature when it comes to most things. However, since the dawn of selfishness, greed, psychopathy, there have been people observing the human animal and its nature, and using that nature to manipulate them into unnatural acts.

You know. Like advertising. Propaganda. Cults. Gaslighting.

And when you have a culture built on these things, over time we become twisted versions of ourselves, in a way that dates back so far, it can seem like nature: Just the way things are.

But history is long. And while most of our written history before 10,000 years ago is unknowable (because, you know, of all the times monotheists BURNT ALL THE LIBRARIES. Still bitter about Alexandria), the origin story of the slut IS in our current cannon, which is how we know that things were not always that way.

It’s in the bible, and it’s the story of Jezebel, the pagan queen, who did not submit to Christianity, disregarded “prophets,” and used her power to violently fight back. When she was killed by being thrown out a window and eaten by dogs, she is described as wearing her jewels and makeup and finery–the trappings of a queen. But in the story of Jezebel, they become, in her death, the trappings of a slut. Which is why Jezebel is synonymous with “slut,” and not “queen” in our modern day.

It’s the story of the overthrow of female agency. It is the story of how Christianity and monotheism came to rule the world. And it’s the source of our fucked up culture, and the impossible positions we’ve put ourselves in.

Because, as every statistic shows: Cultures thrive when women have agency. It is better for public health, it is better for economic growth, it yields better outcomes for children, it is better for general happiness–there is, in fact, no metric which does not improve when the women are free. When humanity denies one half of itself, unsurprisingly, humanity suffers.

And for those of us who were alive before the internet took over, we have seen humanity approach something like respect and equality. In the 90’s, we start to see television shows where men and women are platonic friends on equal footing. Frasier’s best friend is Roz, who sleeps around. While he may poke fun, there is no feeling that her sexual agency is a threat to him. In fact, his interest in her is purely platonic and respects her full personhood. Even when they sleep together, there is no crisis over having had sex with a “slut.” He knows her to be a talented producer and a good friend. He feels no need to police her choices. No hand-wringing, no “don’t do that!” no “No man will ever marry you.” Just respect. The ribbing, in fact, is part of that respect.

Friends, Sex and the City, Seinfeld, Golden Girls–the 90’s were chalk full of grown adults, being friends, supporting each other, and having the sex they desire, based on their personal choices.

For those of us around 40, we were raised on this idea of what life could be. A life where we enjoy each other’s company without having a battle for control. This is a marked difference from, say, the seventies–also an incredibly progressive time for television. In Mary Tyler Moore, for instance, we see a woman discovering her agency, and the people around her discovering that her agency is great for them, too. The comedy comes from the trepidation with which she takes it on. Because it’s new. Lou Grant becomes her friend, after having been her skeptical boss. The arc is one of shrugging off control of a woman, to instead come to accept her as her own valuable, autonomous being.

By the 90’s, the sitcoms reflected the new reality: Women are people. People have sex. We can relax and be friends. It wasn’t perfect by a long shot. But the messaging that sex is a part of life, and that women can make their own choices was made clear and, at least in most segments of society, accepted.

And as I came of age, graduating high school in 2003, my dating life didn’t look different from what you saw on TV: Men and women being friends. Sometimes that friendship turned into sex. Sometimes sex turned into a relationship. There was sex with strangers. There was sex with friends. There was sex in relationships. And we were generally having a good time, in spite of the dramas that come with all of that: Sometimes things don’t work out. Sometimes feelings get hurt. But fearing for my life because of my sexual choices was not part of it.

In 2012, social media and dating apps were suddenly a major part of our culture. And suddenly, I found myself encountering men with strict rules and judgments about female sexuality. It was 2012, four years after I had begun work as a phone sex dominatrix, when I was first sexually assaulted by a man, who believed my sex work entitled him to first spend a whole evening insulting me, calling me weak, and refusing to leave, before sexually assaulting me with his fingers. I said no the entire time. He believed climbing on top of me and assaulting me would get me in the mood. “I wish you would just relax…” he kept saying as I struggled underneath him. When he finally got the picture that I vehemently did not want to have sex with him, he said, “Then why did you tell me about your job? That’s the last time I ride my bike in the snow for you, sweetheart!” Which still strikes me as funny, to be honest. He left, leaving behind a string of insults about what a slut I am.

A woman who tells men no for a living, and was telling him no.

And from that moment on, my dating life looked very different. I wish I could say it was due to my trauma or paranoia or my sexual assault causing me to push men away, or something. But the truth is, emotionally, it seemed like a horrible night, but a one-off. Into every life, a horrible shit-show of a man might insert himself. But I had dated enough, had enough male friend, had had enough good sex to largely be undeterred. I was optimistic about sex and love.

But the men seemed to be onto a whole new attitude about women. By 2014, we saw the rise of the pickup artist, but at first, it was hard to understand what was happening. I noticed that men must be swapping manipulation tactics, because suddenly all the men had the same horribly disrespectful dating habits, even using the same lines, and wanting the same things sexually.

Suddenly, it was assumed, for instance, that all women want to be choked in bed. In particular, I remember watching a man holding court in a bar with some other dudes. He was saying, “No, you just have to go for it. They love it. But you have to show them. I’m telling you dude, they want to be choked.”

I inserted myself because I was naive and flabbergasted. “You can’t just go for it, that’s the kind of thing that has to be explicitly asked for. A lot of women have been choked for real, and–“

He shewed me away with his hands and said, “Don’t listen to her.”

I remember being truly befuddled by this. He was arguing that women liked this. I was a woman. Surely I know more than he did about what we like. But here, in real life, was a whole group of men, casually discussing how you can’t trust a woman when she says, “Don’t choke me.” You have to impose it on them, and then ask them to thank you and say they like it.

And, of course, there’s the disturbing under-girding: That for some reason these men wanted to choke the women they were having sex with.

As a Dominatrix, I am no prude when it comes to kink. But what they wanted was non-consensual abuse. BDSM, on the other hand, is built on trust and consent and negotiation. In the movie Secretary (the best movie about BDSM by a long shot), we see the difficulty of finding a kink partner you can trust, that aligns with your wants. Maggie Gyllanhaal’s character goes on many unfulfilling dates with kinky people before choosing, for herself, the man she trusted to dominate her sexually. She is submissive. But she is also a woman with agency.

But now domination was being casually inserted into vanilla sex, and being imposed on unsuspecting victims as a matter of course. Dating around 2014 was an en masse sexual assault, dressed up as “the new thing.” As a result, you saw a lot of women suddenly saying they liked to be choked. They liked anal sex.

But more likely, these things were being imposed on them, and as young women who is driven to have sex, the two became linked–they seemed to come into the same package. It’s not uncommon (though not the rule, by any stretch) that people’s sexual kinks stem back to a time of having been abused, and the confusion that comes with having sex linked to harm. BDSM, for many people, is a way to take control of these complicated feelings. And for a lot of them, when they have a partner, paid or otherwise, whom they trust, it helps them integrate their more complicated feelings into something resembling a healthy sex life (if any of us have that).

But it’s only possible with consent and trust and the ritual of play–knowing that this will end, you are safe, and you are in control.

This is far different from having all of your sexual encounters include an element of abuse whether you expected it or not. That is simply a culture of rape. And it will fuck you up. And it will make you afraid.

This pick-up artist culture eventually gave rise to the Me, Too movement. And when women realized that they were being abused en masse, the world stopped having sex.

In 2020, I was working in a sex shop, and got to see more of the trends happening outside of my own sexual experiences and my professional work as a Dominatrix: The 20 somethings were attracted to animal costumes and anal plugs. A very high portion of them described themselves as asexual, and there was much confusion about trying to find them toys that they felt affirmed their asexual identity but also somehow got them off. They longed for sexual intimacy and sensation, but did not want their genitals involved. Many of them were virgins and had never had a relationship.

And while I know it’s not my place to decide whether or not these people were sincere in their asexuality or just afraid of sex, I will say: It would make sense that they were afraid of sex, and there sure were a whole lot of young people coming into a sex shop, wanting something, but identifying as people who do not want sex.

I think it’s likely they simply didn’t want sex like this. They didn’t want to be attracted to men who might hurt them. They didn’t want to be a slut. They didn’t want their libidos to lead them to abuse.

This is not to say that asexual people don’t exist. Of course. However, when very specific sexual proclivities or lack thereof sweep the people en masse, you can be sure the source of the trend is cultural, not biological.

All of this, though is shrouded in mystery, and was pushed in spaces not readily visible to women online. The men were being radicalized in the manosphere, and integrating social media and pornography consumption on sites like PornHub led to what I can only describe as a sexual assault on men, as well: A perverting of their sexuality that subverts the joy and turns it into abuse.

Hurt people hurt people.

But for the men, too, their own radicalization was shrouded in mystery. Because it seemed to arise from “democracy.” We were told the online space was an amalgamation of the world’s information. We were told that we were seeing humanity clearly for the first time, because “the people” were guiding it.

But what we were seeing was a tech agenda, that we now know is a patriarchal, Christian agenda. Peter Thiel, who is currently giving lectures about the anti-christ, was the first investor in “TheFacebook.” He is the man who brought J.D. Vance to prominence. He is the man who controls much of our money and how it’s exchanged. And his vision includes creating a world wide surveillance state in order to bring about a theocratic monarchy.

The control of people’s sexual agency is a way to break down the masses and make them submit. And it’s what Christianity is built on. Sex is an easy thing to fuck with, because while it’s a primal and necessary function for human beings, which cannot be denied, it is not as regular and all consuming as something, like, sleep. If, instead of sex, we were told that sleeping is shameful, we would ruin ourselves trying to stay awake, and we would fall asleep anyway, and bargain with sleep, and try to create rules around sleep, and fail at them, and the shame would harm us upon waking, and we would be right fucked up. But we’d also recognize pretty immediately that sleep is necessary.

Sex is no different. But it seems different because you can go without sex for good stretches of time (I’m including masturbation and sex that is not strictly P in V, to be clear. When I refer to sex, I mean intimate sexual pleasure). When we are barred from our own sexual drive, and when our orgasms are ruined, we are being abused, and for the purpose of making us submit.

Sexual abuse of the masses has been how Christianity has reigned for two thousand years. And, in fact, quite a lot of BDSM makes no sense in a world without Christianity: It is a reaction to the nonconsensual abuse–whether physical abuse, or the abuse of sexual repression.

The Christians took great offense to the shrugging off of shame we saw in the 90’s. They have been working to halt that progress ever since. And they are succeeding, thanks to the tech industry, who has an excellent mechanism–their algorithms–to mindfuck the masses.

Again, we were told that we, ourselves, generated our algorithms, and that is somewhat…a little bit true. It’s true enough to provide cover for the inserted content which radicalizes. And it aids the radicalization, because you believe you chose it yourself. After all, look at all of these other things in your algorithm you chose yourself!

You like canning vegetable. You like crafts. You want to be a tradwife.

You like women. You like sex. Women want you to choke them.

The radicalizing content you didn’t choose, but you think you did, is the point. Social Media does not exist to give you what you want. It exists to subvert what you want for the aims of the tech overlords, who are incels, authoritarians, deeply bitter about women, and believe in strong patriarchal control of sex and women’s bodies.

And, also, of men’s bodies: They need soldiers. They need you to commit harm against women.

Harming women has never, in the history of harming women, led men to be at peace with themselves or happy with their sexuality. Never. It is a source of shame deeper than can be imposed on you by society. It leaves men twisted and unsatisfied and confused.

As a Dominatrix, I recognize this trick: You withhold true bliss, and keep the submissive in a loop of trying to please. It is how you gain their allegiance: you hold the key. They must follow you.

In the algorithmic world, that means you must keep scrolling and clicking–and proliferating the propaganda–hoping to be satisfied. But never being satisfied because what you crave is intimate, human connections built on trust and consent and your own agency.

In the time between 2008 and 2012, when I was a Baby Domme, I was very open about my work. And honestly, most people thought it was cool.

But in recent years, I’ve struggled with being out. My female friends, one by one, became more prudish and judgmental. The men became more hostile. They came to make assumptions about me, and assign my behavior to having been traumatized (my “best friend” of 20 years had asked me to admit that I was sexually abused shortly before I ended our friendship. For the record, I had not been, until the abuse I mentioned above, which happened four years after I made the unfraught choice to become a Dominatrix), and therefore unable to make good decisions. They started to become condescending about my work, and who I was generally. Suddenly, my friends believed the work I have always been proud of was nothing but the manifestation of my twisted, slutty psyche.

When people who are close to you start making accusations and treating you like a wayward child, and not someone who knows it is their duty to fight back and insist on their own agency (like you think you are), it is only natural to consider if they’re right. So I went to therapy.

In therapy (which has it’s own patriarchal problems, but that’s for another time), it took time, but eventually it seemed clear that I was not destroying myself with my choices. I was destroying myself trying to make people understand my choices. I was destroying myself surrounding myself with insincere people who were ultimately concerned with being “normal.” They approved of me when sex was normal. They did not when sex was not.

I’m not immune to the culture: I too, started running scared. I lost friends, boyfriends, family ties because I asserted myself in the world and made sex a central part of my profession. The industry itself–which, I swear to you, was once relatively safe–was now getting hit with DDOS attacks, nonstop trolls, and time-wasters. Business in an already volatile atmosphere became extremely up and down. The whole world wanted me to quit and “be normal.” No one recognized or believed that I was providing my clients with a vital service. Nor did they believe that the insights I gleaned from my work could hold any water, considering my choices and views were clearly based on some trauma I was hiding, as far as they were concerned. Whether or not it was wrong of them to associate me with such stigmas, the stigma remained. And I’ve struggled ever since to know if it’s worth it.

But the struggle is what shows me that it is. If I found my work ultimately unimportant, there would be no struggle–I would give it up. I work in many different mediums, and am capable of starving in all of them. But for some reason I cling to the one that society hates.

I cling to it, because that hatred is the problem. That hatred is what will lead us to fascism, and what will lead to women being subjugated and killed. I cling to it because I know the good my work does for my clients I know the insights I am privy to that the general population isn’t. I know that until sex work is validated, women will not have agency. It is the lynch pin: We are always, in some form, fucking or fighting. When we outlaw fucking, or having sex in ways that benefit the women having it, all that is left is fighting. Which is a battle women will lose, and horrifyingly.

A woman’s sexuality is associated with her caring–even in domination. You’ll notice the caring professions–ones where women bring art, and smiles and good feelings and connection–such as waiting tables, art, teaching, childcare, retail, grooming–are all low wage jobs that do not compare to the rents. Sex work, which has a high hourly wage and value, is largely illegal or so stigmatized as to feel that way.

We do not have agency without sexual agency. Sex is communion. Coming together. Sex work is only the literal and crystallized version of this. But all caring professions suffer from a stigmatization of our sexual agency. And a sexless culture is a fighting culture.

Just look around. We are all fighting and no fucking, and the world is falling apart. I am more scared of repercussions for my work than I ever have been in my life.

But I can also not afford to be scared any more. Because if we continue to be afraid, the fascists will win. And so, after my neighbor found my website with the “slut stuff,” I came out to my other neighbors, that erotica and sex is a large part of my work. I am no longer sidestepping the uncomfortable. I have to be a real member of this community. I can’t do so in hiding.

A big part of why SmutMag has been so all over the place is because I’ve been struggling with what I want to emphasize in my work, and what I want to commit to. But I do not take it as an insult to find that my most lauded and meaningful work has been as a dominatrix and erotica writer. It does not insult me that in the last five years my erotica has proven exponentially more popular than my music.

It IS music. And it’s lauded for the same reason: My ability to get to the heart of a matter. And to my mind, and especially now, there is no graver matter than how we treat sex.

If I have one recommendation for my fellow sex workers, it would be to try and start building your practice outside of the main platforms, which are themselves the root of so much turmoil, both for the performers, and for the audience. I don’t believe they are there to serve you. I believe they are there to subvert your aims. Of course, we all have to make our own choices.

My choice is to be an out, independent, remote dominatrix and erotica writer and performer. And from here on out, to do it with pride.

I’ve seen the culture pull a complete 180 in my lifetime about how we view sex. I have every reason to believe it can be turned around again.

But only with our eyes open, and a lust for life that overrides fear and submission.

I am a Dominatrix. I will not submit.

Make sure you get your bones to keep this enterprise going! There are both sexual and non-sexual ways to spend your bones here on SmutMag, and it makes it possible for you to enjoy content here and on SmutMag Radio for free.

I truly can’t do this without you–you are what keeps me going. Why not start with a SmutMag Radio tee-shirt to show the world that you support women’s agency, the art, and our common humanity!

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