The girl you're hoping comes home to doesn't exist in real life.

Often times, folks who aren’t kinky, or don’t know much about sex work, will make assumptions about the kind of kinky play I do in my personal life. I know that more than one person has asked my partner “how that worked,” in regard to our sex life, and I have received other comments about how they wouldn’t guess that he’d be into a dominant woman or that we must “have a lot of fun”. I also have had people assume that I must be so insanely kinky that I even scoff at vanilla ice cream, and that everything I do at work is something that I do in my private life as well.

I usually try to summon up a response more polite than my immediate reaction, which is something like, “Um. No.”

Sorry to break your titillated little hearts, but I have some disappointing news for you: There are a lot of kinky things I do at work that don’t actually turn me on. And yes, sometimes I do like to fuck in the missionary position too.

When I first started working at the dungeon, I decided that I was going to try almost anything that felt like a maybe. Even if I hadn’t done it before, even if it didn’t hold any particular appeal for me personally, I decided that any activity that didn’t elicit strong disgust (not toward the people who engage in the activity, but toward the activity itself) or discomfort would be worth trying.

Perhaps it’s because I was a “weirdo” from the outset, but that left a short list of things.

My policy has always been to try everything on that short list exactly once, which sometimes means taking it moment by moment without any real experience with what I am doing. As time goes on, new experiences come up all the time, but my ability to roll with it has gotten better. Just when I get comfortable with seeing the same thing over and over again, something new pops up. A few weeks ago, a middle-aged Brit came to see me and had a very specific request that I hadn’t dealt with before: puppy play.

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“Hey Tizz, you have a three thirty. He wants flogging and verbal humiliation,” said the receptionist to me.

I was so relieved to finally have work after a short dryspell. As I’ve said before, this work is feast or famine. When business is good, the money cannot be beat, but when things are slow, I find myself scrounging for quarters for coffee and calling the phone company to make arrangements to keep my phone turned on. A dryspell, even if it is only a week or two long, can feel like an eternity.

I ran down to my locker and picked out my outfit: a simple black corset under a white button-up that I tucked into a black leather mini skirt, plus my signature black six inch peep-toe heels with an ankle strap. After putting on everything except my heels, I prepared the room I wanted to use.

In the dungeon, there are several different rooms with different themes; for this particular session, I picked a room that had a warm, dark feel to the inside of it, with big mirrors, lots of space, and several strategically placed wooden pillars begging to have a writhing body strung up between them. After lighting some candles, turning the lights on low, and making sure my music was set, I threw on some lipstick and strapped myself into my heels.

After seating my client in our separate negotiation space, the receptionist let me know he had arrived. With a glass of water in each hand, I threw back my shoulders, took a deep breath, and entered the room.

“Hi Richard! It’s Richard, right?” I said to him as I put down my water and closed the door behind me.

“Um, yes,” he nervously responded.

Richard, a man in his mid-fifties with a lightly colored beard that was beginning to gray, was sitting on the couch with a paper bag by his feet. I handed him his water and sat down next to him.

I reached out to shake his hand and he slightly flinched, shocked by my formality. “I’m Tizz. Nice to meet you.”

The fact that people are shocked that we dommes are quite sweet and polite when we’re not in session makes me laugh. While my domme persona is an extension of my personality, it is merely one of the many fractured shards that contributes to the entirety of me. Within my personal BDSM philosophy, joyful, successful play is built on a foundation of trust, consent, and mutual respect. D stands for Dominatrix, not Dickhead.

I sat down on the couch near him and delivered my standard opening, “So, tell me a little bit about what you would like to do today.”

He stuttered as he detailed his interests, and periodically stopped speaking completely to gulp down the water I had given him when I first walked in.

“Well, I emailed you…” he trailed off, avoiding my eyes.

“Yes, I remember.”

Admittedly, this was a half truth. After all, I receive tons of emails from potential clients, and after time, they run together. I remembered vaguely what he had requested, but either way, I have a rule about getting the clients to ask for what they want. Often, clients will email, requesting one thing, then come in and request something completely different.

Plus, part of my endless effort to ensure that the work I do is completely consensual is making sure that negotiation is done properly, which requires each person to be upfront about what they are looking for and what their boundaries are. That also means that the conversation needs to be had in person. Anyone can send an email, but the person I am playing with needs to tell me what they are looking for face to face.

I waited for him to continue. The power of silence, and its uncanny ability to elicit information never fails to amaze me.

“Um, yes, well,” he continued, laughing nervously as he spoke, “Um, it’s much more difficult to say in person, isn’t it?”

We managed to make it through the negotiation slowly. I reassured him that it was a safe space to speak, and in his cute little British voice, he shared with me what he wanted. He had brought along some tools and toys that he wanted to use, and having him show them to me helped turn his anxious energy into anticipation.

The activities he listed: Stepfamily roleplay, verbal humiliation, and puppy play.

Puppy play is a form of animal roleplay where the submissive pretends to be a dog. The intensity of play can range from full on furrydom to verbal humiliation and submissive training. The humiliation revolves around dehumanizing the submissive, and treating them like a “pet”.

Not this kind of puppy play!

Prior to this session, I had never done any puppy play. I had called submissives “pet,” and treated them like an animal by making them crawl on the floor, putting them in a cage, etc., but it was never taken to the extent of treating them like a specific animal or focusing on that aspect of the humiliation.

One major thing I have learned from doing this job is that there are so many different fetishes and manifestations of human sexuality. Although I probably see more strange and interesting things than the average “normie,” the fact that I am a rookie pro-domme ensures that I still have barely seen what wonderfully weird things exist out there. Despite that, though, part of this job is figuring it out. It’s winging it. While there are certain things you can train for (and that you NEED to train for for the sake of safety!), a lot of it is understanding how to operate on the fly. This was one of those moments.

Holy Rover! Wondering what happens next? Check back in next Monday for the following installment of Musings of a Mistress: Woof! (Part II).

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Tizzy Wall is the Playpen Report’s petite spitfire sex-worker, here to talk about queerdom, sex work, and other kinktastic wonders. Take a peek into her big, lovely brain on both Tumblr and Twitter, or like her on Facebook. Have specific questions, topic requests, or need advice on your kinky sex issues? Email her !