by Lois

o I was expecting the dungeon to be, I don't know, dungeon-y: dank, spacious, dark, that kind of thing. Instead, a well-groomed receptionist greets us at the door of Arena Blaze, one of Manhattan's only woman-owned and operated domination dungeons. She has all your basic receptionist accoutrements: phone, fax, computer, big smile, bright lighting. In fact, the only thing that sets this place apart from say, my podiatrist's office, is her bedroom attire and a couple of lazy house cats. It is--dare I say it?--kind of homey.

Our subject, Mistress Elle, emerges wearing a black spaghetti-strapped ensemble, her blonde hair tucked tastefully behind her ears. She could be dressed for lunch at Bendel's. She greets us nervously and offers a tour.

The first stop is the Rodeo Room, the centerpiece of which is a large wrought iron Catherine wheel, a sort of sideways-Ferris wheel contraption "ideal for bondage, whipping and disorientation." Running left to right across the room is a "trolley suspension system" (I don't ask) that defies description. Were I to attempt to mount said system, the resulting ballet would doubtless be more vaudevillian than erotic. After a quick perusal of the "nipple torture" devices (um, hi--ouch!) in the antique display case, we are off to the Byzantine room.

The Byzantine Room is drop-dead gorgeous. (Mind you, this description comes from a woman whose own room is oft described as a cross between Pee Wee's Playhouse and a French bordello, but nonetheless.) A red leather sofa and a gaudy mirror comprise the left wall. The right wall sports a prayer bench, a whipping post and the pièce-de-résistance: a chain, harness and sling system suspended over a pit. It's the Inquisition with better lighting.

I love least the Medical Room, where the interview is to be held. I have to think this room is purposefully claustrophobic. A gynecological table, a dentist's chair, various well-stocked medical cabinets and a commode are crammed into a space approximately the size of my kitchen. And I live in Manhattan, kids.

My assistant beelines for the dentist's chair, Mistress Elle curls up feline on a floor pillow and I perch gracefully atop the toilet, lid down of course--women run this place. Preliminary chitchat, cigarettes for nerves and off we go.

Lois: So, the idea here is I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, so I'm interviewing people with nontraditional jobs to see if theirs might be the one for me. Say I want to be a dominatrix. How does one become a dominatrix? How did you get started?

Mistress Elle: My friend that you met when you came in, Octavia, worked in some really shoddy dungeon very briefly and was getting fed up with the whole thing. I used to joke that I wanted to be a dominatrix and she'd tell me horror stories. And I thought, "No way." Then she ended up here. And she started telling me about it and the thing that makes this place really different from most dungeons that I know of. I've never actually worked in another house, but most of them are owned by men. And run by men. This place is owned and run by three women.

Lois: And that makes all the difference?

Mistress Elle: To me, it makes a huge difference. They care about what they do. They are all dommes themselves. They spent a long time in the business before they started this place. You know, you're going around admiring the fixtures and the furniture and the toys--everything is picked out with loving care--and I think that has to do fully and completely with the fact that this place is owned and run by women.

Lois: What were you doing when you met Octavia?

Mistress Elle: What was I doing--?

Lois: Professionally. Do you do this full time, by the way?

Mistress Elle: No I don't. I have a day job. I have a really boring day job. I only work here two nights a week.

Lois: What's your day job?

Mistress Elle: I work in an office. I'm fed up. Right up to here. So much so that the censorship buttons between my brain and my mouth do not function 9 to 5 Monday through Friday.

Lois: I've had that problem since I was 17.

Mistress Elle: It's really bad.

Lois: But you don't make enough here that you could quit--well, obviously not if you only work two nights a week. Could you go full time here?

Mistress Elle: I know people who do. I couldn't. I have this need for stability, and it's not reliable. Sometimes there's a lot of money to be made, and sometimes it's very slow. It depends. Ebb and flow.

Lois: So are most dominatrixes--what the hell is the plural?-- dominatrices?

Mistress Elle: We say, "dommes."

Lois: Are most dommes part-time?

Mistress Elle: I would say--I mean I only know the people who work here--but most people have other jobs.

Lois: How long have you been doing this?

Mistress Elle: Three years.

Lois: Tell me about your first day. The first time you did this.

Mistress Elle: When I started here? Octavia had been telling me about how great it was and I sort of half jokingly said, "Oh, will they train me?" And she said, "Actually, they might." And so I went in and met Carrie and she said "Yes, definitely, come work for us. I'm doing training sessions every week."

Lois: Did you have to pay for that?

Mistress Elle: No, uh-uh. And even once I started doing sessions I would go in and do training. And there is still stuff I won't do because I don't feel that I'm proficient enough to inflict it upon another person. I mean, people think "dominatrix: whip." But my whipping skills--I just don't do it that often. I mean, I'll play with a flogger. I'll do a light flogging, but if you want serious serious whipping, I won't do it. I mean, someone is here to get hurt, but they're not here to get hurt by someone being incompetent. They're here to get hurt by someone who knows what they're doing. The first time I actually did a session, Carrie had called me and asked me to come in. It was really dead and no clients came in. I was actually getting ready to leave and her personal slave had been here with her earlier. They had just left. She called me from the corner and said, "Dog is coming back up, he wants to do a session with you."

Lois: Explain to me "personal slave."

Mistress Elle: He is her property. He has dog tags that say, "Property of Arena/Blaze." If he wants to play with another mistress, he asks her. He does things for her outside of here. He'll run errands for her. He is completely and utterly devoted to her. He's a really nice guy. I like him a lot. We call him "Dog"--he's a foot fetishist and he's on the floor all the time at everyone's feet. If Carrie's here he'll be on the floor wherever she's sitting with his face at her feet. So the first session I ever did was with him, which was really good because I already knew him and a foot-worship session is not that intimidating. I don't have personal slaves and there are a lot of reasons I don't. I've been asked to allow people to be my slaves, and I've turned them down. I don't have time.

Lois: Wouldn't that help?

Mistress Elle: It takes time to reach the point where you're convinced that they're actually going to be helpful to you. Someone will say that they want to be your personal slave and be there for you and make your life easier when in reality what they want is a 24-7 domme who will be in charge of them and punish them for free. So you end up with some guy cleaning your toilet to substandard requirements, so that you'll kick his ass.

Lois: Are 100% of your clients men or do you ever have women or couples as clients?

Mistress Elle: I personally have never done a session with a woman. I've played with women not for pay. Couples come in more frequently than single women. Octavia really enjoys doing sessions with couples. I haven't done that many so I'm not as comfortable with it. The truth is, single females don't have to pay if they want to be submissive. They can go out any day of the week and find someone who is dying to dominate them for free.

Lois: That's a sociology paper right there.

Mistress Elle: And the thing is, if you want to break it down to an over-simplistic view, when you're a woman in an S & M relationship, you get treated really well. If you're the domme, he's your slave. If you're the submissive, you're still the center of attention.

Lois: How is this structured on the most basic level? How do you get a client? And what is a first session like? What is any session like? They get here, they meet the receptionist--then what?

Mistress Elle: How do we get clients? Well, there's our website. We have ads. We all write stories.

Lois: Do you really? That's so cool, I didn't know that.

Mistress Elle: It's free publicity. We don't get paid for having them in magazines. It's mostly Black and Blue and The Vault magazine.

Lois: That's really neat. I love that. Is this fiction? Do you write up fantasies or write up sessions?

Mistress Elle: I usually write up sessions. The last one I wrote was like a month ago now. One of my favorite clients had this really strange Nazi role-playing fantasy.

Lois: How did that go?

Mistress Elle: It's during the war, he's an American airforce colonel, he's been shot down in Germany and captured. He has information that if he gives it up will allow Germany to win the war. They've been tormenting him, torturing him, but they're not getting anywhere. I--me, right here--am Hitler's right-hand torturer. So they send me in to get the information. (He's obviously into a capture and torture scene.) I would have someone go in and tie him up for me first, usually to the St. Andrews cross--the cross on the wall, or the Catherine wheel, or wherever so that he's already bound when I get in there. He would say, "If you'll just let me down from here I'll show you what a real man can do." Or "Let me down and I'll take you back to Hollywood and make you a star." And meanwhile, I'm Hitler's right hand Diva Bitch saying, "you obviously don't understand that males are inferior to females" giving my little speech that I stole from the S.C.U.M. Manifesto on how males are genetically inferior and the Y-chromosome is nothing more than a damaged X- chromosome. And males are vulnerable. Just take their balls in your hand and [she indicates pulling]--- your hand always snuggly in a rubber glove mind you. I liked it because it was role-playing, but the entire demeanor and attitude that he wanted fit me so perfectly. He didn't want loud and bitchy. He didn't want nasty. He wanted confident, calm, but really unnerving.

Lois: How do you find this out? Do you have a consultation or what?

Mistress Elle: If they know who they want to see, then they can just schedule for that particular person. If they don't know who they want to see, they can come in for a "consultation." We come in one at a time and talk to them briefly. What's your experience? What kind of play are you into? Is there anything you are absolutely not into? What are your limits? Are there any questions that you have? We can get an idea of whether or not we are going to be compatible. Is this going to be a good session if I do a session with this person? After he meets us, he decides who he wants to see. So, we've already talked to him about what he wants by the time we start.

Lois: Do you ever have someone who has never done this before and doesn't know how to answer the questions?

Mistress Elle: If I go into meet someone and they say, "I've never done this before so I'm not sure what I'm into." Okay, what brought you in here? And a lot of the time it'll be, "I was watching these videos" or "reading these magazines." Okay, what was it about them? What were you seeing or reading that made you want to come and try them out? Okay, that's where you start. You have to feel it out and make sure that they're okay throughout the whole thing. I've seen people get a little bit freaked out.

Lois: Have you always been sexually precocious?

Mistress Elle: No. Not at all. That's a very loaded question. First of all, nobody should get the wrong idea. There is no sex here. No straight sex of any kind. If the Mistress sees fit, she can send a client away completely unsatisfied. There are no hand jobs, no foot jobs, nothing. People see it as being a sexually precocious thing--

Lois: Do you not see it that way?

Mistress Elle: It's not sexual. I mean, for the most part, for the client it's sexual, but for me it's about--power. It's about what's going on in your head.

Lois: What's the most common fetish? Rubber? What?

Mistress Elle: Shoe and foot fetishes are really really common.

Lois: How's that played out?

Mistress Elle: It's up to you, you can do all sorts of things. You can have someone give you a foot bath, a foot massage with oil, paint your toenails,--

Lois: THEY pay YOU to do this?? Oh, WOW.

Mistress Elle: You can have someone paint your toenails. If you want to be very amused and you don't mind the mess you can make them paint your toenails with their teeth. Anything you can think of. If they have been good and you want to give them a reward, aww heck, put some whipped cream and strawberries on your feet and let 'em lick it off.

Lois: That's so nice.

Mistress Elle: If you want to be really mean, wear really high lace-up boots and make them undo your boots with their teeth. Have you ever seen a man try to unbuckle a really tiny shoe buckle with his mouth?

Lois: No, never. I was underprivileged.

Mistress Elle: It's very funny.

Lois: Oh, I'll bet. I can't do it with my fingers.

Mistress Elle: You can walk on them. You can trample them, in bare feet or stiletto heels. When we're finished here, I want to show you the room where we keep the shoes.

Lois: The shoe room?? Oh my god, I'd love that! Can you write your shoes off your taxes?

Mistress Elle: Absolutely.

Lois: So when you have another domme helping you, like with the Nazi guy. Do you--

Mistress Elle: Share the wealth.

Lois: Like a bar back?

Mistress Elle: A tribute. Like, I don't do serious humiliation--spitting, for instance, or scratching.

Lois: I noticed that on your web page.

Mistress Elle: It's just not in my nature to abuse someone in those specific ways. So if there's a client who really wants a session with me, he really wants to see me, but he's also into being humiliated, I'll go out and say "Who wants to come in and insult my client?" Or spit on him, or whatever. You can get a whole parade of Mistresses coming in, for the sole purpose of taunting the slave--sometimes you get guys who absolutely love the public aspect of it, so the more Mistresses, the better. I've known people who like golden showers--if they could find a place to spend an evening sitting naked in a bathtub, where the Mistresses would come in and pee on them throughout the night, they'd be in heaven.

Lois: Ah, "golden showers." I love the terminology. We had some vocabulary questions actually. Looking through the Mistresses' web pages they'll have--

Mistress Elle: Abbreviations?

Lois: Yeah, like "cbt"?

Mistress Elle: Cock and ball torture.

Lois: Oooooooo! THANK you. Okay.

Mistress Elle: And there are so many kinds of that. One of my favorite things.

Lois: Tell me.

Mistress Elle: Pretty much anything that you can think to do to someone's cock and balls. You can tie them up. [Goes to get orange string.] We have this string in all different colors.

Lois: Do you really?

Mistress Elle: If it's someone who can really tolerate it, you can tie it up really really tight, so it's all bulgy and stuff. We actually have cool photos.

Lois: Do people ever ask to be photographed?

Mistress Elle: I had a Japanese guy in here once who wanted photos, polaroids. We were doing a medical session and we had him tied up to the gyn table with rubber tubing, feet up in the stirrups, clamps on his nipples and testicles. It's surprising how many men enjoy the threat of being examined like a woman, by a woman.

Lois: Do you have to train for months?

Mistress Elle: Um, no. It depends on what skills you're learning.

Lois: Did you need to learn about knots?

Mistress Elle: Yeah, you need to learn quick-release knots to get someone out of bondage quickly. I know people who have been trained how to put in catheters, how to put in sounds...

Lois: "Sounds," like music?

Mistress Elle: No. They're little curved metal dilators and they go into the urethra, actually. Not being a man, I can't imagine how that could be comfortable but you know, a lot of men really really like it. And you'd be surprised how many people want enemas.

Lois: I think I need an enema. I'm not surprised in the least. [laughter] Who are these people?

Mistress Elle: A lot of middle-aged businessmen. But it really runs the gamut.

Lois: White guys mostly?

Mistress Elle: Yes, but--I've had sessions with everyone from a really old retired guy who just wanted to be hit as hard as you could possibly hit him with these really evil-looking homemade implements--

Lois: It was important that they were homemade?

Mistress Elle: He made them himself.

Lois: He brought them in?

Mistress Elle: [Nodding] He would ask you to take your shoes off so you could get a better stance.

Lois: Yikes.

Mistress Elle: I had a session once with an incredibly geeky young twenty-ish boy--I can't even call him a man--he had never done anything like this before. He wanted a little bit of cross-dressing; he wanted to be made to wear women's panties. He was really really nervous. I ended up for a lot of the session comforting him. He sat on the floor at my feet in his little women's panties and I stroked his head and talked to him and told him that he had nothing to be afraid of. "If this is what you want to do then this is fine. You have every right to be here and every right to do what you want to do and you should never be ashamed to own it." People ask me frequently, "How can you have respect for men who want you to do these things to them?" I have the utmost respect for someone who can own up to what they want and who they are. If you can look me in the eye (or tell me with your head respectfully bowed) what you really want, and I can fulfill that, that's an incredibly personal connection. And that's a really good thing. Amazing. It doesn't always happen. It's also what makes it hard to do this full time. Aside from it not being reliable financially, it's incredibly emotionally draining.

Lois: Is there a big turnover?

Mistress Elle: I think this place is more stable than most other places. At a lot of places the policy is that the client gets what the client wants. Here, my limits are my limits; I don't do anything I'm not comfortable with.

Lois: I wish I had that policy in my day job.

Mistress Elle: Me, too, actually.

Lois: How many dungeons are there in New York?

Mistress Elle: I have no idea. If you look in the back of Vault magazine at all the ads it's amazing. There are a lot of dungeons right now. S & M has become really trendy. And S & M under Rudy Guiliani has become one of the last bastions of deviant sexuality. He's closed down 42nd street. He's put the hurt on strip clubs... And the fact that we live in the era of AIDS has made this a safe thing to do. It's not safe anymore to go looking for a prostitute or engage in other forms of illicit deviant sexual behavior. This is a safe sane environment in which to play out sexual fantasies.

Lois: Do you tell people that you do this?

Mistress Elle: It depends. Guys who are trying to hit on me find it really compelling.

Lois: Oh, I'll bet.

Mistress Elle: It's a really strange thing though, you meet a guy, you tell him what you do, and he's really really interested. Then after a while, when you're in an actual relationship, it bothers them.

Lois: That doesn't seem quite fair now, does it?

Mistress Elle: No.

To view the rooms Lois oohs and aahs over, visit the Arena/Blaze website at arenablaze.com (site contains mature subject matter; use your discretion).

Disclaimer: While all practices discussed in this interview are commonplace in the S/M industry, they are not necessarily practiced at, or endorsed by, the staff and proprietors of Arena Blaze.

Welcome to the premier of

with your charming hostess, Lois!

Maybe you ended up as whatever you wanted to be when you grew up. Or maybe veterinarian, ballerina, and witch were already taken. So here you are, your career clock ticking away, with a job not even worth mentioning at cocktail parties. If you ever went to any. Lucky for you, here comes Lois to save the day. This is the first in her series of unconventional careers that just might get you started down the path to job satisfaction. Hold on to your day jobs!

Lois lives in New York's East Village with two members of the band Team Spider. She thinks lipstick is an endlessly fascinating topic of conversation and can't help but like that song "Mambo #5." In addition to writing, Lois performs as a member of Improv Central's professional improv troupe, "The Loos Scrooz Show," and MTV VJ Dave Holmes' sketch comedy group, "Dottie Danger." She is the publisher and editrix of two zines: the artist forum The Red Planet Poste and the eponymous art/lit zine, er, Lois. Every summer she dresses like a big freak and throws a wild party aptly titled The Martian Love Fest. With less than a year until her 30th birthday, Lois still has no idea what she wants to be when she grows up.

Domme with whip/inset details:
William Rosado.

Domme with cuffs:
Mercy Breheny.

Mistress Elle photographs:
Arena Blaze.

William Rosado is a freelance illustrator and comic book artist whose credits include The New Titans, Superman, Green Arrow, Batman Detective Comics, GI Joe and Robin. William currently resides in Brooklyn, New York and can be reached via e-mail at WRoziti@aol.com.

Mercy Breheny is a freelance illustrator living in Edinburgh. Strangely enough, I don't know much about her paying credits, but I do know she's not afraid to show it and that she and her mom and have been working at a wolf sanctuary. Reach her at mercy@thehelm.com