When you start, the dominatrix says, it feels like being thrown into a deep ocean when you don’t know how to swim. You are coughing up water, choking, feeling like you are drowning.
Her first week at the dungeon Alexis Lass Trbojevic was overwhelmed by what she saw. What she saw was subs being whipped and caned, subs with bloody welts, subs walking on all fours on leashes, subs getting slapped in the face and spat on, subs licking the bottoms of women’s shoes, subs left bound in cages for six or eight hours. She had to remind herself of a line from The Night of the Iguana, “Nothing human disgusts me …”
She thought of her mother saying that you become brave by acting brave. Though she also thought of other things her mother would say about what she was doing. In the beginning it was very hard to get the voice of her Upper East Side upbringing out of her head, to separate the flock of preppie Spence girls in their green plaid uniforms, the blocks of doorman buildings and tulip lined avenues, from the the amorphous entity she was beginning to think of as her self. Those first days in the dungeon, wearing latex, whip in her hands, she hears a voice call her trashy, a whore, a loser, but she doesn’t know if it’s her voice.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/roiphe/2012/09/dominatrix_essay_from_katie_roiphe_s_in_praise_of_messy_lives.html