After graduating from Stanford in 2016 and publishing her first novel, Oola, in 2017, writer Brittany Newell was looking for a job that would provide a decent income, while still allowing her time to write. She waited tables and tended bar, but found both mentally and physically exhausting. Then she took a job as a professional dominatrix.
"A professional dominatrix is a person who is hired by submissives to enact a series of fetish or kink related fantasies," Newell explains. "It's different than being an escort. It's much more about role play and the creation of these fantasy worlds and satisfying different fetishes. And of course, the defining quality would be the power dynamic."
Being a dominatrix provided Newell with the control of her time and creative freedom she was craving. But she says there was more to it than that; she also genuinely enjoyed the work.
"I'm a writer, so I'm always interested in stories and I kind of randomly found this type of work where people are always telling you, not just their stories, but they want to tell you their secrets," she says. "I always like to say that what makes a good writer is also what makes a good dominatrix, which is empathy and curiosity and bravery."
Newell leaned on her work as a "dom" while writing her latest novel, Soft Core, which takes readers into San Francisco's underworld of dive bars, strip clubs and BDSM dungeons. The novel's protagonist, Ruth, is a stripper who begins working as a professional dominatrix after her ex-boyfriend disappears.
While many readers have assumed that Soft Core is autobiographical, Newell says it's a mix of fiction and "sensory details" pulled from her own life and the lives of people she's close to: "I always say [that's] the tax of dating or loving or befriending a writer. Is that all of these sort of like very specific, intimate, sometimes seemingly insignificant details are the things that end up being woven into the book and making it have the texture of real life."
Interview highlights
On what motivates Ruth, the protagonist of Soft Core
I think Ruth is lonely and it actually has made me reflect a lot on my writing in general. And I think I'm always writing about characters who are defined by their longing and motivated by trying to fill the God-shaped hole inside of them, to use 12-step language. ... I think she has a lot of reservations about her own lovability and also her own desirability, which maybe is one of the many reasons why she enjoys her work as a stripper and later as a dominatrix. I think she's a very curious person, which probably would be the main ways that I think I'm like Ruth. Like, I actually think I'm very different from Ruth, but we do share that fundamental curiosity and like an attraction to underworld's or shadows, maybe. I feel like she's very unafraid of things that other people might deem seedy or grubby. I think she feels at ease in those environments or with those types of people.
On how Newell learned to be a dominatrix
The training was not necessarily minimal, but it was very much, like sink or swim when I first started working at that dungeon. ... A dungeon always has all the toys and the paddles and anything, anything you could possibly imagine. It's always already there at the dungeon. And you just get booked and you've shadowed another dominatrix who's kind of gone over mainly the hygiene. ... [Hygiene] was kind of the main thing that the training was around, because that is important.
When it comes to the dungeon scenes ... the training was pretty, like, you learn as you go, and I guess that's probably how they weed out the girls who can't hack it. You just have to be brave. I remember the first few sessions and how overwhelmed I felt. But ... it is like improv and you just kind of have to perform your way through the scene and eventually you get better.
On what a BDSM dungeon is like
I will say every dungeon that I've ever worked in has always been an aboveground, very nice, very clean, big, beautiful house. They're not literally underground. "Dungeon" is a word with a lot of semiotic baggage. … The first dungeon that I ever worked at, I think they call it a "BDSM play house," which is maybe more expansive and allows for images of the different types of fetishes or fantasies that are played out there, not just the whips and chains and torture scenes which did happen there. Like there was the torture room and then there was the student dorm, which was for more like playful sessions. And then there was like a boudoir room that no one really used for some reason. And then and then the medical room. Every dungeon I've ever worked at has a medical room, which always has a very realistic recreation of a doctor's office.
On having more empathy for men now that she's worked as a dominatrix
More than anything, it's made me have so much empathy for men that I certainly never would have had otherwise. Perhaps because of the specific power structure of a BDSM session, where I'm always in charge and they're coming to me in this state of vulnerability and an openness in a way that is almost never replicated in the real world. I have this rarified opportunity to get to witness all of the like, pent up emotions and all of the anxieties and grief and desires that men carry around.
I think a stereotype that is pretty true is that, not all the time, but a lot of the time, the types of men who book sessions with a pro dominatrix are high-powered men who have demanding jobs and make a lot of decisions in their real life and are generally in positions of power or at least have to be dominant and in charge a lot of the time, which is maybe is also true for all normative men to some degree, this expectation of always being in charge and not showing your weakness or whatever. And so in a dungeon, they get to experience the ecstasy of surrender. …
It has definitely made me have a lot more empathy when I see how burdened all of these men are by the demands of toxic masculinity, because I'm highly aware of how toxic masculinity hurts and burdens and alters women and non-binary people. But in the dungeon session, I'm getting a front-row seat to how toxic masculinity has harmed them. … It just feels so good for them to let go in a way that they don't feel like they're able to in their actual lives or with their actual partners.
On safe words in the dominatrix space
I've heard "rutabaga" as a safe word, like, several different times. People think, "I've got such an original safe word," and I'm like, "Is it rutabaga? Because I've heard that one a lot." …
It has to be a word that you would never say in any sort of sexual role play. So "rutabaga" is as random as someone can go. Honestly, like in sessions, like I just prefer the plain old fashioned, like "yellow" for slow down, but don't stop the scene, and "red" for like, this needs to stop now because I'm in too much pain or whatever it is.
Sam Briger and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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