My unorthodox lifestyle set me apart from every other uni student. At 19, I was just a little bit older than average but the difference was far greater than that. You hear about all these students having fun, drinking, well that may be the case if you are middle class with wealthy parents. The people like me are the ones who never get to go to the parties because they either get part-time jobs or drop out into dead-end careers with no qualifications. Parties and drinking certainly weren’t part of my life because I was working every bloody hour God sent just to try and muddle my way through. All around me were students enjoying their first taste of freedom away from home. They were all ‘Wow… I can do anything now, blah, blah, blah…’ whilst I was like ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve been living away from anyone since I was 16. I just want to get this course over and done with.’ Everybody seemed interested in going drinking but I just couldn’t be arsed because I’d done all my clubbing and drug-taking and partying and drinking years before.
As the months went by I could feel the university workload increasing and time became even more precious. Even bank holidays such as Easter or Christmas were no holidays for me. They were a precious opportunity to get extra work done and earn extra money. I’m trying hard not to sound self-pitying but it truly was a nightmare, a bloody nightmare, to survive sometimes. I had to cycle to the supermarket and buy all these 9p tins of beans and then live on beans and bread and noodles. I had a friend in Southall who told me you could buy these really cheap packets of noodles there, so I would cycle over and pile them up high. I never really got fruit or vegetables, just the simplest things to have some kind of sustenance. By then I was an expert on living cheaply, so I would go shopping with only three or four pounds and come back with surprising amounts of bargain food.
By my second year I knew there was no way on earth that I could do this any longer; something had to give. It was then that a friend, half-jokingly, pointed out an advert in the local paper for ‘escort services’ in West London. It was a typical massage parlour advertisement of the time but buried in the body of the ad extolling the dubious charms of the ‘friendly and sexy girls’ was an intriguing footnote. It offered ‘good pay’ for a receptionist. My friend claimed she wanted to apply but didn’t have the nerve to call. I was desperate enough not to care about possible embarrassment; I picked up the phone.
A week later I started my first weekend shift as the receptionist in one of West London’s busiest ‘working girls’ flats. I was certainly not a virgin, I had a keen and continuing interest in fetish fashion and had played what I thought were some pretty kinky games with my boyfriend in the past, but answering the telephone in that flat was an eye-opener for me. Until that moment I had no idea just how many, many men were willing to pay for sex. The phone rang constantly, literally never stopping. Just 18 years old and relatively naïve, I found myself talking to a succession of men about their crudest sexual fantasies. Some of the callers were embarrassed to the point of stammering stupidity, many were clearly a little drunk and some were brazen and just wanted to engage me in sex talk on the phone. My job was to try and make the girls sound as beautiful, as sexually voracious and as alluring as possible without getting the guys so excited that they could take care of their frustration themselves, over the phone, for free. It was a fine line to tread and it also required me to lie through my teeth!
According to my patter, all of the women working there were ‘slim and attractive’ all were ‘young’ and ‘eager for sex’. In this telephone fantasy land, the girls ‘enjoyed all positions’ and were particularly fond of ‘the more mature man’. To be fair, many of the women were nice girls just trying to earn a living but this was, in truth, merely a somewhat downmarket suburban brothel, not a high-class, international escort agency: I just had to make it sound like the latter rather than the former. Thus a tubby, 58-year-old prostitute named Irene, with greying, badly-dyed blonde hair and troublesome lower-back pain, transformed into ‘Tamsin, a young, in her early thirties, slim sexual athlete with a penchant for swinging from bedroom chandeliers’. I also rapidly became adept at the codeword conversations that indicated the precise services on offer. Many, such as ‘hand relief’ or ‘oral’ were self-explanatory, but others seemed to involve a somewhat-stereotyped, racist geographical tour of Europe that took me some while to decipher. ‘Does she do Greek?’ I would be asked, or ‘French without?’ Nowadays even well-brought up young ladies would have little trouble in translating those as requests for anal intercourse and fellatio without a condom, but I sometimes got a little lost on this continental journey. With a naturally mischievous streak, I was often tempted to make up my own nonsense terms for a giggle: ‘She will do Finnish… and maybe Latvian… but don’t you dare ask her for a Romanian kiss.’
Once I got over my initial awkwardness, and better learned the language of brothel-speak, the job suited me down to the ground. Within days I was happily discussing a client’s need for ‘water-sports’ which many of the girls didn’t mind, or ‘kaviar’ (always, for some reason, with that spelling) which none of the girls wanted to touch with a bargepole. I soon became adept at picking out the real weirdoes who just might be dangerous and the timewasters, who just wasted my time talking. The girls were on the whole decent and kind to very young me and it was interesting to hear snippets of the convoluted stories of their lives in between appointments. Most important of all, I suddenly found that I no longer had to worry where my next meal was coming from; for the first time in my life I had good money in my pocket from my receptionist/maid duties. The real oddity was that my own sex life was just about non-existent at the time. I was living like a nun at home but discussing every sexual perversion under the sun each weekend in one of London’s busiest brothels.
Throughout my young life I had always striven to gain as much experience and knowledge as I could from every situation in which I had found myself. I started my ‘maiding’ with the attitude that this was going to be no more than a short-term financial fix to help me survive through to my graduation. Soon, however, I realised the scale of a hidden demand that was not being met; there was real financial potential right here. The mis-match in supply and demand that I had identified was for girls who could dominate men in the way they clearly desired. Answering the phones every day, I would get constant requests for ‘domination services’ but most of the girls would never entertain that sort of client. The brothel worked on encouraging a rapid turnover of straight sex appointments; the best clients were, to put it bluntly, in the door for a quick suck and a fuck and back out again on the street, minus £60 from their wallets. The girls would charge extra for more fancy games, such as putting on some of the cheap and frankly tatty uniforms hanging up in each room, or for inserting their favourite dildo or vibrator into their pussy, waggling it around for a few minutes and then gasping their way to a patently fake conclusion. For the few extra pounds it was hardly worth their while to bother. They certainly didn’t want to get involved in lengthy scenarios with submissive men who wanted to be humiliated or beaten, not least because none of them had the faintest idea of how to do that.
For me, however, the prospect was intriguing. I had been fascinated by fetish clothing ever since first encountering Madonna in my early teens. Thigh-high boots, tight-fitting and shiny outfits in rubber or leather had always caught my eye. I knew I would never have the money to buy such clothes for myself; why not indulge that particular passion for my own fun and make money as well. It just seemed a natural progression to willingly stroll down the road to where my own sexual enjoyment could be found. The opportunity to do that came a short while later when a new customer appeared on the doorstep and was ushered into one of the girl’s bedroom. There was a brief interlude with the door shut and then the girl re-appeared and told me she didn’t want to see this particular client. As far as I could establish, he had asked her for domination services that she didn’t feel experienced enough to provide. Seizing the opportunity, I asked if she’d mind if I gave him a go. Moments late
r it was me walking back into the bedroom while the working girl took a well-earned break. It was a watershed moment for me: I had started the day as a receptionist and maid but was going to end it as a professional dominatrix. All I had to do was fulfil my first-ever client’s request:
‘Tell me my cock is too small…’
CHAPTER 15
A MISTRESS’S FIRST STEPS
The middle-aged man patiently awaiting my attention in the whorehouse bedroom was an unlikely candidate to be into kinky sex. He just appeared to be so ‘normal’: smartly dressed in a neat grey suit and looking every inch a dull civil servant. He immediately put me in mind of Penfold, the bespectacled, little hamster companion of the cartoon character Danger Mouse, a firm television favourite of my youth.
True to character, Penfold was clutching a briefcase from which he proceeded to pull out a stunning collection of items which would never have made it onto kids’ TV. He carefully laid out a range of different-sized plastic and rubber dildoes in rows upon the bed. It was, to say the least, surprising, but I was determined not to giggle or react in any way which might shatter my first customer’s illusions. The fake cocks ranged in size from a realistic half-a-dozen inches up to a monstrous pink penis so long and fat that he must have bent it double to get into his case. Outwardly I just tried to look stern and commanding. Inside I was thinking: ‘Oh My God… what on earth is this lot? What on earth does he want me to do?’
What he did want was for me to criticise the size of his penis and compare it in the most unfavourable terms possible with the dildo cock collection he had prepared on the bed. ‘I want you to tell me my cock is too small,’ he haltingly explained, his voice mumbling into his boots and sounding as nervous as a kitten. I was, luckily, that day wearing high boots with high heels and so I was already towering over him as he nervously stammered out an explanation of his needs. ‘I want you to compare me with these dildoes and tell me that they are what women need, rather than someone small like me. I need you to humiliate me as much as you can.’ His demands were desperately light on detail because he could barely speak, either from excitement or fear. Little did he know, but he was probably talking to the only woman in London more nervous than him. My nervousness stemmed from the fact that I had never even considered such a scenario before. I’d always thought that you should big-up, rather than belittle, the size of a man’s penis. Outwardly I was oozing confidence but I wasn’t feeling confident at all. Could I do this without laughing or losing the plot? Well, I thought: ‘Let’s give it a whirl.’
I cannot tell you how much fun I had. I started slowly by making him strip naked in the middle of the tiny bedroom with its sole bedside cabinet, a mirror on the wall and a rack of ‘sexy’ uniforms all chained together. He obeyed instructions and just stood quietly whilst I walked around and around on the tatty grey carpet staring at his genitals. Truth is, I can’t remember now, all these years later, whether or not he really was any smaller than average. After the first few thousand penises they all seem to merge into one. But I had no trouble in selecting suitable insults. ‘You weren’t exactly first in the queue when it came to handing out willies, were you?’ I sneered. ‘How could you possibly think that any woman would be interested in that? You can’t even make it hard, can you; it’s useless, absolutely fucking totally useless.’ As the session continued I was going into more and more graphic detail of how inadequate a man ‘Penfold’ was. At one point I tried measuring his flaccid cock in inches and estimating how tiny it really was. Then I picked up each dildo in turn form the bed and made him hold them against himself, laughingly pointing out that I was most definitely not comparing like with like here. Spotting that he was wearing a wedding ring, I got more and more personal. ‘Does your wife even know if you push it inside her?’ I asked. ‘She must still be a virgin. You’d never have broken her hymen with that thing. I bet she’s probably out right now fucking the milkman, or any man with a decent sized prick.’
I was absolutely loving every minute of the game and, amazing to see, he was clearly growing more and more excited the nastier my creative imagination became. I was being an actress because this was all completely alien to me. I’d never encountered this type of play before. My only personal interest was in fetish wear and bondage play with my boyfriend, and the idea of humiliation was a bit of a revelation because I found it quite exciting and something I could really be good at. Over the years since I’ve learned that it is the ‘feedback loop’ which creates my excitement As my client’s excitement mounts I get excited by the fact that I’ve excited him – if you see what I mean. I may not find what I am doing exciting per se, but the effect it has can be a major turn-on. I hadn’t thought so far ahead as to consider whether or not he might want to climax but, in the event, he showed no interest in any form of ‘relief’. I could have stayed there all day hurling out insults but in the end I thought I had best bring things to a close.
‘I can’t look at such a pathetic specimen anymore. It’s insulting that you could even dare show me something that small. Put it away now and get out of my sight.’ Then I sat on the bed with my back towards him whilst he stumbled around trying to get dressed. With his clothes back on, he regained a little of the dignity I had so effectively stripped away over the previous half-hour. The transformation was astounding; Penfold the submissive little cartoon creature vanished and a confident businessman emerged. Now it was my turn to be on the back foot as he asked me how much he owed for his session. I didn’t have a clue what to charge him. ‘I’ve not actually touched him, just give him all this verbal abuse,’ I thought, ‘I can’t charge him much.’ So I just said £30 – the first figure that popped into my head.
Considering the amount of time I had spent in the bedroom and the brothel’s normal range of fees, I had cocked-up (pun not intended) completely. Double that price might have been more appropriate. Unsurprisingly Penfold was delighted to settle his bill. ‘Thank you Mistress,’ he said, ‘a wonderful session, thank you so much. You’re the best Mistress I’ve ever seen.’ I may have undercharged, I may have been inexperienced, but I’d had a bucket load of fun… and Penfold went away as happy as Larry.
I was happy too. I had just earned what for me was a lot of money with the greatest of ease and without even having to touch my first client. The other girls were impressed when I told them the story, not with the unusual kinkiness of his request but at the way that I had been able to dream up so many insults and keep the abuse flowing. ‘How can you do that,’ asked one of the women. ‘I could tell a man his dick was small, but not in enough ways to keep him paying for an hour.’ I wasn’t sure myself how I had done it; I had quite liked Penfold but it just came so naturally to humiliate and abuse him and obviously my creative juices must have been in full flow. It was a routine that was to be repeated many times, not always with small-cock insults but with a veritable smorgasbord mix of humiliation that could pour from my lips. I had to use a lot of creative imagination because I had precious little BDSM equipment with which to work. In the weeks to come, one of the other girls even asked to sit in a session and watch me in action. She said she wanted to learn my secrets – but in the end she decided to stick to safer sex.
The fact that none of the other women could handle the domination clients was an ideal opportunity for me. By then I knew what each of them would, or would not do and I knew that none of them would consider performing any sort of anal services on a man. Guys would ask all the time to have fingers stuck in their arses or would want the women to use a strap-on to fuck them. The girls all had a similar reaction: ‘I’m not doing that; I’m not touching them there.’ So I would constantly be taking phone calls asking for various anal games and I would have to turn them away. I soon recognised that a common theme was developing.
One of the brothels in which I was answering the phones had one very small room that the girls never wanted to use because it didn’t have a proper bed. That was not the slightest problem for me because I had no intention of sl
eeping with anyone and no intention of letting men get close enough to lay me down and touch me. At some time in the past, a half-hearted attempt had been made to kit out this little room as an amateur dungeon. The walls and ceiling were painted matt black and there was an ultra-violet light in the ceiling. A bench sat on the floor and a wooden cross was fixed to the wall. If the working girls didn’t ever want to use it then I had to seize the initiative. I was still very much a student and all of this was really just for a bit of fun. But I had studied enough business theory to recognise that there was a market here, with needs that weren’t being met. Perhaps I could contribute to a much-needed supply?
I started on a small scale using the unloved room to deal with the submissive guys who called or turned up at the door. I saw some weird and wonderful people but found every one of them interesting and fun. I never tried to judge people and although much of what I was asked to do was way outside my own experience I tried hard to make them happy. There were some things that I wouldn’t do, not because I found them too strange, but because they were outside of my own limits. Even so, there were some memorable moments when even I found it hard to understand what pleasure it might bring to a client. One of the weirdest was the man who liked me to stand on his head. At first I didn’t quite understand what he wanted me to do but then he lay down on the floor and explained it in detail. He wasn’t into boot worship, or a foot fetish, he didn’t want bondage or any form of sexual relief. He would come in and I would stand on his head in silence. Ten minutes later he would say, ‘Thank you, I’m quite happy, that’s fine’ before paying my minimum charge for one hour and then leaving.
Fifty Shades of Domination - My True Story Page 11