“Becoming a dominatrix had not been my plan when I moved to New York…”
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I learned about Whip Smart some years back, when the author, Melissa Febos, was on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. It was a fascinating interview. Febos came across as open, frank, articulate, and subtle. And Gross, as always, shone as an interviewer, handling the topic with genuine curiosity and minimal awkwardness.
The description of that life—the “dungeon” in mid-town Manhattan, the outfits, the “sessions,” the “clients”—would be, on its face, interesting enough (and, perhaps, a little disconcerting). But the interview made it clear that her book goes beyond mere salacious description. As a memoir, it charts Febos’s shifting experience and attitudes toward her work there—as she got past uncertainty about what she should do or say in those early sessions; as she got herself off heroin, which removed a sense of “distance” that the drug provided; as she wrestled with the complexities of her feminist beliefs and her sex work; and as the job became in some sense, or at least in some cases, a bit banal.
The book’s been on my list since then, and it’s come up in conversation much more often, and with a wider group of people, than I’d expect—especially in the post-Fifty Shades era, when BDSM (however misrepresented by the books) was brought into the public conversation.
I finally decided that I had said, “I’m planning to read that,” once too often, so I downloaded it to my Kindle. (I had hoped to find it on Audible; it would be a good read for a commute. Alas….)
I’m about a fifth of the way through, and so far I’m enjoying it; Febos, an MFA and a creative writing teacher, is a pretty good writer, and that’s important: the sexiness or quasi-abuse of the narrative could easily overwhelm the reflective aspects of the memoir, turning it into a lame Penthouse Letters or, worse, a dreadful bore.
But she makes skilled, strategic decisions about presenting information or description or narrative. She is most direct when reporting what the dommes say to the “slaves”—the dialog is alternatively amusing and startling. But when she focuses on what happened in a session, she tends to write circuitously, focusing on the effects of the actions rather than the actions themselves. For example, she’ll describe the opening of a session—setting the scene, so to speak—but she’ll make the reader figure out how the scene ends, drawing conclusions from the list of the equipment that had been gathered in preparation for the session, and then a description of the clean-up afterwards.
In her interview, Febos talks about a lot of interesting things that I have not yet encountered in the book (as I said, I’m only 20% in): the motivations and demographics of the dungeon’s “clients,” similarities (and dissimilarities) between these fantasy sessions to therapy, her evolving attitudes toward what she calls the “inversion of misogyny,” and so on. I’m looking forward to those discussions.
In particular, and especially in the wake of Stormy Daniels and her unapologetic, Strümisch und Drang defiance of those who try to shame her into silence, I’m fascinated by the way women’s sex work interacts with feminism—or, more appropriately, feminisms, since there is no single, canonical attitude toward sex work and sex workers that qualifies as authentically feminist.
If my attitude changes, I’ll update the post. But so far, I recommend the book.