In the most recent episode of the VICE Slutever show, embeded into the post below this one, I spent a day with the pro-Domme Mistress Amanda Whip, and she gave me #sexy beginners lessons in “BDSM for the bedroom”. However, there were large parts of my interview with her–specifically the parts about how she got her start as a dominatrix, and her career thus far–that were edited out of the final cut of the episode. But it was all sooo juicy, so I decided to publish it here as a Q&A. I hope this interview will be useful for some of you, as I’ve been getting a lot of emails recently from girls who are all like, “Uhhh… I want to make money beating up guys, can you teach me how to become a dominatrix?!” So if you’re one of those girls, PLEASE, read and learn! You’re welcome.
When did first become interested in fetish?
Mistress Amanda Whip: Well, I grew up in South Florida, which is a very sexually charged place, so from a very young age I was just aware of sexual… ya know… stuff. And then I started making erotic art–drawing pictures of sex, of nudity, and some minor fetish stuff crept its way in there too.
Like what?
I remember this one scene that I drew where a bunch of girls were jumping on a guy on a trampoline. So they were trampling him, basically. My friend’s mom found that one and got freaked out! And I loved drawing girls tied up.
I always wonder how much of our sexual desires are programed when we’re very young, like how much our parents influence what we’re “into” later on in life.
Well, my parents are pretty open-minded, and there was always a lot of nudity around me growing up. And my grandma was kind of a man-hating psycho, so I guess I’ve picked up some elements of my sexual personality from all of them! Like when I was about 3 or 4 my grandma has this boyfriend, and she would always encourage me to beat him over the head and do other evil things to him. I was a sadistic kid, and she really brought it out in me.
And when did you move more seriously into the world of BDSM?
I guess it was when I moved to New York and started going to fetish parties. I would go to the Bite Party at The Delancey, and Suspension—places like that. And they always had these “play areas” in the back where you could play one-on-one with “real life slaves.” Those were my first experiences beating up guys, or being dominant with them, like “Rub my back, rub my feet, get me drinks,” and stuff. I was like “Wow, I can’t believe this exists!” Guys would literally line up on their hands-and-knees to give me an eternal foot rub. And if I wanted to stick my heel down their throat and make them bleed, I could. They were there to serve.
Do you get paid at those types of parties?
Some of the guys will give you money, but most of them don’t. I didn’t have my hustle on back then, as I was only about 18 or 19, so I was doing it mostly for fun.
So when did you realize this was something you wanted to do professionally?
Well, I started out doing art modeling, and working at lap dance parties. And then I started doing fetish films, so I sort of worked backwards, actually. Basically I answered a casting call to perform in a fetish film at this small, independent BDSM space, and then afterward they asked me if I wanted a job as a dominatrix, and I just said OK.
And what did performing in the fetish film involve? Was there actual sex?
No. I’ve done some girl-on-girl videos, but the fetish films I did were mostly cock and ball torture, crushing, kneeing–stuff like that. Fun things!
So at this first job, were you a house Domme? I know lots of girls start out that way–they work on staff at a dungeon, and then clients come in and pick out the girl they want to session with. It’s sort of brothel vibes, but it’s an easy way to start out, and you get a lot of training and experience.
I wasn’t a house Domme actually. The main draw for me at that first place was that I only had to show up when I had a client, and they would find the clients for me. Granted, I didn’t get a ton of clients and it was kind of a mess, but it was an easy start.
The things that seems strange to me about working as a house Domme is that the initial situation, where you’re waiting for a client to pick you, seems quite submissive.
Yeah, that’s why I’ve never wanted to work in a major dungeon house–I don’t like the idea of sitting in a room with fifteen girls and a guy coming in saying, “Oh, I want that one,” and then afterward having to dominate him, when he just dominated me. But for a lot of girls that’s the only way they can get into it. But the great part about it is that when you work in a house, you instantly meet a clientele base that you can take with you when you decide to go independent.
Generally you get trained when you work in-house. Did you get any basic training?
In the first place I worked they did try to train me, but it was a little shady. Really the owner just wanted to get a free session with me as a submissive. He said I should be his sub to teach me how to be dominant. But it didn’t pan out the way he wanted, and I ended up forcing him to pay me for the session. Basically it was me and another girl, and he tied us both up and faced us away from him, and I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw him pull up the other girl’s dress and pull down his pants and start jerking off. I was like, “This is not what was discussed, “ and told him to never fucking do that again, and to hire me. Ha! So I wasn’t really formally trained, but I experimented and had friends who were Dommes, and I read a lot of fetish literature.
Some girls who work at dungeons work as a “switch.” How does that work?
That’s when you switch between being a Domme or a sub, depending on what is requested for the session. When I first started my boss was like, “You can work only as a Domme or you can be a switch, and switches get $300 an hour.” So I was like, “Okay, let’s try that and see what happens.” I let him know in the beginning that I’m not really a submissive, so I started doing light switch sessions, but it didn’t last long. I’m not good at taking orders and couldn’t keep my mouth shut, and I tended to anger the dominant guys. Like, this one guy threw a glass of water in my face because he got so angry at me for not obeying.
Is being a Domme a lucrative job for you?
Yeah, it pays my bills and gives me a nice life.
Is it the only way that you make money?
No, I do some burlesque here and there. I’ve been stage managing burlesque shows for a while, and I had a small chocolate making business for a while too.
Has there ever been a time when you were really grossed out or shocked during a session? Like, “What am I doing here? I’m a nice girl!”
Well, I don’t really consider myself a nice girl :) But there was this one intense time where a client wanted to eat my shit. But I wasn’t ready to pinch out a log on this dude, so I compromised and I told him I would sell him a bag of my used toilet paper. And the moment I was handing him a Ziploc bag of my used, shitty toilet paper, and he was looking at it like it was a bag of chips, in my head I was like, “How did I get here?”
Lol. Have you shit on anyone since then?
Not, I don’t like excrement. I’ll pee on someone if we have a good relationship and the money’s right, but that’s not my thing either. Although I’ve heard I have particularly sweet urine.
I’ve seen guys drink literally pints of pee, so much that they start choking and burping up pee burps.
The worst is when they’re laying on their back and you fill their mouth with pee to the brim, and then they just close their mouth and gulp and you know it’s a hot load of piss they just swallowed.
Yum! So, from your experience, why do you think so many guys like drinking pee so much?
A lot of them just like the humiliating aspect of drinking someone else’s waste. They like feeling like they’re a toilet. That, or they just like feeling close to a woman, and they feel that’s the best way for someone as lowly as themselves to do it.
You know when you love someone so much that you literally want to get inside their body, just so you can be as close to them as possible? Do you think pee drinking is kind of the same thing–wanting to get at what’s inside someone else?
Yeah, I don’t do a ton of piss stuff but I get a lot of guys who want me to spit in their mouths, and when I ask them about it they say they feel it’s the closest they can get to me. Also, a lot of this stuff is just about wanting attention. I think some people are just born feeling like they should be beneath other people. And others are in really powerful positions, or are the head of a household, and they just need to go somewhere and relax; they say seeing a Domme is like maintaining peace of mind. There are some foot fetishists who come in and just spend the whole hour under my feet, and it looks like they’re meditating, like it’s some sort of Zen thing. I get texts from them after like, “Thank you so much, now I can get through my week without going crazy!”
It’s a stereotype that high-powered businessmen, after bossing people around all day, see Dommes because they crave a role reversal. Do you think that stereotype is true?
Yes, for sure. But my clients are all across the board—old, young, professional types, DJs, musicians, shoe salesmen, lawyers, doctors. Everyone can have a fetish.
The only commonality I’ve seen between my own clients is that they’re usually white men.
That’s true. Well, I get some Asians. And Hasidic Jews are big, because they’re so repressed. They grow up thinking these crazy things about sex and who they are as sexual beings, and they don’t want to offend God or their people, but when they’re with their dominatrix they can be themselves and just get it all out.
Has a client ever surprised you with his reason for seeing you?
There was this one Hasidic Jew who told me that he’d had cancer as a child, and as part of his treatment I guess they’d zapped whatever it was that made him able to produce sperm. But, as an Orthodox Jew, you can’t get married or have a family unless you can ejaculate, basically, because you need to be able to have kids. So he came in because he couldn’t ejaculate and so desperately wanted a family, a life, a wife… everything. He’d already been to doctors, therapists, and sex therapists, and I was basically his last stop. And I actually did make him ejaculate, at least a little bit, by peeing on him and spitting on his nipple.
Whoa.
But after that he got so desperate and would call me at all hours, like, “I need to see you, ahhhh…!”, so I had to stop seeing him; it was too intense for me. I didn’t get into this business to get involved with something so deep.
What’s your favorite kind of session?
I really like a corporal session where it’s just me taking out my frustration on some guy. I like seeing a man squirm or flinch as I’m pulling back to whip him.
Have you ever felt unsafe during a session?
Generally I don’t, because I’m good at screening people and getting references, and the place I work now has security cameras, and the clients know that. However there was one situation a couple years ago when a crackhead came in and was smoking crack in front of me and blowing it in my face. He was pacing back and forth, sweating profusely, saying, “You want to hear about the most twisted, fucked up fantasy?” and then started talking about fucking dogs and kids. I was like, “You need to leave now, this isn’t the kind of session I do.” He spent a while searching for his crack rocks on the carpet before he actually left, but I eventually got him out the door.
What’s the most extreme request you’ve gotten from a client?
Once I was burning a guy with cigarettes and he asked me to burn his taint.
AHH! NO! Did you do it?
Of course! I didn’t burn him that bad, I just kind of kissed it with the cigarette. I also had this other guy–a human ATM, cash pig type–who wanted to sign over his power of attorney to me and put me on his bank account, but that ended up not working because he was a little too high maintenance for me.
I read another interview with you where you talked about farting in a client’s mouth.
Yeah, that was the guy that would buy my used toilet paper. I would give him the toilet paper, he would nibble on it, I would give him a bottle of my pee or whatever, a then, for the rest of the session, he just wanted me to fart in his mouth. It required a couple days of preparation of me just eating broccoli and loading up on food.
Sounds traumatizing. So, what do you like most about being a Domme?
I like meeting people and finding out about what’s going on inside their heads, where they come from, and what makes them tick. Especially if they are freaks, and you meet a lot of freaks first-hand in this job!
Do you think being a “freak” is bad?
No, not at all. I’m a freak! Think about it this way: there are a lot of people who live their lives repressed, who don’t acknowledge their desires. And then there are others, like my clients, who acknowledge what they want, and go out and seek it. And more power to them!
Photo by Sandy Kim
