Our paper is not a research study, but rather an important critical viewpoint. Professional domination is frequently trivialized, misunderstood, and not taken seriously. We hope to demystify a fascinating occupation that seems to provide deviant unusual leisure services to many mainstream clients, yet this phenomenon has received virtually no serious attention within the academic literature. We believe that it is time for scholars and professionals to consider this issue more thoroughly and critically.
Our paper is intended to be a first step in this process. The first author is an interdisciplinary social scientist whose interests and formal education span the fields of clinical social work, leisure sciences, deviance and criminology.
The second author shares interests in the behavioral sciences, and has had a long and successful career as a professional dominatrix. In this capacity she has had the opportunity to work with hundreds of clients and several top peers in her field. Drawing from both of our professional backgrounds and observations, the purpose of this paper is to briefly describe and explore the work of highly trained dominants alongside a spectrum of helping professions.
We acknowledge that professional dominants may be of any gender, but we refer herein specifically to dominatrices female gender since the demand for their services is much greater. Given that this is a professional paper, we have decided not to capitalize references to dominatrices and interchangeable terms dommes, dominas, and mistresses.
However, it may be noted that BDSM subcultural discourse and writing practices frequently necessitates capitalization of such terms, which emphasize a power dynamic. Regarding the latter criterion, we prefer the word erotic over sexual, since erotic seems to be a broader term and many BDSM experiences do not include sex. Additionally, recent research challenges the common assumption that all or most BDSM is sexually motivated see Newmahr, a. BDSM may include a number of diverse activities i.
