'Body of Work': The Artistic Merit of BDSM
By Adriel Saporta
December 14, 2010
© 2010 Broad Recognition
- Reprinted With Permission -
Original Article / PDF Reprint


Our former HeadMistress Collette

“Mistress is making a painting for you,” Blunt leans over to tell me.

She is referring to the series of welts on Slavid’s backside that Mistress Collette is creating with a single-tailed bullwhip. Slavid is leaning over a black sawhorse in the basement dungeon of La Domaine with his underpants around his ankles. His sixty-year-old rump is bright red, having been hit for the past ten minutes by a variety of different instruments: white paddle, whips, bare hand—all of which have been carefully selected by Mistress Collette.

“Slavid is the type of sub who likes to beaten bloody,” Master R explains to me, as the marks that Mistress Collette’s flogging has left behind begin to rise. On my right, Master R and Blunt are seated next to me on a couch. His hand rests lightly on her crotch, and the two giggle together.

Meanwhile, Mistress Collette runs her right hand gently over the canvas of Slavid’s buttocks.

“See how they change over time?” Mistress Collette asks me. “Would you like to feel?”

I politely decline.

Back upstairs, seated around a dinner table, Mistress Collette tells me, “When you apply marks to someone, it’s done in an artistic way. There’s an aesthetic and sensibility.”

She once bull-whipped a man fifty strokes. The slave later commented that his back looked like the “delicate grass” from a Monet painting. “I never broke the skin,” Mistress Collette says proudly. “Each mark, skin reacts differently, and it’s beautiful to see them flush and change. At first it will be a flat red mark, then dark purple, then it will raise, and the bruise evolves: it changes from red, to purple, to yellow, to green.”

La Domaine Esemar, founded seventeen years ago, is “The World's Oldest BDSM Training Chateau,” according to its website. It is a school and professional dungeon for BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism and Masochism), run by Head Master R and Head Mistress Collette. The establishment is considered one of the most prestigious dungeons in the business. People from the farthest reaches of the world come here for the sole purpose of visiting.

After reading “Will the Real Dominatrix Please Stand Up: Artistic Purity and Professionalism in the S&M Dungeon,” written by Columbia’s Danielle Lindemann for publication in Sociological Forum, I became interested in the possibility of BDSM as an art form. I got in touch with several pro-dommes, one of whom had just finished her PhD at Yale. She suggested I speak with “the folks up at La Domaine” if I wanted to explore the artistic side of BDSM. Next thing I knew, I was driving along I-91 on my way to Master R’s sex dungeon.

While forms of BDSM have been around for thousands of years, it has recently become decidedly mainstream and linked to prostitution. Although BDSM may involve penetration, as long as the exchange is monetary, no genital touching of any type occurs. Mistress Collette tells me that in her personal sexual experiences as a domme, she could sit on a slave’s face; with a client, though, she wouldn’t do that. “Technically,” Master R explains, “this counts as sexual entertainment.”

Slavid, a friend of Master R and Mistress Collette, is La Domaine’s resident lawyer of sorts. He is dressed as though he has just come from the office, and wears a pair of black thick-rimmed, square-shaped glasses. He emphasizes that despite the sexual context of the dungeon, there is no contact with either the domme’s or the client’s genitals. It is important to make this distinction clear, he tells me, because genital touching is considered prostitution, and, thus, illegal.

Pro-dommes who partake in such prostitution are stigmatized by those who don’t. “The dommes in Chicago give hand jobs!” Mistress Collette cries in disgust. These mainstream pro-dommes, and their breach of the law, distract the public from the psychological benefits and artistic merit of BDSM.

There is a significant ideological difference between BDSM and standard prostitution. Master R says, “At one time, there were temple priestesses, and they had huge sexual powers.” He explains that many women would bring their sons to these priestesses to be “initiated into their sexualities.” The priestesses would also see warriors who had recently returned from battle—presumably with forms of post-traumatic stress disorder—in order to restore them to health before sending them back to their wives. Pro-dommes are a modern realization of these temple priestesses, whereas, as Master R puts it, “prostitution is a male-dominated society trying to strip temple priestesses of their rights.”

At La Domaine, BDSM is more than just sex work; it is a form of art.

Masters, Mistresses, and slaves are hosted and trained to the highest standard at La Domaine. As is the case for many reputable institutions in the arts—Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism—there are skeptics in their respective fields who insist that such schooling is a waste of time.

However, considering the weapons, and psychological and sexual humiliation, implicated in BDSM, it’s not unreasonable to consider the importance of proper training.

Master R demonstrates a remarkable academic and emotional understanding of his life work, and has created a sanctuary in which he may impart his wisdom to others. It is a Hogwarts-like establishment where men and women, otherwise at loss in a hetero-normative world, can come for refuge. Among their clients are gay and transgender men and women, even animals (people who act like animals, that is). Suddenly, at La Domaine, they are no longer alone.

From the outside, the La Domaine “château” is fairly understated: a worn cottage thickly surrounded by woods. The natural environment and the isolation it provides are important aspects to the training experience (they are often visited by black bears and cranes). The evening of my visit they are serving rabbit and fresh trout caught in the nearby stream.

When I arrive, in the front yard are a man and a woman, both of whom help Master R and Mistress Collette around the house in exchange for sessions in the dungeon. “Harry was superb today,” Master R tells us later. Blunt agrees, “He’s really grown a lot.” Harry is a crooked older man with the flowing white hair of Ian McKellen’s Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, into which a yellow flower is neatly tucked. He is shirtless, and a large bellybutton protrudes from his potbelly.

I first meet his female counterpart, a large woman with extremely dry skin, as her arms are gently massaged and lathered by Mistress Collette with a thick yellow paste. “Oh, I got some on your boob! Sorry!” Mistress Collette laughs. The woman glows under Mistress Collette’s gaze.

Mistress Collette is a self-taught expert in homeopathy. After seeing so many men and women naked, she came face to face with a variety of terrible skin conditions. She took it upon herself to learn how to cure her clients and friends naturally, so that “they feel more beautiful, open.”

Mistress Collette escorts me inside a dark, yet homey, space that serves as both a living and a dining room. It has a warm, intimate feel, and is charmingly scattered with various eclectic pieces. Empty bottles of wine are lined on top of a brick hearth, in front of which sits a wood-burning stove that Master R gets up to stoke every now and then. A large cozy leopard-print armchair, with a white shag carpet hung over its back, sits on top of a beautiful oriental rug, and a red curtain hangs in the doorway to the kitchen. There is certainly something of the New England homespun at La Domaine.

I meet Blunt, a Mistress in Training who is hardly twenty years old. She’s a beautifully fresh-faced girl with a head full of luscious, maroon-colored corkscrew curls. As long as she is in training and until she graduates a Mistress in her own right, she is referred to as “slave” by Master R and Mistress Collette—although her relationship with them is remarkably familial. As her slave nickname suggests, Blunt is a bit reserved at first, but quickly opens up over the course of the afternoon, sitting at the dining room table with me, biting her nails, painted bright turquoise.

I have been invited to stay the night at La Domaine, and Master R is incredibly excited to show me the guest room. In contrast to the dusky warmth of the living room, this bedroom is bright and airy; everything was impeccably fresh and clean.

Hung on a long row of hooks that spans an entire wall were various tools for flogging—including a rubber chicken. On the next wall were two bookshelves filled with a multitude of texts, almost all of which concerned sexuality: from erotica, to the United States Constitution in Braille, to a book of Barbara Nitke’s photography, entitled KISS OF FIRE: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism (on the cover of which is a photograph of Master R and Madame, the former Head Mistress of La Domaine).

Next to the bed stood a tall dresser.

“Those are the Snoop Drawers,” Master R tells me. “For guests who like to snoop.”

Inside is every imaginable dildo and vibrator, and scores of other such sex toys.

The bathroom is equally as luxurious as the bedroom. Four erotic cartoons hang above the rather large bathtub.

Then, after much anticipation:

“Should we show her the dungeon?”

Mistress Collette lets out a soft laugh that Master R accurately describes as “chilling.” Both her voice and touch strike the perfect balance between remarkably gentle and terrifyingly sharp. Leaving Slavid draped over the sawhorse, she glides gracefully over to her wall of weapons where she contemplates her next flogging tool. She chooses two whips and returns to Slavid. She circles her arms rhythmically in front of her body, twirling the whips as a bandleader would batons, striking Slavid’s rear on each upswing.

She steps back to look at the damage done to Slavid—perhaps as Pollock might have inspected a canvas after going at it with splattering paint. Cocking her head to the side, pacing, she seems to be contemplating what type of hit she would like to try next, which cheek needs more work, which instrument hasn’t been used in a while. As she decides, she lays her left hand gently on Slavid’s back and slaps each butt cheek alternately with her right bare hand. She then leans over to whisper in Slavid’s ear. Although the specifics of the conversation cannot be heard, the two seem to be sharing a loving exchange of words. Slavid turns his head and smiles; Mistress Collette chuckles softly. She straightens, steps back, and continues her flogging.

Meanwhile, Master R is staring at Mistress Collette with a mixture of pride and awe: “You’re looking at one of the top five dommes that I have ever seen.” And Master R, over the course of his lifetime in the business, has seen, firsthand, the world’s best dominants.

Master R’s long brown hair, turning grey and balding a bit on top, is pulled back into a low ponytail. He wears skintight black lamé leggings and a black long-sleeved shirt with the La Domaine logo printed on it. On the bridge of his nose rests a pair of large-framed, metal-rimmed prescription glasses.

It doesn’t take long to recognize Master R’s intellect; lines of wisdom and experience are etched into his face. He is a paternal figure at La Domaine, presiding over all that transpires, encouraging dominants and submissives alike to reach their full potential. His knowledge of the world spans all fields—from the fine arts to history, from politics to pop culture. It seemed that his wealth of knowledge was never-ending.

Master R and Mistress Collette have an “open, but very anchored-to-each-other, relationship.” Mistress Collette is a beautiful woman, who looks much younger than the forty-three years that she has behind her. Her thin, skeletal frame only emphasizes her striking features and angular face. On the day of my visit, she wears a red faux-snakeskin leather halter-top, cropped above her belly button, and a matching red pencil skirt, which ends right below the knee. She wears lavender eyeshadow and her brown hair is pinned up in a plastic alligator clip. She ices her right wrist, which is incredibly sore from too much one-handed spanking the day before.

From as far back as she can remember, Mistress Collette considered herself a woman worthy of worship. “[My childhood fantasies] definitely involved Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, and the woman tied up on the railroad with the big blade spinning towards her crotch,” she tells me. “It takes you a long, long, long time for the penny to drop, but, I mean, these were images that really influenced me, inspired me, polarized me, made me think, made me cream.” As a child, when asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she couldn’t give a straight answer—she knew it would be something of which she could not yet conceive.

At thirteen years old, she was introduced to the possibility of becoming a dominatrix. Ava Taurel, a highly esteemed New York pro-domme, was on The Phil Donahue Show. “Growing up in the very conservative, white, middle-class, factory worker, no-books-in-the-house, no-musical-instruments, very stifling atmosphere and the impressions of the women I had around me… and then I saw this woman, and she was intelligent, articulate, beautiful, interesting, and she had this career and she went home to a husband. And I was like, Wow, how do I get there? How do I get to grow up to be a woman like that?”

Mistress Collette doesn’t consider herself a feminist. “Because I don’t like ‘isms,’” she explains.

“Except for ‘jism,’” Blunt reminds her.

Much of La Domaine’s ideology is based on the destruction of gender dichotomies. There is an immense amount of respect exchanged between dominant and submissive. “We don’t think subs are less than doms,” Master R tells me. “There’s an unstated equalization process there. I wouldn’t want to dominate someone who’s not my equal. And everyone’s equally entitled to use sex as sex, and use sex as metaphor. And metaphor has a huge amount to do with democratizing the world.” In fact, as Blunt adds, slaves “can dom most Mistresses and Masters from a submissive side. If you’re good enough.”

Master R says that some new clients will ask, “Are you bisexual? Pansexual?” “To us,” he tells me, “we do so many things that are beyond gender that those barriers break down. Gender fluid and role fluid. Some people come in saying ‘I’d never allow myself to be touched by a man’ and then they change. We say ‘It’s not the shape of the genitalia but the quality of the domination and submission.’”

As Mistress Collette tells me, “I don’t believe in female superiority. Everyone has a huge potential and I want everyone to attain their huge potential.” Mistress Collette wanted to level out the playing field.

She tells me that much of what appeals to her, though, about being a pro-domme is finding herself, finally, on an equal level of power as the men she dominates: “Way before we had male patriarchy, we had female dominance.”

“The Neolithic emergence to the Bronze Age—that’s what you’re talking about,” Master R adds encouragingly.

Mistress Collette’s husband took on a pro bono case (Barbara Nitke and NCSF v. Alberto Gonzales) against the Communications Decency Act of 1996, meant to regulate all things pornographic on the Internet. Barbara Nitke, as a world-famous photographer, was cherry-picked for the case. She argued that she couldn’t upload her most extreme S&M photos for fear of prosecution. Mistress Collette’s husband eventually lost the case in 2006, but the question had already been posed: Can BDSM be considered “art” or to have “artistic merit”? How does one make such a decision?

During the court proceedings, Mistress Collette’s husband needed to raise sufficient funds (the transcript cost alone was over $20,000). Stir-crazy at home in Long Island, Mistress Collette decided to throw what turned out to be a successful fundraiser called “Indecent.” It was a silent auction in which any work that an artist was afraid to publish was auctioned off, including pieces concerning couples of mixed race, different ages, and even bestiality.

Here, Master R first met Mistress Collette. He remembers that she wore a stunning red dress and was surrounded by men. He could tell she was a natural dominant.

He invited her and her husband to a gathering at La Domaine, where Mistress Collette “just did some cock and ball bondage.” The next day Master R told her that she had outshone all of the other dommes the night before (and given the quality of dominants at La Domaine, this was no easy feat): “I had seen it and was transfixed.” Although her bondage technique had been impressive, more memorable was the way in which she communicated so instinctively with her slaves. Mistress Collette was awestruck when Master R told her that she should do professional domination.

She struggled often with her husband’s double standard as to sacrifices made for their relationship. Her husband was an experienced submissive who agreed to be Mistress Collette’s slave for a number of years. They fell in love. But navigating a relationship can be difficult for a sex worker.

As a lawyer, trying to make partner at a firm, he kept his BDSM life fairly quiet. Before she knew it, Mistress Collette was a Long Island housewife. It was difficult to make it into the city; she felt alone. “I just started to shut down, get really like, Well, is this it? Is this all there is?” Mistress Collette tells me. “I started to feel really dead.”

For example, Mistress Collette has always wanted to have two men: “There’s always the motif of the man with two women, but way, way, way, way, way before that started going down, it was women who had multiple male partners.” She found herself co-topping with women occasionally, though, instead. Although she would allow him to continue bottoming for other dommes, he could not accept her topping for other slaves.

“She was amazingly generous towards him and she was envisioning having a three-way open relationship with [an ex-domme of his],” Master R says.

“I was honest about what I did, but of course he wasn’t happy with it,” Mistress Collette tells me. “At some point I said, I got to snap out of this.” She and her husband got a divorce.

“My home life was very oppressive and very abusive,” she confesses to me. She remembers promising herself that she would never let anybody hit her. “I just felt very, very clearly from the earliest age on that I was to be worshiped … I grappled with feeling like a victim, but at the same time I was very, very certain that I was a dominant person.”

Blunt tells me that most of the other dominants she has known have been other types of artists before coming into this business. Mistress Collette is no exception.

She received a scholarship to one of the best art schools in the Midwest, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Although she focused mainly on painting, she wound up attending the Fashion Institute of Technology where she got an Associate Degree in Jewelry Design. Mistress Collette shows me a painting and a pair of diamond earrings both of which she made herself. She doesn’t have as much time as she would like to continue painting or jewelry design. She has chosen a new avenue of expression: BDSM. She tells me, “I think one of the things an artist does is practice the art of transformation. So, it’s all about completely inducing a whole other mood, state of consciousness, another level of awareness. Art opens up new doors.”

Any form of art must imply a certain amount of compassion. Without it, the piece will lack all impact. It is exactly this compassion that makes Mistress Collette’s work so compelling. While she was flogging Slavid—even when I spoke with her over the phone for the first time—she demonstrated a gentleness that was astonishing considering the activity.

“I resonate with other people and their sexuality,” Mistress Collette explains. “I don’t see any boundaries. Everyone’s sexuality is completely unique and different, and I want to be able to relate to them on some kind of a sexual level.”

“Resonance is a big word,” Master R cuts in.

Slavid, who works with Mistress Collette frequently, can attest to her sensitivity and warmth: “Collette is so good. She really gives people that reassurance and compassion, and puts people at ease initially. And when people come here for the first time, they’re nervous and feel like something is wrong with them.”

Mistress Collette recognizes the origin of the public’s misconception of dominants: “There are a lot of nasty bitch pro-dommes. They think dominance means force.”

Master R breaks in, “And they think that arrogance is mastery.”

Blunt recalls a man who went to one of these pro-dommes. He was whipped 300 times, and then just sent right home. “That’s abuse!” she insists.

“We are constantly healing people who have seen bad dommes. They are people with no training and no psychological empathy whatsoever,” Master R said. These abused men and women have been struggling with their repressed sexual preferences for almost their entire lives. When they finally work up the courage to see a professional dominant, they are psychologically, emotionally, and, of course, physically, destroyed by those who are untrained. It is the difference between “treat[ing someone’s] sexuality” and regarding that someone as a “moneymaker.”

I ask Master R how many pro-dommes of all those on Max Fisch, arguably the most widely used online domina guide, are well-trained. He guesses about only five percent.

After every session, Mistress Collette hugs and caresses her slaves—something that I see her do with both Blunt and Slavid. “I find that many people have not been touched in a very long time,” she says sadly.

There is a consensus among this group at La Domaine that BDSM goes far beyond a sexual fetish. It involves an immense amount of psychological awareness and emotional delicacy—truly only attainable by professionals. In fact, a minister who spent his entire career training others to be successful counselors once told Mistress Collette that she was one of two people he had met in his life who had such genuine care and concern.

“Don’t be misled,” Slavid promises me. “Collette can be wonderfully sadistic.”

The healing power of such work is apparent. And such, many could argue, is the importance of art in our everyday lives: its ability to repair our senses. Mistress Collette’s compassion allows her clients to open themselves up to this restoration.

Untrained pro-dommes lack this sensitivity and skill. “There are a lot of dommes out there who won’t even see veterans because they’re so scared of them breaking down,” Master R tells me.

Harking back to the temple priestesses of before, Mistress Collette tells me about a firefighter who was horribly disfigured in 9/11, who she saw at a strip club in Albany: “It was easy to see he was shunned by probably his wife and no one wanted to touch him. And those women—and it wasn’t just for money—they never left him alone. Religion doesn’t pick up the slack with these people. Their families can’t handle them. They feel like they’re going out of their mind. Who can serve them? Who has the courage?”

Mistress Collette views herself as a therapist: “People say things to me that they don’t say to anyone else on the planet. I’m privy to complex psychological insight that people rarely have.”

“On the one-on-one relationship, its our sexuality, so its our form of love. In the larger extended family which happens here, we all want to make each other proud and devoted to each other,” says Master R.

Without taking into consideration this foundation of affection, it’s too easy to misconstrue the ultimate intention and capacity of BDSM. Its artistic potential would be entirely lost.

Much of what separates a well-trained dominant from one who is untrained is the former’s capacity as a therapist of sorts. The relationship between dominant and submissive should be one of release. Mistress Collette explains, “The intent is that you’re going to open yourself up and trust someone, and they’ll cherish that and revel in your openness, and you’re going to allow yourself to be taken. It’s not this denigration that happens, but you get a glimpse of all that you are and what you could be.”

“People gain so much self-confidence, and you might not expect that.” Slavid is speaking from experience.

As a slave and as a dominant, it’s possible to understand further what you are and are not capable of; what you do and do not want to tolerate. You understand, more thoroughly, the intricacies of your emotional state of being, and the delicate relationship between mind and body.

“I love when you tell slaves, ‘you don’t let anyone else abuse you except for us!’” Blunt tells Mistress Collette.

“That’s one of the huge values of being a slave,” Mistress Collette explains to me. “You understand where you can have control in being victimized in the outer world.”

There’s a self-preservation involved in BDSM. Much of it is about getting to know oneself in order to better protect oneself. As Mistress Collette puts it, “If you don’t control your sexuality, someone else will—gladly.”

Master R talks to me about his theory on the origins of BDSM: “We all come from thousands of years of being pharaohs and slaves, all over the world. … This is the basic nature of how we’ve been made up. We’re aggressive and submissive. It’s deeply imprinted on our genes and cultural patterns. … There’s a deep psychological ten thousand years at play here.”

Blunt emerges from her usual reticence to offer a more believable rationale behind this supposed need for abuse: “Like religion, you need someone to lead. … There are some people who are leaders and some who are followers. We forget we’re part of something larger than our intellectual view of ourselves as humans. It’s an intellectual conceit, based on the fact that we dissociate ourselves from the senses that we share with the animals.”

Blunt is addressing another crucial way in which the practice of BDSM demonstrates the need for an artistic sensibility: the sharpening of the senses and a heightening of awareness.

Shklovsky, one of the leading advocates of Russian Formalism, writes in his Art as Technique that “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. … [T]he process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.”

In Shklovsky’s sense of the word, then, BDSM can certainly be considered a form of art in its own right. Master R describes not only the human body as a form of art, but also the process of communication between dominant and slave. Both he and Mistress Collette discuss repeatedly the importance of a heightened awareness between dominant and slave.

Master R discusses this further with me: “We stress here that we’re all beasts. We’ve been isolated from our senses. But if you don’t use all your senses fully, then your intellect has nothing to ground it. We tell people all the time here to sniff. When in a session, you should be able to tell me what that slave is feeling by the sniff. We should be able to tell, but we can’t, because we’re cut off from it. In New York, the dommes blare music, but here we want to hear the softest breath. The intellect should feed on the senses, but society now has it the other way. Art succeeds, BDSM succeeds, when your senses take a primary importance to our intellect.”

“People walk around in this world blind to their senses,” Blunt agrees.

Master R continues, “We see people locked so much in their bodies that when you touch their skin, they don’t even feel your touch.”

Mistress Collette’s explanation sounds incredibly familiar to Shklovsky’s: “Artists are trained in ultra-perception and they translate that in ways that can be digested by others to help bring them to that place of greater perception. …When someone, a lawyer, the Rolex, the three-piece suit, and in front of me, they’re naked, and I see them as a being. There’s something greater than their job. There’s so much more.”

All forms of art maximize perception, but the public’s attitude changes once the canvas involves the human body. Even method acting is criticized for this very reason. The same could be said for BDSM. As Mistress Collette puts it, other forms of art have “limited palate[s].”

Mistress Collette explains that a well-trained dominant should be able to use all of her senses to judge the emotional and psychological state of her slave. As a result of this standard for La Domaine’s Mistresses and Masters, they do not use “safe words.” A dominant should know when to stop. No dominant ever wants to take a slave farther than he or she wishes to go. It’s the worst feeling in the world, Mistress Collette tells me—a fact I readily believe.

She describes the process in which she first gets to know a slave: “The first thing I’ll do is put someone in slave posture. I’ll teach them posture and how they should address me. I go through that, and I note how they respond, their slave energy. Does it get them aroused? Are they very connected? The tone of their voice, is it distance or dripping with lust? These are all the mental notes that I make.”

Other comparisons can be made between certain aspects of BDSM and other artistic mediums. Master R referred to “the physical grace that resembles ballet”—which Mistress Collette certainly demonstrated in the elaborate spinning of her arms while flogging Slavid. Certainly the instruments used in BDSM are as varied as those used in any other form of art.

A strong association can be between the role-playing involved in BDSM and the theater. “We play with archetypes,” Mistress Collette tells me. “I’m calling up every archetype resonating between me and the other person. Because that’s what’s coming up in them. … I understand that I stand in as a primal archetype in their DNA.” As Blunt puts it, “It’s theater without acting.” A performance takes place in the dungeon, but all of the gestures are bred in the bone.

For Mistress Collette, the medium of the human body and the context of the dungeon are more truthful: “In paintings, I feel it’s very furtively danced around. People look at a Poussin orgy and no one recognizes it for what it is. No, let’s name it! Let me take your cock and transform it into the “canon”!

Even music is created in the dungeon. “I love the sound of the implements, the sound of the smack on the ass,” Mistress Collette passionately confesses.

Master R tells me about the other day when a composer friend came over to La Domaine. Mistress Collette had just bought some new handmade bamboo canes, which Master R took out for me to take a look at myself. They were certainly beautiful specimens that, because of how they were cured, flexed easily, whistling as they swung through the air. As the composer tested the canes, Master R, in the corner with his guitar, noticed that one cane whistled a D note. They tried the others and found that they were F-sharp and A: all three notes came together to make a perfect D major chord. Master R was amazed: “The canes were perfectly in tune, as if some cosmic tuning fork!”

There is incredible skill in different types of bondage, as well. Mistress Collette uses Sakura bondage. Master R learned this technique from a Japanese man who in turn was taught by Seiu Ito, the last great master of Japanese bondage. Master R loosely quotes Seiu Ito to me: “I practice my art for sixty years and they still call me pervert.”

Mistress Collette explains that the word sakura means “cherry blossom”: when the bondage falls, it should roll off a slave’s body “in a beautiful gliding sheathe, like a cherry blossom falling off of a tree.” This is only one of many types of bondage.

What horrifies most people about the concept of BDSM is, of course, the pain involved. But as Mistress Collette aptly points out, there are many different tribes that utilize pain to reach transcendence and a heightened spiritual level. For example, in some cultures putting hooks in one’s flesh or tattooing is perceived as beautiful. Even in our very own Western culture, monks and nuns would perform self-flagellation as a form of self-punishment and to achieve similar divine transcendence.

It is this same transcendence that many of us look for in art.

Slavid tries to articulate his pleasure in pain, speaking of a “real connection between two people in an S&M relationship. You actually feel that energy and connection with the other person. … It can be a very special experience.”

Mistress Collette adds, “There are times when you actually feel that your two bodies are melded together. As a dominant, there are many precious times when I feel what I’m doing to someone in myself.”

As I watched Mistress Collette whip Slavid in the dungeon, even I recognized the love and humanity shared between the two—it was a bond palpable even for an unversed onlooker.

The door that opened to the steps leading down to the basement dungeon was right off of the living room. Throughout our conversation, Master R and Blunt would excuse themselves to the dungeon to take care of something or other, and would occasionally leave the door seductively open a crack, so that all that escaped was an emanating warm, red glow from below.

I thought they would never ask, when Slavid finally suggested I take a look downstairs myself.

Master R let me lead the way. As soon as I took a step down, I felt the warm air from below, carrying the soothing scent of cedar, hit my face. I climbed further into the depths, anxious to see the extent of this hidden playground. But before I could enter the space, Master R asked me to lean against the cross that stood at the bottom of the stairs with my arms out to my side. I looked up the stairs I had just come down and noticed that on the inside of the door was an erotic photograph. Like a slave might have, I felt exposed, but ready for what lay ahead.

I walked into a large golden space of seemingly infinite possibilities. Layer upon layer of games and instruments, beds and mirrors. There was The Evil Gym: a Bowflex-type exercise machine. Floor-to-ceiling shelves spanned an entire wall filled with various sex toys: every variety of whip or size of mace; there were spiked gloves and a medieval knight helmet. I wondered where such quality tools were bought, or how Master R and Mistress Collette decided what to use on whom with such a wealth of options.

Mistress Collette pointed me to William Sin-oma, an entire shelf devoted to kitchen utensils used as instruments for punishment. Various erotic paintings and artwork were scattered across the room, and black garbage bags lined the walls of the basement to cover the brick behind. A drag post was set up for the humiliation of male slaves, complete with wigs, eyelashes, and pounds of makeup. In one corner stood a cushioned table on which hot wax is poured on slaves.

I was in awe. And I hadn’t seen the half of it.

Master R pointed me to a doorway that led to yet another room. This room was more intimate than the last, with a heater placed right in the center. It was clear that this room witnessed the more severe practices of BDSM.

To my right, Master R introduced to me to Vlad the Impaler, a stool in the center of which a hole was cut out and in it placed a mechanized dildo that moved up and down. In front of that stood the sawhorse over which I would later see both Slavid and Blunt whipped by Mistress Collette. On the other side of the room was a Saint Andrew’s Cross (also known as a saltire cross) on the frame of which a slave is tied. This cross was supported in its middle, so that the slave could be upended. As the cross seesawed from side to side, the chains holding the structure together would crank menacingly.

“That’s my favorite sound in the dungeon,” Master R confides in me.

Mistress Collette proudly shows me her collection of whips, all dangling in a line from the ceiling. Hidden behind them is another, darker alcove where a bondage bed is surrounded by dozens of candles and above which a mirror is suspended. Towards the center of the room sits a large plush couch. Above sways a black wooden box into whose bottom a neck hole has been carved, so that a slave’s head may be encased in the box. Later on, while Mistress Collette was flogging Slavid, pranksters Blunt and Master R hid his clothes in this box.

Master R tells Mistress Collette to show me her favorite part of the dungeon: the doctor’s office. Behind some curtains is a fully equipped dentist’s chair, with all sorts of medical supplies (they have a generous doctor friend, they tell me). Mistress Collette enjoys performing piercings on her clients, dressed as a nurse.

It is a fantastically thorough set up.

I ask Master R and Mistress Collette if they harbor any hope that the public will one day recognize BDSM as a form of art.

Master R insists that “it is recognized—by the advertising industry.” It true that the theme of dominance and submission is often utilized for commercial purposes, “throw[ing] something intellectual at you without emotive understanding.”

“I won’t hold my breath,” Mistress Collette says. “But that’s not my purpose. I touch the people that come here. The great people that I have met, who are in the high echelon of this world, are the most multifaceted, intellectual people.”

Master R admits more disappointment, though, than Mistress Collette: “We take our training seriously, but we often feel we’re not making a dent.”

It’s a fact of life, though, that Master R has come to terms with: “The depths of devotion that are possible and the depths of respect that we can grow with each other—that’s what keeps me here… That’s what this is all about.”

Adriel Saporta is a senior in Yale College and the Editor-in-Chief of Broad Recognition.