From the newest Dan Savage column:
Dan seems to agree with the guy, but thinks he’s a controlling jerk for bringing this up in a public column that he knows the dominatrix reads.
I guess that never really occurred to me…I don’t know, maybe I’m uber squeamish, but I couldn’t find it in me to feel bad for the dominatrix. Besides, any public dressing down she was getting would be anonymously.
This is utterly out of my realm, but the dominatrix was out of line, and Dan Savage could’ve just not run the question in his column, so he was in the wrong, too.
Different Doms react differently to being disobeyed, and the one in the column apparently doesn’t tolerate it at all. Pros can afford to be that way.
The thing to note here is that the sub in this example did what he did during the session. Sorry, but inside a scene, until and unless a sub safe-words or taps out, the Dom is in charge. A sub who questions their Dom like this is waaaaaaaaay out of line.
There was a spanking in my house Wednesday night over this very subject.
I take the guy’s side. All role playing aside, he was concerned about getting diseases from an unclean toy, which should be important to the dom as well.
Okay, Dan Savage agreed with the guy on that one, but I don’t understand how writing a letter about it that the dom would read is disrespectful. He didn’t use her name or any other identifying information. I don’t see this as controlling behavior. What is he is trying to control?
I had not read the actual column when I replied earlier, but now I have, and I agree with Savage entirely. SHEESH was topping from the bottom, exactly as he contracted not to, and now he’s still trying to be the top by having the last word on the situation.
Prostitutes with dildos is vastly far outside my realm of experience but this sounds utterly insane to me. He should have waited until after the session? Is there a safe word that lets you tap out of the hepatitis the whore’s unsterilized shared dildo gives you?
As the situation is described, I get the impression that the dildo training was to begin at a later session, not imminently. Given that, there would be reason not to expect to be able to discuss such things outside the scene.
Barring that, if the Dom did indeed have the objet d’amour in hand with malicious intent, then, yes, the sub has two choices: accept with trust* that the Dom would not do harm to him or safe-word out.
*It may be hard to accept if you aren’t a kinkster yourself, but BDSM interactions are primarily about two spectra: trust and power. If you don’t trust someone enough to give over all your control to them, you should be involved with them. If you cannot let go of your power and give that trust, then you are, sorry to say, going to wind up topping from the bottom. As I said before, different Doms have different levels of acceptance for that and this one has none.
I hate to hijack (not that that ever stops me) but the letter writer’s capitalizing of “She” and “Her” is what grabbed my attention.
Granted S&M is not my cuppa and I fully believe in to-each-their-own but when it spills over into one’s punctuation that’s where I draw the line. This dude’s a weirdo.
Ok, I read it again and I agree there’s nothing to suggest the dildo was going to be introduced imminently, which I was assuming. And, you know, I’m not into BDSM so I guess I don’t get it - but doesn’t her willingness to put him in a dangerous situation per se indicate that she doesn’t deserve his trust?
Unless the Dom’s name is Ayesha, she lives in the Himalyans, and possesses the secret of Eternal Youth, she is a she, not She.
When it comes to disease risk, there should be zero tolerance. The dom should be named and shamed.
The whole thing smacks to me of that “I’m not touching you!” stuff little kids do to each other. You know, where one of them hovers his finger 0.0003 inches from the other one’s nose and claims he’s not doing anything at all to be annoying?
Essentially, since he knows she reads the column, he’s using this to send a message to the dom–he’s right (see there, even Dan Savage agrees with him), and she’s a big poopyhead. But he’s within the letter of her instructions; he’s not contacting her.
IMO, everybody was somewhat out of line. The dom was a little out of line for not just telling the guy that they would discuss the dildo issue later, but for now he needs to shut the hell up. It seems fairly unprofessional to not be willing to discuss the issue of safety precautions. SHEESH was way out of line for a) being willing to engage in this sort of relationship with someone he thinks is irresponsible and unprofessional enough to not take basic safety precautions like this, b) arguing with her during a scene despite a clear agreement not to do that very thing, and c) writing this letter in an attempt to skirt her directions not to contact her again. Dan was a teeny smidge out of line for running the letter and thus allowing the guy to skirt her directions not to contact her again.
ETA: So, you can pretty much skip this whole post and just read CrazyCatLady’s, because she said what I was getting at in much less space! 
Jeebus.
So, having read the column, here’s my take (as a female dominant who has done some pro work in the past):
He specifically contracted not to “top from the bottom.” To me, that’s a red flag right there - why did she feel the need to write that into the contract? Either she’s a seriously controlling woman, or he’s a pushy and manipulative bastard, or both. HOWEVER, he knew going in that she expected to have final authority over all things in-scene, because of the way the contract is written. He chose to engage, and did not take the avenues available to him to disengage from that dynamic (safe word, etc.) before trying to reassert authority over the activities.
It’s just flat insulting. If someone were to question my ability or willingness to sanitize my equipment as a professional, I would be pretty pissed. Asking to see the sterilization implies a lack of trust that is just not going to work out in a D/s or S/M setting, regardless of whether it’s pro or for fun. Regardless of how they approached it, any client who wanted to watch the sterilization process because they didn’t trust my methods would no longer be a client, because either a) they’re a micro-managing asshole, or b) they don’t trust me or c) both. I am the only micro-managing asshole allowed in my scenes, thanks.
Getting the last word in - ohhhh, boy, that makes you look about 12, SHEESH. Well done. It’s a public column where anyone who knows either or both of the participants and reads it will probably know who it’s talking about, because both these people have talked about what happened with their kinky friends, I guaran-damn-tee it. So, he’s not just questioning her publicly and attempting to get a columnist and his readers to judge her - he’s also affecting her potential client base. Trust me when I say, reputation is EVERYTHING inside the scene, and rumors about bad endings like this are faster than wildfires. Putting just his side in a public venue where she, and potentially her clients, are guaranteed to see it is just a shitty, shitty move.
On preview: I don’t see anywhere in the column that indicates that she was willing to put him in a dangerous situation. Grant you, a lot of the following is assuming she has good business practices - but by and large, pros with bad business practices are not pros for long. I see it as follows:
I think you’re assuming that she wasn’t going to clean and disinfect the dildo at all, which seems rather unwarranted. She didn’t refuse to clean it–she refused to clean it with bleach in front of him. It’s possible she refused because she wasn’t going to clean it all, but it seems far more likely that there were other reasons, like such a performance undermines the implicit trust you have to have in a relationship with someone who is going to tie you up and shove something up your ass, or the dildo she plans to use is made of a material that would be damaged with bleach, or she puts condoms on all her dildos before using them so they stay clean and uncontaminated.
I need to say before I go on that I am not the best person to explain the motivations of a sadist (the type of Dom SHEESH was dealing with). In large part, I’m not a sadist because I have no use for masochists, but what it boils down to is, I just to roll that way. I have paged A Priori Tea to get a sadist’s point of view on this thread, but I’ll go ahead and carry the toppy banner until someone better qualified arrives. 
M’Kay? M’Kay.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Doms don’t make subs, subs make Doms.
Simple answer to your question: No. It is SHEESH’s willingness (which ultimately is his need) to be dominated is what places him in a dangerous situation.
The issue here is not whether or not the dildo gets properly sanitized. Any decent Dom (especially a professional who wishes to remain in business) would of course ensure that their tools are cleaned, sanitized, hell, even sterilized between uses.
The issue here is SHEESH’s giving control of that question to the Dom. A sub who will not submit is a problem and the Dom has a choice: break them or boot them. A Dom in a personal relationship with their sub, looking for something special and emotional, is liable to choose the first. Breaking someone takes time and commitment and emotional investment. A pro looking to earn a living probably isn’t interested in that investment.
Again, anything I have to say about power exchanges like this is the fuzzy edge of what I do in my house, because my D/s relationship comes well-defined in those terms and there’s not a lot of need to negotiate those sorts of things.
EDIT: and now you know how long it took me to draft this reply. I see A Priori Tea has arrived.
LOL! I think all of us said essentially the same thing, no?
One tiny point of order - dildos with condoms on them still need to be sanitized* in between clients or uses, for most effective risk management.
Other than that, thank you again for saying what I was getting at, much more concisely!
ETA: KtK, does this count as a shockingly reasonable pile-on, with all the accord? 
*I spent that whole last post hunting in my brain for the word “sanitized” instead of sterilized, and just couldn’t find it. Thank you for jogging my memory on the more appropriate term!
I’ve never been opposed to a pile-on where everybody was in accord.
I think it’s an impossible situation for me to relate to, not because it’s kinky, but because she’s a prostitute. You are right about the dildo, that’s exactly what I’m assuming. If I were ever to engage a prostitute, whether it was for BDSM activities or totally vanilla sex, I would assume that if something isn’t sanitized in front of me it is not sterile. But I would never be in that situation, so again I guess I just can’t relate. If the woman weren’t a prostitute - even if they weren’t monogamous - it would be such a different situation in my mind that I’d have to start over from scratch.
I think it is entirely reasonable to require visible safety precautions for something that could give you some very serious diseases. It’s not like dominatrixes are licensed by the state and have to under go regular inspections of their sterilization processes and carry insurance in case of incident. This is roughly analagous to going to someone’s living-room home-tattoo shop and wanting to see the equipment sterilized in front of you. The sub may have broken some taboo about speaking up, but I’d think any real professional would be eager to set their client’s mind at ease about safety practices, enough so to forgive any faux pas about timing.