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Vice Blog

MY FRIENDS WERE TEENAGE DOMINATRIXES

Within the last few years, a couple of my friends have found success in one of the more colorful lines of work in the city. I first met Valentina in middle school at a get together in John Jay Park. She was a normal, innocent middle schooler, and if you had told me that in just a few short years she would be shoving food down a grown man's throat at a dungeon in Chelsea, I probably would've called you crazy and given you a "mush."

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A few years later I met Scarlett in Thompkin Square Park. She was with a giant gang of young girlfriends, one of whom I knew, so we all squaded up and went to some party. Shortly after Scarlett would link up with Valentina for a foray into the dark and semen-y world of New York sex dungeons.

They have both since left the industry, but at the time they were still in high school, rushing from class to the dungeon to put on some leather and do weird stuff with old mens' feet, or whatever the client wanted. Although I've known them for years, I've never gotten to really pick their brains about the whole thing until last week.

Vice: How did you ladies become Mistress Scarlett and Valentina?
Valentina: Scarlet and I were 18 and living together because we had both just gotten cut off by our parents. We weren't going to work some minimum wage job, so I thought, "Whatever, there's no sex and it's easy money. I'm already good at that, I can play mind games and I don't mind treating a man like shit." It just seemed like the perfect fit, and it was--we were naturals. We did it for about eight months as well as some freelance work on the side. These days we have other means of getting money. We were still in high school at the time, so I would often go to class in the morning and then bike to the dungeon for a shift that started at 1:30. I'd stay all day and do my homework there.

Were you guys only working for one company, or did you float around?
Scarlett: We worked at a specific dungeon in Chelsea. They had a website with all the girls' profiles and an in-dungeon booklet with photos of everyone for the guys to browse.
Valentina: It's crazy, there's a yoga studio, meditation center, and then in the basement there's a dominatrix dungeon. The whole building knew what it was, because girls would come running out in lace, fishnets, and steal stilettos to get a bagel or use the phone outside. All the stores around there knew who we were too, some of the girls got discounts.

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Who ran the company?
Scarlett: There were a bunch of shady managers from Russia. One was actually a female who would work on Sundays. She was the biggest crackhead I've ever met.
Valentina: No, she was so cool.
Scarlett: She was a crackhead, she used to push a cat around in a stroller.

What was the inside of the dungeon like?
When you first walked in there was a lounge with a wall of fetish accessories. You'd have to fill up a basket with all of the weird stuff on the wall before you went in on a session. So much random stuff--for example, some guys wanted to be mummified or have smoke blown at them through weird different sets of tubes.
Valentina: There were seven completely different rooms. The medical room, the cross-dressing room, the torture room… even a wrestling room. One was the Ming Palace, which was this crazy Orientally decorated room with a suspension, a chair, and cage. In that room some mistresses would be suspended and spanked--hard. When I saw that room I was like, "Oh my God, I can't believe this shit." I would never, but they were loving it.

Did anyone ever get seriously hurt there?
Scarlett: Well, one guy got his balls chopped off there.
Valentina: He apparently had really thin skin and they tied a thin line around it [his ball sack]. One guy OD'ed in there and all the mistresses had to drag him outside. What do you tell the ambulance?

What kind of guys would come into the dungeon?
Scarlett: All types and ages. One time though, I had a client come in who was my age and it really freaked me out. A lot of Hasids came in, many as young as 19 and mostly wanting to spank women. We had a veteran of the war who used to be a cross dresser. Some of the experiences were so sad. This one guy had just come back from the war and had been shot and his wounds were still bleeding. He just wanted to talk the entire time. He left and came back again to see me just to talk.
Valentina: My favorites were the couples that would come in together. There was also a judge who used to book us for the whole night… just these crazy 16 hour sessions. He would do coke the whole time and probably end up dropping about 20 grand. He would book all the girls, they loved him.
Scarlett: Basically, you just had to pinch his nipples the entire time while he giggled.
Valentina: One time Scarlett and I had this crazy session where this guy wanted us to strap him down and shove mushy foods into his face.

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Was he fat?
Scarlett: No, he was actually really, really good-looking.
Valentina: He was so hot. He wanted us to throw up in his mouth too. It was so sad because he was so beautiful.
Scarlett: He wanted us to shove the mushy food down his throat really fast until he was choking and throwing up.
Valentina: It was disgusting, but easy to do. A lot of times we got booked together because we were friends and worked well together. She filled more of the submissive role and I was the dominating one.
Scarlett: So she would tell me what to do. It was easy though because we were friends. It wasn't like I was with some mean mistress in the room.
Valentina: We would fuck around a lot, take our shoes off and sit down and smoke, pretending to walk around, it was bullshit.
Scarlett: One guy just wanted to tickle my feet the entire time. He thought it was funny, I'd have to run around the room and he would chase me and try to tickle my feet.
Valentina: One guy wanted to be a chair. The whole session, one hour, I just sat on him. Other clients were even stranger and developed parasites from eating shit.

How many dominatrixes were there?
Maybe 20 women there at any given time. With the way the economy was, so many women were doing it as their main job.
Scarlett: They had all been working there since they were like 15 and many of them in there 30s.
Valentina: One lady named Rose was about 70.
Scarlett: She never got a session though, it was sad.
Valentina: She would hang around and sell the clothes from her better days.
Scarlett: Or teach new mistresses how to use rope.
Valentina: Most are really emotionally unstable. You're usually done in six months, or you stay for ten years.

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Did your at work behavior ever spill over into your everyday life?
Of course, I think I'm more kinky because of it in my personal life. In my everyday life, yeah, I do tend to boss people around and stuff.
Scarlett: It was just a learning experience. I didn't know that there were people like that.
Valentina: To live that first hand, to be in a room with someone and know exactly what they want, was pretty wild. I now look deeper into people and know that they all have secrets. The psychological aspect of it is also fun, like, how do you get a fetish? Whether it was to bring back childhood memories of their sister toying with them, or their parents beating them, there was almost always a root to the fetish. I look at it all as a learning experience.
Scarlett: We were working so much that we wouldn't go out many weekends. We would stay there all day and night sometimes.

Scarlett has a boyfriend [above], who I talked to as well.

How did you feel about your girlfriend's line of work?
BF: It blows my fucking mind how much money she can make in 15 minutes, it's about as much as I make in a whole day. The thing that really bugs me is that these guys have these crazy, deranged fetishes and there obviously has to be something wrong. Looking at it from a guy's perspective, you know how they are and what they want. It worries me that they are going to take them away or some shit like that. How long can you withhold sex from a man who is on some crazy fetish shit? A guy who has been seeing your feet for months--you think he doesn't want more? You don't think he is going to snap at some point? I was really bugging at first.
Scarlett: I once made him stay for a session to see what it was like.
BF: I've seen these guys, and they are weird looking. I saw one get trampled in a dress shirt. They've driven over to my house before to give her money if she needs any.
Scarlett: We're friends, I talk to them. One guy, who we called Slave Joe, would teach us stuff. He would take us out to dinner. We took him to the club one night.

Did you or any guys ever get involved in the work?
BF: Absolutely not, I'd rather work my job.
Scarlett: Sometimes they would hire this crew of graffiti writers to spit in gay guys mouths.
BF: Much lower rates for the dudes though--20 bones.

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY TAJI AMEEN