Talk about burying the lede. His profile described the languages he speaks (French, Italian, Spanish, English) and his intellectual pursuits. Only in the last line did it mention his desire to be dominated.
I could do that, I thought to myself. “Francois” seemed smart and interesting, and he was cute enough. My therapist had recently suggested that I consider looking outside the box of what I normally sought in a date. Francois probably wasn’t what she had in mind, but outside the box he was.
Also, full disclosure, in graduate school one of my classmates had tried to recruit me to work with her as as a dominatrix at the Dungeon, in Los Angeles. She said that at 6’1″, all I needed to do was pull on some Lycra and thigh high stiletto boots, and I’d be a natural.
Tempting though the income might have been, I couldn’t figure out what one would do with the clients.
Humiliate them and make them grovel, she said. It’s not about sex.
For a whole hour? I thought. That’s a lot of groveling. What would I say, “Kneel on the ground, you bad boy,” and make him wait while I graded student essays?
In fact, that may be what my friend did, as I once delivered her students’ blue books to her while she was at work.
Though I missed my opportunity back then, by now, like every woman I know, I’ve had it to above the eyeballs with the Harvey Weinsteins, Jeffrey Epsteins, and Donald Trumps of the world, not to mention the predators I’ve dealt with in my personal life. Francois wanted to be spanked; I want to spank the patriarchy; it could be cathartic for both of us.
I messaged Francois something innocuous and friendly.
He shyly inquired whether I had read his whole profile.
Of course, I replied. Are you ready to relinquish control? I asked.
Oh, my, was he ready. His response fairly squealed through the phone. He thought I was gorgeous and strong and had firm hands; he couldn’t wait to look up to me. By the way, would it please me to be referred to as “You” or “Thou”?
What kind of nonsense was that? I may have been [pretending to be] a dominatrix, but I’m an English professor first and foremost.
Never capitalize “you” unless it begins a sentence, I told him.
And “Thou”? My surname is not “Christ.”
Call me . . . and here I got stuck. “My lady”? We’re not in the Middle Ages. “Madame”? I don’t run a whorehouse. “M’am”? I’m not an old lady in the South.
“Marchesa,” I told him.
“My Marchesa,” he replied, obediently. “How can I please you?”
Good question, I thought. Could he operate a carpet shampooer?
Making him to do housework not really being an option, I did what an academic does and stalled while I researched the variants of human sexuality having to do with domination and the administration of pain. And what an interesting snake hole that was. Which I won’t go into here.
I held Francois off for a few days by ordering him to prepare himself for me—go to the gym, tell me about the healthy meal he was going to cook for me, read up on shiatsu.
And then, as I was about to stop teasing and tell him when and where he could come to kiss my feet, I reviewed his profile and noticed a big red flag.
He had posted just one photo.
I’d gone on enough online dates to realize that if one photo is all a person has, there may be a reason for that. Everyone can take one good photo.
Also, my subject was supposedly my same age, yet when I looked more carefully at the photo he’d posted, he appeared to be in his twenties, wearing a backpack, baseball cap, and black sunglasses, standing in front of Notre Dame. The guy I’d been imagining was that guy, who might have been Francois several decades back.
“I need to see your eyes,” I told him. “Send me a photo with no sunglasses,” I ordered.
“Yes, My Marchesa,” came his immediate response.
(The dominatrix thing was growing on me.)
He took a photo right then, sent it to me, and . . . oh, my.
The person in the recent photo was not my fantasy material. I was imagining sexy, young-ish, attractive; the current version of Francois was . . . somebody’s grandpa. My relative health, height, and strength made the proposition seem both unfair and un-sexy.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, seeing his face without the shield of shades and hat, he became a real person rather than an abstract notion. If he really had been Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, or Donald Trump, I think I could have found it in me to give him what he desired and more, but the proposition in front of me appeared pathetic. Francois would have had to pay me to spank him, and even then I was no longer interested.
Of course, Francois did not take my refusal to humiliate him easily. I’d led him on for a week or so, and his hopes for a sound spanking by a tall dominatrix in stiletto heels were sky high. For all that I was supposedly in control and he my subject, he persisted in asking me what he could do to change my mind until finally the Marchesa had to send him off with a firm, but virtual, goodbye.