The world’s a big place, filled with mostly boring people. A few freaks still slip through, though. The four-way taught me what hope meant. No matter how high I climb, there will always be a taller mountain.

“Make me swallow your spit,” he suggests, momentarily breaking the spell of our role-play.

When I was 19 and in my second year of college in New York, I was hell bent on having full financial independence as quickly as possible. I found myself perusing Craigslist for odd jobs and modeling gigs, and a vaguely-worded listing with a pay rate of $80/hour caught my attention.

E.L. James could not have written a character less likely to dominate in bed than Christian Grey.

I had many clients who were wealthy executives, married with children — supposedly upstanding citizens — but who led double lives as drug-hungry perverts.

There’s a tendency to think of us as semi-mythical creatures who only come out at night and who don’t exist in the prosaic humdrum world of everyday life.

A dominatrix pretending to be blogger Lindy West stood before me in white patent-leather gear.

Here’s what every fledgling dominatrix should have in her kit.

He wants it. He wants it so bad that he’s facedown on his mattress with his legs spread waiting for me to give him what he wants.

We all know what it feels like to want to be so close to someone that merely pressing yourself up against their body is not enough, and the only way to achieve the desired level of closeness would be to literally cut them open and crawl inside their ribcage, submerge yourself in all the weird junk that lives beneath their skin.