Midori-01
Of Human Bondage
The SM scene's budding popularity among heterosexual couples is causing aging dominatrices to go where many retirees have gone before them: into the classroom
- Joe Garofoli - Sunday, August 4, 2002
Fetish Diva Midori, one of the most popular characters of San Francisco's renowned underground sado-masochism community, retired last fall at the still-divine age of 35. Just from "active dominance," as she puts it. No more torturing people for cash.
Why give up $250 an hour of bump and grind? To teach, of course. Just like a CEO looking for a new challenge might enter academia as a way to impart knowledge to hungry minds, Midori wants to nourish the self-described "pervs" queuing up to enroll in classes like one of her July seminars: "Eroticizing Pain: How to Take More and Enjoy It."
The road between cracking the whip and crafting curriculum is not well-trod in the spiked-heel world. Yet Midori is one of a growing number of professional dominants, or doms, who sense a deepening thirst for education about sado masochism, or as it's more commonly known, BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism).
While the BDSM concept is repugnant to some, there's no denying the gradual surfacing of this subculture largely unseen by the "vanilla" hordes. Whip-and- chain, role-playing iconography seems to be showing up everywhere - from yogurt commercials to Altoids ads - and in dozens of books, Web sites and instructional videos now appearing in mainstream bookstores. The vanilla crowd must be jonesing for leather.
This -isn't something that can be measured with statistics. But longtime community members say that judging by what they've seen, you'd be surprised by who in your office might keep a set of leather gloves on their nightstand.
The Internet has spurred much of the change, SM insiders say. Straight Boomers hitting their mid-40s are looking for a little boudoir rekindling, and after first investigating their fantasies online, many are looking for a real person to flesh out their dreams. Or at least flog them a bit.
"There's been a greater stress on education because the people who are coming out to check out the scene -don't have a clue. People -don't know how to tie a knot," said John Weis, founder of the Leather Leadership Conference, a six-year-old nonprofit dedicated to fostering BDSM education and community. Its Los Angeles convention drew 300 participants this year. Six years ago, it attracted 50.
This influx of new skin has widened the BDSM world. While there has always been a strong BDSM subculture in the gay community, now it's spreading into the straight world.
Which means San Francisco is no longer the only place to get kinky tutelage, or to find community if you just want to talk with someone who -doesn't think you're sick if you like the occasional slap and tickle. Mistress Morgana, a San Francisco dominant with a new SM beginner's video, said, "I'm getting a lot of calls by groups of women who hire me to come to their house, kind of like a Tupperware party."
In Walnut Creek and Santa Rosa, 30 to 70 BDSM devotees meet regularly in private rooms of family restaurants in informal klatches known as "munches." Munch groups meet twice a week in Palo Alto. The 27-year-old Society of Janus, one of the Bay Area's leading BDSM educational and support groups, boasts as many members from Alameda and Contra Costa counties as it does from San Francisco.
Founded as a gay leatherman's organization, "now 80 percent of our (600) members are primarily heterosexual. And many of them are couples," said Mark, a coordinator for the organization, who, like many interviewed for this story, declined to give his full name. He's an executive at a Bay Area ad firm.
Mark said the privacy of the Internet has led an increasing number of straight women - the fastest growing segment of the subculture - to explore kinkland.
When 53-year-old Mistress Reba, a Bay Area dom, began exploring the scene more than a decade ago, "there were maybe three women out of 20 people at a Janus orientation. Now it's a lot more even. Women are our fastest-growing group."
Yet despite the influx of vanilla types, there's still a need for discretion, as this Internet posting for a recent munch at a Walnut Creek chain restaurant shows:
We will have reserved a private room for The Walnut Creek Munch (on the right-hand side past the ice-cream counter) but this is still a totally Vanilla venue. Please respect the attendees and patrons by dressing appropriately for a vanilla venue and maintaining our confidentiality."
It's the desire to break down these walls of shame and stigma that drove Midori into her new line of work. And because regions outside the Bay Area are generally less tolerant of the leather and latex set, Midori's teaching business is booming.
Since she "retired" last November, she has done gigs in London, Berlin, Boston, Dallas, Portland, Ore., Richmond, Va., and - hold onto your studded collar stereotypes - Salt Lake City. This month she's headed to North Carolina and Columbus, Ohio, and next month she'll be in San Jose and at the leather mother of SM celebrations, the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco.
Midori is trying to bridge the SM gap between Folsom Street and Folsom.
Late last year, Emeryville's Greenery Press published her first book, "The Art of Japanese Bondage," a meticulously detailed how-to coffee-table book. She just released her first CD, giving breathy voice to Carol Queen's erotica, and in May was the focus of a show on Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen television network.
Could mainstream acceptance be far behind? Midori's dream: To be the SM version of a cross between management guru Steven R. Covey and Dr. Ruth. "And being a nerdy geek, I'd love to be interviewed by Terry Gross on (National Public Radio's) 'Fresh Air.' Just so I could try to make her blush. 'Terry, have you ever been kissed so passionately that you -couldn't see?' "
Yet in her decision to retire while in her prime, Midori is crossing into uncertain territory. There's no graceful way for a professional dominant to fade away. No pension, no matching 401k, no gold manacles await doms when they become as wrinkled as their chaps. Or, like most, burn out after a handful of years.
"A lot of people just go work in an office," said Dara Lynn Dahl, editor of Spectator magazine, the Berkeley monthly where Midori writes a column. "But Midori is different. In a lot of ways."
"The business changed a lot five years ago, and that's when I started to get out," said the well-respected Cleo Dubois, a former pro dom in her early 50s who started her Peninsula SM Academy in 1995. Frustrated that the scene was heading away from the personal exploration that made it so fascinating to her, and into more of a cheap-thrill sex romp, Dubois now concentrates on coaching SM and producing instructional videos.
But DuBois found a paradox in trying to spread the good word about BDSM. Pornographic film distributors told Dubois that her 2001 video, "The Pain Game, " was too tame to market on their channels (despite receiving a positive review in the Village Voice). Still, she made enough on "Pain" to release a follow-up this year.
"With all this new interest (in SM), there's a lot more good information out there, but there's also a lot of trash," Dubois said. "Some people think they can just put an ad in the paper and make some money dominating guys. But it's not as simple as that."
It's not just that being a dom is for whipper-snappers. Dahl and others say there are plenty of older doms out there with much to offer. Yet it's a difficult life, they say, and not always as fun as it looks. While estimates of the number of pro doms in the Bay Area range from 50 to 100, most agree there's a core of 12 to 20 who have been at it for several years - which is getting into gold-watch time if you're a pro dom.
Longtime doms say there's no way to underestimate the emotional drain of constantly fulfilling another person's fantasy. Burnout is common. And even though the going rate is $250 an hour (or up to $400, if you're into really kinky fantasies), it's not an easy way to make money.
"It's just that after a while, you say, 'Been there, done that,' " said Kat Sunlove, known as Mistress Kat Sunlove back when she was one of the Bay Area underground's legends.
Now, the 57-year-old is button-holing lawmakers as legislative director for the Free Speech Coalition. Sunlove is perhaps the only Sacramento lobbyist who can look back on her previous career and say, "I mean, you start to wonder, how many nipples can I squeeze?"
But Midori did the office thing - she put her UC Berkeley psychology degree to use for seven years as a Financial District suit - and she isn't going back.
It bored her.
Now, this woman whose avocation became her vocation wants to spread the good news. From Salt Lake City to the East Bay.
So there, standing in front of a semicircle of 12 women seated in metal folding chairs after hours at the Berkeley Good Vibrations recently, was the often-billed "Ambassador of Kink," looking more like a librarian than a dom. Her shoulder-length platinum-streaked brown hair is pulled into a bun behind her black, geek-chic glasses. She's wearing a long-sleeved mall-bought red sweater over a knee-length latex skirt.
And of course, the thigh-high black boots.
The students, ranging in age from early 20s to early 60s, are there to take Feminine Dominance 2.0.
"-Don't worry," Midori assures them at the start of the class,"Fem Dom 1.0 is not a prerequisite."
Anyone expecting an X-rated experience will leave disappointed. It's 63 minutes into the 90-minute class before Midori busts out anything as provocative as a black leather glove. And it -doesn't get much racier than that. Watching her enrapture the class, it's hard to believe that the Kyoto, Japan-born Midori spoke only Japanese until she was 14. Yet today she is mostly about words. And that's the message she tries to convey.
So it's an evening of reviewing recommended reading lists ("Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns: The Romance and Sexual Sorcery of Sadomasochism,") and discussing strong feminine archetypes. Midori's voice rarely rises above a husky whisper - not a 1-900 voice, but one of supreme confidence in her ability to bring out her students' "uber feminine power." A few of the neophytes confess they're there to gain confidence, and not just in the sack.
"Technique can be learned any time," Midori whispers to them. "The secret is knowing yourself. You are not the life-support system for a whip."
Starting a kinky scene may seem hard, awkward, even silly at first, Midori counsels. "But it's the same thing as playing make-believe as a kid, except with the sexual privilege of an adult."
First, she asks the class to list their favorite powerful "femme icons". Everyone from Madonna to "Star Trek's" Lt. Uhura to Katherine Hepburn to "my third grade teacher" surfaces. Midori offers "my grandmother, who raised me, and my drill sergeant, who could run backwards in combat boots while taunting you."
Over the course of the next hour, she shows the class how the icons - and their light and dark sides - are a reflection of the students' inner characters that are ready to surface in an SM scene.
But before they put on the leather, they have to get in the proper dom mindset. Since, as she said, "so much of SM is in the posture," Midori shows the class what she calls, "The Queen's Walk." The look that says they're in charge.
Lean on your right heel. Hand on your right hip. Chin up, but not high enough to be haughty. Create a sphere around you, and in that sphere, the world moves a half-step slower. The Queen's Walk conveys grace. Power. The class watches; a few furiously take notes.
"This is what you do when you come home from work and you've had a (lousy) day, and you really -don't want to do this scene with your husband or lover," Midori says. "You do the Queen's Walk. The body and the physical attitude takes over."
The rest of the class is about Midori the psychologist, the teacher showing her students how to put themselves and their partners in the mood for kink. She saves the Heloise hints on how to flog ("put your flogging hip forward") and latex care for the end.
After the bell rings, many in the class emerge renewed. "What's different about her is she's a teacher," said Roxi, a 33-year-old San Francisco resident who has taken other SM classes. "A lot of other doms are too dominant, or negative, or dark. She's a class act."
But just because Midori is now an SM academic, it -doesn't mean she's lost her edge. Days later, she's in a South of Market flat for the 25th anniversary retrospective/birthday of Michael Rosen, one of this community's leading erotic photographers.
Inside the two-room gallery burns the musky heat of a hardcore crowd. No vanilla here. Several of those milling about are featured in the black-and- white portraits on the gallery walls, their bodies pierced and intertwined like some sort of voodoo doll orgy.
Here, Midori shows up smoldering in a low-cut teal latex dress with her assistant/submissive, Baby Doll. The pair appear on the evening's bill in between the spoken word artist and the nude violinist, and about 45 minutes after the birthday boy has hushed the crowd by spanking two bare-bottomed volunteers 30 times each in honor of his 60th birthday.
Within minutes of her taking the stage, the crowd is Midori's. After locating a weight-bearing beam in the ceiling on which to suspend her partner, Midori shows her artistic side with Japanese Rope bondage, the centuries-old practice that combines eroticism and the martial arts. She considers it to be like "arranging limbs in a vase."
As she knots the ropes, Midori is part jazz musician, part kinky florist, riffing off a few basic knots to arrange Baby Doll's limbs in a rope-gilded bouquet.
When Baby Doll is hanging upside down, rear end skyward, a smile creases Midori's face. Not the smile of a performer or teacher or saleswoman. But the smile of pleasurist - of someone who truly digs this stuff.
Afterwards, the crowd gushes over Midori. Scott, a Sunnyvale programmer who said his officemates would melt if they knew he was here in a sleeveless black shirt with a rope around his neck, said, "Nobody is like Midori. She's real."
Midori shook a few hands, then sped across town to celebrate her 36th birthday at the Fairmont Hotel's Tonga Room. Guests received invitations specifying "fetish wear that's permissible for the public. (breasts, genitals and rear must be covered, please!)"
All obliged the request. Yet the 50 or so Midori chums who showed up revealed a different side of this community. A side that mainstream acceptance will perhaps soften.
While being into BDSM means probing the deepest secrets of the soul, many here are on a first-name-only basis. Except for those who knew Midori before she became Fetish Diva Midori, many in the crowd -don't know her full name. Those who do -aren't divulging; it's the code of those in the community.
Even Baby Doll, the woman Midori tied up hours earlier, the person Midori is handing off many of her former customers to, said, "I -didn't know her full name until, well, we travel together a lot, and I saw it on an airplane ticket. "
Anonymity is OK, Midori said when told of this days later. "By maintaining a certain amount of your life anonymously, you're able to share more freely of yourself."
As she was explaining this in a Castro District cafe, a woman walked by and thanked Midori for a recent class. Midori hugged her. When the woman found a seat out of earshot, Midori whispered, "she's a San Francisco firefighter."
Then Midori the teacher smiled the smile of a pleasurist. "We're everywhere, dear."
DOM TIPS: While doms like Midori preach BDSM (bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism) as a psychological drama played out in the head, there are practical considerations, too.
It's all about the clothes. Take it from the woman with 120 pairs of shoes, a dresser drawer devoted to leather gloves and a wardrobe that fills two-thirds of her two-car garage. But Midori and other doms also offer some Heloisian tips for the dom-in-waiting:
- Be careful about your shoe choice. You want to look hot, but don't buy heels that are too high. You have to be able to maintain your balance. Confides Mistress Morgana: "Sometimes, I actually take off my shoes."
- Before you start flogging, work out a little. Midori suggests a high number of repetitions curling a 3- or 5-pound weight to build arm strength and ward off those pesky rotator cuff injuries that plague some doms.
- Stretch out before any scene; remember, this is a physical activity.
- Wear a pair of sweat socks under your leather boots. Midori said it helps to absorb the sweat and odor.
- A tip if you're struggling to lace up a leather corset by yourself: Hook one drawstring on a nearby doorknob, while you pull tight on the other.
- Don't hang your latex clothing on a hanger - it could stretch it out irreparably. And store it away from direct sunlight to avoid fading.
- And finally, Mistress Morgana suggests: "Get a lot of sunshine. You don't want to be spending all of your time in the dungeon."
E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.
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