Mistress Velvet’s guide to individual reparations
Mistress Velvet is a black dominatrix who requires her white cisgender male clients to read black feminist theory
Dominatrix: a dominating woman, especially one who takes the sadistic role in sadomasochist sexual activities.
Mistress Velvet is a black dominatrix based in Chicago whose clients are mostly white, cisgender men. She first introduced black feminist theory into her sessions after her first client asked her if she had the temperament to do this job. She’s been including it ever since. Why?
“I thought this could be something really fun, and it’s a lot of money, so why not try,” She told HuffPost
Though introducing feminist theory into sex work is a bold idea, Mistress Velvet is certainly in the right niche to try it. Inspired to incorporate a reading list and curriculum into her client relationships after hearing from one sub who only held the door for black women, she says she’s noticed positive results. One client was so struck by her teaching that he created a nonprofit to support single black mothers on Chicago’s South Side.
One thing that sticks out to me about Mistress Velvet is that she mentions she created a ‘safe space’ for her clients. The patriarchy makes it difficult for men to be submissive. That she has created a safe space for men to explore submission is laudable; that they learn names like Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins at the same time is astonishing. Everyone wins here!
Eventually, I realized, wow, I’m emotionally invested in my clients. They’re getting this safe space. The ways that patriarchy impacts men, they can’t really be submissive in a lot of contexts. They come to me looking for a safe space to explore the parts of them that may not be seen as masculine, or they might have a lot of shame around. They may not have opportunities to be their full selves in a lot of ways, including sexually, because of those societal constraints. — Mistress Velvet
The method is pretty sound: she asks clients why they want to be in her presence. She then proceeds to read them a piece if what they said was problematic and fetishizes black women (it often does). She likes to take passages from Sister Outsiders by Audre Lorde, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, The Black Body In Ecstasy by Jennifer Nash, The Color of Kink by Ariane Cruz, and selections from the anthology, The Bridge Called My Back.
Why don’t we think ‘Domme’ when we think of black women? We don’t. I confirmed this myself by Googling black dominatrix and black domme, looking for images, and found very little. There were a few photos scattered around, but most seemed sort of caricature-y or irrelevant. Aside from that, there were just a lot of photos of white women dressed in black. It makes me proud to see a black woman finding a space in an industry where we’re often excluded or an afterthought.
I raised my fist in solidarity when Mistress Velvet claimed this was a form of reparations, “… not in a systemic way like we’re getting land back, but definitely on an individual level, it provides me with an emotional sense of reparations.”
As a black woman, I can get behind this method of educating someone. It gets so tiring having to explain feminism and why black women need to be included. We’re brushed off over and over because people refuse to listen or because people gas-light the hell out of us, to say nothing of the fetishization of our bodies.
We are TIRED.
Maybe we should all start tying these men up and forcing them to read black feminist theory…
Check out the Huffington Post article that inspired the story.
