Mistress Danielle Blunt
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of ‘Can I Be Blunt?’ which is a podcast, vlog, YouTube series about sex work, BDSM, where I talk with sex workers, professional dominatrices, therapists, lifestyle kinksters about their relationships, online sex work, and BDSM. And so today I’m here with Domina Elara to talk about BDSM, spirituality, concepts of safety in the scene
and playing with newbies. So I would love if you could just start by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about how you got into this scene and maybe a little bit about your domination style.
Domina Elara
Hi, I’m Domina Elara and I’m a professional dominatrix. I got into the scene in a kind of roundabout way. When I was a kid, when I was pretty young, I was already very interested and very enthralled by the kink world. I didn’t fully understand it at that time. So, I would search on the internet for “shiny people”. Not understanding that what I was actually looking for was people dressed in latex. It wasn’t even necessarily for horny reasons. It was just, I really wanted to see them. I just had to look at them.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
That sounds very horny…
Domina Elara
Like, women in very tight-laced corsets and stockings and garters kind of set up. If that’s what they’re wearing, I was very into it. But I kind of already understood that there was a subversion to it. If my mom were to walk past the door, I would shut all the browsers. There was already an inkling in my mind that this was something I couldn’t share with people, and I pretty much kept it to myself all the way until about eight years ago, actually. So it’s actually pretty recent that I finally had a partner who wanted me to flog him. I actually had acquired some kink accoutrements already, including a couple of floggers, which I had never used before, and finally decided to use it on him. I remember when I was flogging him, I was in a small apartment at the time, and it was kind of late in the night, and I could hear this laughter from my neighbor’s house, and I was like, “why are they so loud?” And so I was flogging harder and harder and I heard this laughter just growing, emanating, like just resounding in the entire apartment. I was like, “why would anyone be laughing at this hour? What is so funny that my neighbor thinks is so funny?” And then kept laughing and laughing. I was hitting harder and harder. And after a while, I was like, “I’m laughing. That’s me.”
So we started to go to kink events together. And we’d do a scene and people would watch and the end of one of these, after a few months of doing this, I went to the person who was running it who, at that time was Mistress Viola. And I said, “thank you so much for making this wonderful space. It feels very safe and I really appreciate you”. And she looked at me and she had a drink in her hand and she was like, have you thought of going pro? And I was like, “maybe, but let’s talk about it”. So I became her mentee and Natasha Strange’s mentee. And I’ve been doing this now for about five years.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
That’s amazing. I feel like something that really stood out to me, just because I was sort of the opposite… I’m curious about how the early roots of fetish then came together with some of the corporal play in dominance and submission. Because when I was younger and Googling things, also unaware of the word humiliation or tease and denial and just specifically looking for any sort of like… woman on top, slight teasing vibe and more vanilla porn until I found the kink scene. And then I feel like some of the more fetishy things came for me because I then understood them as an extension of like, feminine power and as a way to control people. And I’m curious, for you it sounds like sort of going the other way… from fetish attire and shiny people on the internet into more like, trying on your dominance and embodying it in the scene that you’re discussing with your boyfriend, and then going pro. I’m curious what that was like.
Domina Elara
I feel like my kink and sexual inclinations have sort of, kind of ebbed and flowed in different directions. So sometimes it could be as simple as something like my shiny people thing when I was younger. But also it can be very surprising to me. It could be something that somebody mentions in conversation and it starts to stir something in my brain. I’m like, “huh, I should go investigate that”. So it can come in so many different directions to the point where it’s so hard for me to place it, because it just comes so randomly. But also I think something that is quite fun is that I feel like now I have a queer kink community and they’re very creative. Everyone is so unique and so effervescent with their energy and their kink exploration that everyone’s vividly sharing, “this is what I did recently”, or “I’m so into this”, or “how about this?” It really opens up my mind, I’m like “yeah, maybe I could be into this. How about I investigate that too?”
I think us sharing with each other without shame has given me so much permission to explore so much more in kink, even for myself. So many different things.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Yeah, I do feel like it can be a little bit contagious, especially with like, just constantly being surrounded by people sharing beautiful content and beautiful artistic scenes and scene documentation. I really love it when submissives will let me photograph a scene. It’s so fun to be inspired and just share all of the fun things that we get to come up with in our brains and then actually do to people and make real. I feel like is really fun.
Domina Elara
Yeah, it’s really fun and so intimate as well,” to be able to share like, this is something I care about”, and it doesn’t even necessarily have to be kink, but like, being fully witnessed by people who are not in this scene that you respect or you care about, like, “I did this fantastic thing recently, look at what I did”.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
And it’s like… bloody sutured balls.
Domina Elara
Exactly. Like, “look at this!” People who are the right people are like, “my gosh, this is brilliant. This is amazing.” Being witnessed in that way is beautiful.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
It’s really interesting. It’s making me think too of what we post on social media as a form of manifestation. I had a woman submissive who was my only submissive at the time who would let me photograph them. And now the majority, or at least half of my clients are queer. And I think it is because the only body that I had that I was photographing and sharing content with was a woman and so I would have people commenting too on the post like, “this isn’t femdom. This is something else, because it’s not a male body”. Where is the word male in ‘Femdom’? It was really interesting. I think it was the first time, a year after posting those photos… I was like, “wow,I get so many requests from women in a way that I don’t hear many of my peers talking about” and I think it was because a few people were telling me that they just hadn’t seen pro dommes with women subs in that way. It made me think a lot about what we put out there and how it will then bring more like-minded people to us in a little bit more of an intentional way. And then I had to be like, “okay, I need to find a cis dude who will let me photograph him” because for a while I didn’t have any cis men clients. I had a handful of women and non-binary folks as my regulars, which was great. But I also feel like I have to remind people- I do also like men.
Domina Elara
That sounds amazing.
It’s true. I think a lot of people forget that a lot of women and non-binary people don’t want to be photographed. I think there could be a variety of different reasons. I think also sometimes it actually might be as simple as, you know, not justobvious privacy reasons, but very often if I see a man as a client, they don’t have tattoos. They don’t have visibly obvious things that can identify them. I think whenever I do see a woman, they are tattooed or sometimes heavily tattooed in a pretty distinct way.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Yeah, I don’t know what it was. Just, the privacy concerns were shifted in some way. But another thing that you mentioned was mentorship. I’d be so curious to hear you talk about your experience with mentorship. I came up in an old guard leather house, which I found because I was doing very perverted things with someone and had no language for it. This kink house gave a talk at a SUNY school and my friend listened to it and was like, “hey, like this is going to be so inappropriate, but I need to give you this business card for this kink house that I learned about because it would be remiss of me not to offer you this”. And I went there like, every other weekend in college and trained more like lifestyle old guard, earned leathers, worked my way through being a submissive to being a domme, taking sessions and then going out independent. It’s a highly problematic place, very interesting, very cult-like. I personally loved it, but definitely on reflection I have some thoughts about power in mentorship situations. This was a man ran the house, which I feel like also gave me a pretty different experience. Their emphasis wasn’t on professional domination, it was on lifestyle training. I’m curious what your experience was finding Natasha
Domina Elara
I’m actually super curious about your leather house experience and I’d to hear about it. I can share about my experience and then I’d love to hear about yours if you’re willing to share. My mentorship under Mistress Viola and Natasha Strange was a very unique one because I believe that there was at that time no standard mentorship process. I think what they saw in me was… it may have been just an instinct or a kind of vibe that they got from me based on their intuition. When it came to the training itself, I would consider it very much a choose your own adventure, which for me worked very well. I think I thrive like that.. the best environment is one where I can sort of… choose the way I determine how I learn my process. So very often what I would do is, I would gather questions over a month and write them down and have this list of questions. And then I would sit with them and be like, “OK, how would I do this? And how would I attack this? And how would I handle this?” They had a lot of fantastic beginner advice for me when I first started, which was extremely insightful and also helped me sort of like, I think start professionally in a way that I don’t think I could have done on my own. I wouldn’t have had any of the knowledge or skills to have figured it out on my own. I feel like a lot of the times sex work can be like the “secret club” and it is kind of, we have to keep a lot of information for safety. So it was very kind of them, very generous of them to be so forthright with like, “okay, you know, if I were you, I would go about it this way”. There was a lot of safety discussion.
But it was very much choose your own adventure. There were also classes that were held at the dungeon which I attended frequently. I think Natasha was a big advocate of like, “you gotta figure out the psychology of a lot of this”. And so I really focused on pursuing it, which I think helped a lot of my online content creation because a lot of it sits in the brain. It’s just a screen. You’re watching me. So where I can take you mentally is where the journey is going to go. I think a lot of it actually has fed into what I do now. And also, I think because I do so much online content, a lot of people forget that I started off working on in-person things, but then COVID hit super fast right after that. So I just went much deeper into the content creation route.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I do feel like having a heavy psychological understanding of BDSM helps with content creation and getting that hook instead of just like, creating very flat fetish content. It can go beyond that and kind of like, link the two together, which I find really, really interesting.
Domina Elara
It really does.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Yeah, my… I don’t even know what to call it. My mentorship, my training, my cult indoctrination was very different. I was quite young. I found the house when I was 18 and then went when I was 19. I’m super open with my family and my mom was terrified and actually drove me there and sat outside of the house for six hours to make sure I didn’t get kidnapped. She was my safe call for years. She was very, very sweet and just wanted me to be safe. No one was surprised when I told them I started domming, they’re like, “that tracks”. My mom tells a story where I asked her why she was so uncomfortable with me asking for what I wanted and I was like, “wouldn’t you just say no if you didn’t want to give it to me?” And I was like, “and why wouldn’t you want to give it to me?” And she was just kind of shocked that I felt that way. And she was like, “okay, good for you.” But yeah, I found the place that I trained at at age 18 and I think because I was so young, I was just kind of very like, bright-eyed and interested. I was just super horny and very much up for experience and I’m not particularly submissive but, I am a sadomasochist. So it was fun for me to explore things and explore the old guard style of training where you have things tried on you before then doing them to other people.
My biggest interest is in power and power exchange. This is maybe my toxic trait, but I really enjoyed watching. It was a very problematic place that I trained in, in retrospect. And I don’t think I was aware of it, but I enjoyed watching the male Dom try and exert power over me in a way that didn’t work. I enjoyed that resistance and I feel like I had very strong relationships with my home and with family and friendships and they weren’t able to maybe isolate me the same way that, in retrospect, they were doing to other people. So I feel like I had a better experience than quite a few people I’ve spoken to. I’d go there every other weekend. They’d have a party once a month. I was like a highlight, like the “mistress in training.” And in retrospect, I probably should have been getting paid for what I was doing. But it was a really interesting space. Like there were people there in 50 year long D/s dynamics who were part of the extended leather family who like, came up when there were not a lot of rules or people you were accountable to in this scene and just kind of making it up for themselves. Yeah, real ownership happening. And so that’s always what my interest was. I found it to be a little bit of a professional hindrance because I am really interested in those deep D/s dynamics. Like I was chatting with someone on a fansite and they were like, listen, I’m just trying to jerk off. I’m like, “okay, I’m interested in getting to know you and seeing if we gel.” He’s like, “Ma’am, this is an Arby’s like, let me just jerk off.” I was like, “okay, I appreciate the redirect, thank you.” (both laugh)
Yeah, they did not train me to be a professional dominatrix. They trained me to be a lifestyle dominatrix. And when I finished working some production assistant job and then did a pro domme session and made the same amount in a month as I did in a two hour session, I was like, “okay, I’m never having a like civvy job again.”
And then I had to sort of figure out all of the safety things and all of the like, where do you find a dungeon?
All of the more like logistical side of sex work on my own because they really did not prepare me for it being a successful business.
Domina Elara
That is such an amazing experience.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Yeah, it was, I think of it largely as a good experience. And I also like to say that a lot of what I learned about power was through watching it be misused in this space, and what I don’t want to replicate in my D/s dynamics, which I also I think is a very powerful way to to learn, but also like, I feel like I learned about what I like about old guard and that I want to take with me into my relationships and what of it I just don’t ever need to touch or am very uninterested in. But it’s very different. I think it was a good fit for me because like I said, I was interested less in like fetish or a specific activity or bondage or something like that, and very interested in power from a very, very young age. And I think I just kind of lucked into finding a place that was also at the core, a very chaotic experience. Like there was no training regimen. It wasn’t like, where are your questions? It was like, like, “hey, Blunt, do you want to sew this person’s hand into a submissive posture to their thigh?” And then just, you know, have people who are willing to kind of show me how to do it. So l I feel like I was doing that before I could like, Florentine flog. It just was sort of like all over the place.
Domina Elara
Wow, like learning to like sew somebody’s hands to their legs, like before you learn how to florentine is, yeah, a very interesting way of progressing through your kink technical skills, but wow. Yes.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Yeah. It was a chaotic, a chaotic thing for sure. I’m curious about… I feel like we talked a little bit about it with some of our roots, but what characteristics do you notice in yourself that make you feel particularly well suited to this as like a lifestyle and as a professional?
Domina Elara
I think that the one that keeps resounding that always feels true no matter the situation is empathy. I think it comes back to trying to be present and fully witness somebody as how they want to be seen. It’s funny, I feel like those are the best traits of me in my civilian life that come out tenfold in my kink experiences where everything seems to melt away and I’m just in this moment with this person.
I feel like there are other characteristics of being personable or things like that, or even things from my corporate experience that are very helpful in a client-facing kind of interaction. But I think the most important one for me, I think, would be empathy.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I like that answer a lot. feel like empathy and sadism aren’t things that we often hear spoken about in the same breath. I think they like to do professional sadism well and not like sadism for like the point of like totally destroying someone to the point where they will never be able to like recouple here in any positive way. I do feel like empathy is such an important part of it. feel like part of what I appreciate about my old guard training is knowing what things feel like in my body as that form of somatic empathy, of understanding where someone’s at… Why someone might say yes to something it seems like they actually should be saying no to and being able to fall in with someone’s nervous system is something I really enjoy about that scene. Like how you were talking about how it shows up tenfold in that space. I really appreciate and resonate with that because I think there’s something so beautiful about the demarcated beginning and end of a scene and the intentionality that goes into it that does make what happens in a scene transform everyday life in a way that you can’t really show up to in everyday life. It is such a focused form of attention, such a focused form of empathy and such a focused form of falling into someone’s nervous system to provide almost perfect attunement. I feel like that empathy and perfect attunement are not states that you can remain in 100 % of the time to that extent that allows you to direct a scene.
Domina Elara
Yeah, it is a very challenging state to be in for a super extended period of time because it does take a lot out of you, but it is such a connection when you do have it with people. Someone I played with recently, after our scene, they were like, “in your eyes, I see compassion and calculation”. And I was like, “yeah, you know, because that’s exactly what’s happening, because I’m listening so carefully”. And I know you do too in your scenes where we’re just in that moment trying to read what’s happening and wordlessly too, right? Or we’re doing this without necessarily verbal kind of affirmations or confirmations, but mostly sometimes even just the sound of a breath, the slight narrowing of the eye or like, you know, you were reading someone so closely. I think there is something also for a sub like, just because you’re blindfolded doesn’t mean I can’t read what’s going on. Like, this part of the face is actually more emotionally responsive than this part of your face. I can read a lot in that moment. And and I think that they sense it too, because they feel very witnessed. And a lot of people, especially men, I feel, actually don’t experience the joy of being very witnessed and experience the joy, the safety, the feeling of that. I think partially because of the lack of the kind of social circles that they have compared to a lot of women or queer folks who have different kinds of community and friendships. So yeah, it ends up being very, very special.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I feel like men both occupy this space of power and taking up a tremendous amount of space, as well as that space being very difficult to connect with and just… a mask and a shield from the more intimate parts of their life. It’s something I definitely see a lot in my work, of having men break down in session. One of the questions I ask on my contact form is “when is the last time you cried?” and the gender difference in this question is tremendous. I would say the majority of men… it’s like “a few years ago, a parent’s funeral, a pet’s funeral” and much more diverse answers with everyone else. So I find that
super interesting in the ability to hold space for someone.
I feel like when a scene goes well, someone feels like you’re reading them better than they can read themselves… that’s something I’ve been told in sessions. Like, “how did you know that I wanted that?” ” Did you plant that idea in my head or is that actually my desire?” I think there are so many different ways to do that. I often will start my sessions with breath work, with yoga, pranayama and meditation and end it in a similar way. I use that time to tap into the breath of someone else so that when it deviates from that more regular, relaxed cadence, I can feel it with them.
Domina Elara
That’s brilliant.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
It’s almost like somatic empathy, when I’m totally tuned in, it’s like I’m not physically feeling what’s happening with someone, but I feel along with them on the journey when I feel like in my peak dominant space. It’s one of the reasons I don’t offer mentorship, because so much of it for me is intuition, empathy and a somatic bodily feel that I haven’t found a way to be able to communicate it. I also don’t think I’m doing enough to facilitate a metorship, honestIy. I work very low volume with a very select group of people that I don’t have like, enough for someone to join in to get the robustness of experience, but it’s also something that I find difficult to put into language of what specifically is happening or what I’m doing because it feels so intuitive to me.
Domina Elara
Yeah, it almost feels like an intangible quality. Right? It’s almost hard to define exactly how to nail it. But obviously you found your own way through, you know, years of experience and exploration and finding this special way of reading people that has become so part of your own practice.
Yeah, I understand that there are some intangible things like, in this very special connection that happens in a scene that I think people have talked about what it feels like, but to nail how to create it is really challenging.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I guess we’re also talking a little bit about like, top space, it sounds like. Of both the flow of top space and falling into like, that rhythm of nothing else existing besides the link between you and your submissive. And I do find it to be so ephemeral and difficult to verbalize, but there’s something that’s so powerful. I think so much of it is just monotasking and like,that’s what happens. That type of attention, top space or subspace is only possible when you’re monotasking. I think my background as a yoga teacher really informed a lot of my practice with ways that I can kind of read a room when I’m teaching yoga and actually, when I did my 500 hour yoga teacher training, wrote about some of the parallels between BDSM and yoga for my final project, which was really fun. Because all of the like, there’s asanas for submission, there are mantras for submission, there are mudras for submission. There are these really beautiful translations about becoming everything and nothing. And all of them are sort of about tearing yourself open and approaching both like pleasure and pain with the same attention. And I feel like that has informed my practice so much. And I also know you have a spiritual practice and I would love to hear a little bit about that and how it relates to your kink as well.
Domina Elara
Yeah, I practice a lot of Buddhist philosophies. I don’t consider myself a Buddhist because I haven’t accepted the five precepts yet, because I don’t know how to deal with the one that doesn’t really want kind of… sexual deviance or whatever. So I don’t claim to be a Buddhist, but I follow a lot of Buddhist teachings. I think for a long time I was considering a lot of the mesmerized clips I was doing, which is really erotic hypnosis… the credit card compaies just don’t want to talk about it. But I really actually like making those clips because a lot of it I think is I take a lot of people through different meditative breathing practices. I even do this with poppers. It’s breathing! It’s breathing exercises, but you have poppers with you. I can make people go very deep with breathing or with poppers using different breathing techniques with less product so they’ll hurt less.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
It’s breath work.
Domina Elara
Yes. So I feel very skilled in that area. But unfortunately, I cannot make a lot of videos about it because it’s such banned content. But people play with me online over a cam call or something, that’s something that I can explore with them. And it’s often really fun. But yeah, there’s a lot of meditation breathing things that I do to take people deeper into an altered head space, or even to a more like, grounded space in their body, because a lot of us are not actually in our body on a daily basis. So being able to pull people back with breathing, with different kinds of meditation and also allowing people to… I feel like a lot of erotic hypnosis can be guided meditation. I feel like I have to be careful as well when I do this, because I can fall into an altered state when like, I’m doing a countdown and I’m like, “no, I’m slipping in, I’ve got to pull myself back”. Because I genuinely believe that it works. Also if you do more of it, you just slip into it easier.
I feel like what a gift to be able to give someone, you know, I think about like, I was talking to another dom who is a lifestyle dom and he was saying “I love giving people the gift of submission”. And I was like, “yeah, I love people”. I love being able to do that too, but I also love to be able to bring people and give people the gift of being fully present in their body, or being sent into an altered state.
So that’s purely, I guess, in the breathing or in the meditative kind of aspect of it. From the other aspect of it, I think that a lot of my practice has informed me about compassion. And that ultimately at the end of the day, we are all suffering. It doesn’t matter what you are, who you are, or whether you think your suffering is more than somebody else’s suffering, we are all suffering.
And it has funnily enough, like the practice of BDSM, I think I got into this initially in the space of being very frustrated with men. I know that the people who casually use the phrase like, “I hate men” and everything. And I would too, because I genuinely felt that at the time. There was lot of anger, I think, in my body for a long time in my 20s towards men. There were so many reasons for it and so many of them very, very valid, I promise you. But funnily enough, in doing Femdom professionally, following a more spiritual practice has actually given me more space to be more empathetic towards men and be able to be like, “no, you are suffering. We are all suffering”. I think it. has allowed me to hold a much more compassionate space towards men in general.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Better be careful, you might get cancelled from Femdom Twitter for that statement. (laughs)
Domina Elara
You know, if I get canceled for being able to show compassion and empathy, that is actually okay with me. Like that is also aligned with my practice. I’m okay about that.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Like do I have compassion? No, I do think it’s just so interesting, thinking about sadism and compassion and sadism and empathy and I think a lot of the work of my friend Avgi Saketopoulou who writes about exigent sadism, a type of sadism that is not meant to destroy but like, for growth or a better purpose and I think that also kind of aligns with a lot of what I’ve… I feel like I don’t know a ton about Buddhism, but what I know about yoga too, is that suffering is part of life and the the radiant sutras that I was talking about give so many opportunities to lean deeply into that suffering and to meditate on that suffering as a form of reaching the divine and I really, really enjoy that about BDSM sessions. Especially like, bringing in pleasure and torture and all of these other sensations. It’s like, no matter what I’m doing to you, your job is to be fully present with that. And it’s also what I love about erotic hypnosis, like FEMDOM POV clips… is being able to induce people into an altered state. I think in my work, I think a lot about neuroplasticity and the way that society forces us outside of our body in so many ways. Capitalism forces us outside of our body and benefits when we are completely disembodied and unaware of how long we’re working and unaware that our body has needs and that our spirit has needs as well. And in this space, I think there is so much space to make space in the brain and to create new pathways for people from where they normally go. I think specifically with playing with shame, being able to have an experience of meditating on your shame and your humiliation and being able to have an outcome that is not one of ostracization, of being held and being seen and being witnessed with compassion, I think really does carve out a different ending and creates a different story that you can tell yourself about. Those very real and understandable feelings about shame that isn’t one of like, losing access to something, but one that brings you closer through your shared vulnerability. I think that there’s, I don’t know… I think that’s the part I like about making Femdom POV clips. I have some cult indoctrination series from my training, from my cult indoctrination, as well as some like submissive guided Hypnosis… I use a lot of breath work in my practices and prompts to facilitate submission. And I think it is very, I don’t know, I feel like we just keep coming back to this space of like… which feels, I feel like for a lot of people, counterintuitive to the sadist as the Dom, but creating a soft and vulnerable place to destroy and recohere someone. To bring the pieces back together in a way that is… I like to talk about how I remake people in my image. I like to use a lot of my background in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, I feel like also shows up in some of my work. There’s this really beautiful myth, which I’m sure I’ll butcher, called Tikkun Olam, the idea being that when God created the universe, it was like a glass bulb and it shattered and a piece of God’s light or the divine was in everyone. Through doing community service or being together and doing goodwill, that is when the Messiah will come. When all of those pieces of the world are brought together through community. I like thinking of my clips as like, infecting someone with a spark of the divine and all of my submissives having like, a little spark of my divinity within them and through doing good for mistress, that is how Peace on Earth is brought about.
Domina Elara
I love this. This is fantastic. Gosh, something you mentioned about like, you know, pain and sadism and spirituality really kind of clicked in my brain for me about how I think not just only in Buddhism, I think in other religions too, there is this… So in Buddhism, there’s the belief that we are all suffering, right? We’re all suffering. And the hope is if we hit enlightenment, if we get to enlightenment, we will escape the cycle of suffering. And one of the ways in my practice is to sit with my suffering. A lot of meditation is sitting with your suffering. And because, I don’t know if you’ve heard the thing where like, If you don’t learn the lessons in this lifetime, you are bound to repeat them in the next lifetime.For example, if you don’t heal some of the ways you manage a romantic relationship, you’re going to probably carry it into your next romantic relationship, until you figure that shit out and heal and whatever. Same logic. My theory is in line with this whole Buddhist philosophy of sitting with our own suffering, is that we need to experience and fully sit with our own suffering so we can learn from our suffering. So we don’t perpetuate and keep cycling our suffering. My theory of like, us bringing people through extreme amounts of pain or sadism in a scene is for them to experience the suffering that they have accumulated over time, you know, that they are already suffering. But in that moment in the scene, when we put them in a scene, we force them to fully experience it. It is inescapable. If someone is bound and they are being beaten, they are fully experiencing their suffering in that moment. They cannot run away from that suffering. And in so doing, they fully embody it, fully process it, and then at the end can cry about it and feel the relief of what it is to feel their suffering fully and get through to the very end, which is the whole point of a lot of meditation. So I think it’s actually really important as a kind of personal practice for a lot of people where they’re like, “I have to go cry now and I have to see a domme to do that”. I’m like, yeah, because it’s so hard for us to access that suffering on our own. I can sit and meditate for a long time, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be able to even touch that suffering. Sometimes I’m so distant from it. It’s so removed from me that I can’t feel it anymore. I can’t fully process it. And the only way for me to fully feel it is for somebody to force me to experience it in that moment where it is truly inescapable.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
It makes total sense to me too. I think also of maybe a more maladaptive coping strategy of cutting. I feel like the way that psychologists understand cutting is to make suffering manifest, like make it visible, to make it seen, to possibly share that feeling.
And I think like a healthier way would be seeing a pro-domme, but I think that there’s something really beautiful about providing space to make that suffering visible, that suffering that everyone is experiencing and what is possible when you sit with it. I actually do a lot of work with therapists. I’ve given trainings to therapists, I’ve interviewed therapists, I’ve taught at teaching hospitals, both about sex work and BDSM. And I have one interview up on Psychology Today about kinky yoga, a practice that I was offering a while ago. I really thought a lot of psychologists were going to refer their patients to me, but I wound up having 10 therapists book me in this one month that this article came out. And I was like, “okay, like y’all are kinky as fuck”. I’ve also had people’s therapists tell them that since seeing me, their therapy has kind of, progressed at a significantly faster pace. I try and encourage most of my submissives who are seeing me on a long-term basis to be seeing a kink-aware therapist because while I think talk therapy is incredibly limited in what it can do, I think it’s very effective for finding language, especially for men who don’t have that space necessarily to talk about their feelings. I think the term is “normative or typical male alexithymia”, which… alexithymia is the inability to feel or articulate your feelings. It is a trait often associated with autism, but various types of neurodivergent people experience alexithymia and because of socialization, a large proportion of men experience the difficulty or inability to name their feelings. And so I think that’s where talk therapy can come in handy, but I also think, because you’re in the body, things just happen so much faster. I don’t know if this is something you’ve seen in your practice too, but someone who’s working through something comes and has that experience of like, getting in touch with their suffering in a somatic and embodied way and is then able to move through different aspects of their life with more grace or like, as you’re talking about that cycle of suffering, that cycle of how they’re approaching relationships and being able to have like more access to make different decisions.
Domina Elara
Yeah, I’ve definitely had somebody tell me “I wish this basically my last seven years of therapy all in two hours”. And I’m like, you know, everyone is so different. I’m a big advocate for kink, but I also don’t think that everybody needs kink. It works for me, it works for a lot of people that I see, obviously, but I think that it can be approached in so many ways. It can be approached in horny ways, which ar fun, but also in very deeply therapeutic ways, you know? I hope and wish that more people would understand that it is not necessarily your only option or only solution. You can layer your own personal practice so that you can live the life you want to live. You can have talk therapy, you can have kink, you can have dance, there’s so many things that you can incorporate into your life that can contribute to you being the full wonderful dynamic person that you want to be. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any one thing that makes everything right for one single person. I think we need a multitude of different things, which feels really, really hard and in our very capitalistic world, where do you have the time to do all the different things? So it’s, it’s really hard for a lot of people, but I’m really happy that you encouraged your long-term subs to go for talk therapy too, because it really does layer on your experience and truly give you a fuller life. And by fuller life, I don’t mean you’re doing more things in your life, but more like, you can exist in the world as the multi-colorful dimensional person that has always been you.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I think there’s something for me too about, especially when working with men, I feel like a lot of my male submissives and clients don’t have the same community that my queer clients do. And I think that there’s something that’s very important about your domme not being the only person that you talk to about your kink dynamic and like this… element of safety of having someone who you can talk about your experiences with and process them that’s not the person who’s doing it to you makes me feel safer that they’re processing it and going to be able to talk to me about something if it it goes wrong I think. Maybe this is a good segue into something else we wanted to chat a little bit about which is the idea of safety in a scene and how so many D/s roleplay sort of like pervert or like undo this feeling of safety and we’re talking about therapy. So maybe now’s a great time to shout out to our therapy clip, which
I’m filming right now, an erectile dysfunction therapy clip which I am very excited for. I did a ton of research for this one so it is based in science.
Domina Elara
That’s it. Good for you. We love a little bit of truth, you know.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Yeah, truth hurts the most. So why not just go there? But yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit about how you think about safety within a BDSM scene. When I think about safety, I think of it largely as like a potential, I don’t even want to say ideal…Like I actually think not being safe is where we grow the most. But I think when we feel safe, more is possible within the realm of what already exists and when we feel secure feeling unsafe, I think that’s when new possibilities are possible. So I’m curious how you play with safety and unsafety in some of the content you make and some of the scenes that you hold.
Domina Elara
I think that I approach it all very differently. Online, I really enjoy playing with the subversion of relationships that are supposed to feel safe, but then end up being subverted or perverted into a way that is actually unsafe. I have gone through so many years of therapy that I decided to create a series of like, six psychologist clips. You can’t use “therapy” or “therapists” on clip sites, but you can use “psychologists”. So my sex psychologist will, you know, very often start off feeling very normal and lure you into this sense of safety of normal interactions. But then after a while, it feels like it starts to get a little bit inappropriate, then it starts to get more inappropriate. And after a while as a viewer, you realize you’re doing something extremely inappropriate in a sex psychologist’s office. So is that okay? And is that safe? And is that all right? And then basically ends off with a certain level of unease and confusion. I really enjoy this kind of interaction because… I think it might be just my own kink of having sat through so many years of therapy and wanting to pervert something that has always been very safe to me. But I’ve always been a person who has enjoyed sort of like, toeing the lines of what is allowed and what is not allowed. You know, if you accidentally saw her underwear because she was crossing her legs in a certain way, like, do you say something? I mean, you probably shouldn’t say something, right? It just keeps encroaching a little bit further until suddenly you’re like, your dick is out and you’re doing stuff and you’re like, “I don’t know if this is okay”.So its this kind of like, frog in hot water kind of environment, where it just sort of gets worse and worse and worse and worse. And here they are. But no one’s ever upset about the situation. You’re just only concerned whether you have crossed a boundary or not. And so I think that that’s the fun, toe-the-line that I like to play. And also, I don’t know, something about that feels very taboo to me and feels very sexy in my brain. How is it for you when you make your clips?
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Well, I really like how you were describing that too, because there’s the research behind flow state is that something should be like familiar enough, safe enough, but then challenging enough that it puts you into this altered space. That is the flow of like, addiction when you’re gambling, it’s the flow of really getting into like, hypnotic space and it sounds like you’re doing something similar in the therapist clips when you’re sort of gauging how much safety and unsafety bringing someone into feeling safe and comfortable and then slowly challenging them and what that concept of that space is. It’s so interesting, and just another way that humiliation and shame can be used to induce an altered state of that like, not knowing but being so entranced that you can’t say no, you can’t stop, you’re so into it, you can’t take your hand off your dick. You are following what you’re told because seduction is a process of bringing people into an altered state as well. And I think you described that very well.
Domina Elara
I like that. I’m going to have to think about that for a while. That’s great.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I think I definitely have some psychology clips which I guess I can’t call therapy, but I think I do a lot of playing with safety and unsafety with my role as mommy. I would say probably the most of mommy being this space that is supposed to be perfect attunement. You’re perfectly attached and there’s so much room to play with someone when you do get them into that feeling of perfect safety, perfect attachment, perfect attunement. Like, “I know what you need better than you do” and then using that to then pervert the dynamic, which I really like to do. Like, “you exist solely for mommy’s pleasure. There is nothing about you that is outside of mommy’s, you are of mommy, mommy made you, mommy can destroy you, every thought you have should revolve around mommy” and like “mommy’s going to make you do these things that mommy probably shouldn’t but you’re going to get very excited by this” and then that shame, you know, the role that shame plays in it… I think I have a very nurturing mommy role with some people and like a very, very sadistic mommy role. really, I haven’t made this one yet, but I really want to do a munchausen mommy clip where mommy’s like, making you sick and making you stay home and you have to keep jerking off over and over again. Mommy’s taking you to the doctor. I want to do that one in person too. “You have a fever. You have to stay home with mommy all day. You’re not allowed to go to school until you feel better. And we’re going to just keep going to the doctor’s appointments.”
Domina Elara
That’s so messed up.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Ideally a little forced intox too for my fantasy.
Domina Elara
Ooh, no, this is good. Yeah, I like this bubble boy kind of situation.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Mommy’s little bub boy.
Domina Elara
Yeah, I love that.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I feel like another thing we chatted about talking about was seeing both newbies and dommes.
Domina Elara
So if I had a specialty, I think for in-person sessions is- I’m a great first provider for people who have never done kink before. I feel like I’m very patient. I’m very compassionate. I’m very intuitive. I’m very empathetic. And I’m very happy to walk people through a lot of their anxieties, because I’m actually very familiar, because I see providers too. So I know the process and like, the different snags where you’re like, “I’m like really nervous here”. I have experienced them too. And it’s so wonderful because this year I’ve had so many people have their first in-person kink experience be with me and they’ve seen me again and again, or they plan to see me again and again.
For me, it’s very emotionally rewarding to be able to be that first safe person that they see. Because I feel like your first experience can really change how you feel about anything. I know somebody who had a very bad first therapist experience. And so now they’ve sworn off all kind of talk therapy forever. I’m sure people, if they had a really bad or even lukewarm kind of, kink first experience… They could be like, “well, I guess it’s not for me” . I’m like, “no, no, you’re here. There’s something about it that you’re curious about. We’ll find it. Don’t worry”. I’m also very good with people who have a very undefined start, they’re like, “I don’t really know why I’m here”. I’m like, just have a curiosity, I’ll find it. I’ll find it inside you. And so far I’ve always been right. So yeah, I actually really love being somebody’s first Domme. It’s very emotionally rewarding for me and I get a lot of pleasure from it. And it seems like people really enjoy it themselves. And a lot of these people, their first time is they were a person who had only experienced Femdom online. And then finally, they’re like, “okay, I want to do in person, but you’re going to be my in person person”. And they’ve been like, “wow, I can’t believe I’ve waited my whole life to do this”.
That’s why I’m always so charmed when somebody’s in their 20s and they come and find me and I’m like, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Don’t even worry about it.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I feel like I’ve gotten so many more young people coming to see me. And I also really, really love newbies. I feel like I have a very… I’ve been around in this industry for like 16 years and people will often look at my content for years before booking me. So I feel like I have the experience. Sometimes I’m there first, but I really do love, well… I’m a mommy, of course I want you to be a virgin.
I think like, I’ve also hired professionals before and my coming up story, like bottoming and sadomasochism, I need a biannual beating to remain humble, I think it keeps me sane. But I remember the first time I hired a pro, she asked for her gift, and I’ve always called it a tribute. And I was like, my God, I didn’t bring you a gift. I’m so sad. And then she was like, “the cash” and I was like, “my God, like, I’m deeply humiliated”. I just recently had so much more compassion for how anxious people are and the weird little things that people will do when they’re anxious just because they don’t have familiarity with the specifics or even how an individual runs their sessions. I honestly think most of them should hire someone at some point, even just for the being on the receiving end of being a client, I think has taught me so much about my professional domination practice as well.
Domina Elara
Yeah, it absolutely can be really stressful and really scary. I also hire pros and even from the moment of filling in that application form, I am so anxious and I have to run it by my kinky best friend and be like, “okay, okay, do I sound all right?” I do get very, very anxious and it’s so funny because I may have interacted with this pro before, like in a normal setting, and we’re fine. But when I’m in that state where I’m applying to see them to have a session, I can get so anxious and it’s so terrifying. I’m so grateful for any of the people I’ve seen who have made the process easier. And I’ve incorporated so much of that into my practice too. That’s why I think newbies find a lot of comfort, because they have no idea what’s happening, right? It’s not like a doctor visit.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Speaking of safety and unsafety, I like newbies who are super open. And I feel like you were talking about it, of like, I will help you figure out what you’re interested in. I’m like, this is what mommy is interested in. And here, what a coincidence. It just turns out that you’re interested in this too. How incredible. I had a really lovely, lovely day with someone that I trained online on my fan sites for years and watched them slowly start exploring the kink scene. So I wasn’t the first Domme that they saw, but by the time they came to me, they had a little bit of experience and it was so fun to like, pervert them further and have all of that anticipation and build up from seeing photos from their sessions that they were doing with other people. Hearing that other dommes were talking about how well-trained they were and all of these little tidbits, I felt like were so fun just watching that growth too.
Domina Elara
It is really fun to watch when somebody started off here in their perversion and now they’re all the way over there. It is so joyful. I think it’s one of the most exhilarating things where it’s like, I really enjoy it when somebody’s open enough to more perversion, to more kinks, more different kinds of eroticism so that they can enjoy such a wide buffet of experiences. It’s just so fun. It’s so rewarding. Like, I gave you a new one.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I feel like I could chat with you forever, but is there anything else you wanted to mention before we wrap?
Domina Elara
Hmm, I think that, I guess like, I guess like the main thing I would say is that If you’re a sub who is online and have kind of always been excited to see an in-person domme, just book and see what happens. I’m also going to be honest and say that in-person and purely content creating dommes have different skill sets and all are valid, right? I this year I think I’ve toured the most with my in-person things because I feel like I feel more comfortable with COVID things than I did before. But when you decide to book an in-person domme for the first time, you’re going to be nervous and that’s okay and we know that and you’re going to be fine. I would say go and do it. Try it! Choose your domme wisely, ask yourself what kind of in-person experience you’re looking for. Find the appropriate one, with appropriate experience to be able to give you that, to guarantee that you can have a really great first experience. And also, everyone does it differently. Just because I do something this way doesn’t mean 20 dommes after me will do the same.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
Yeah, I feel like assessing fit too is so important. What type of experience are you interested in? Because not every domme, I feel like there’s so much subtlety in all of our marketing and branding so that we can connect with the right people. And I feel like as I’ve altered and tailored my marketing, the more barriers to entry that I’ve been able to erect as I do better and better in the industry, the more selective I’ve been able to be as well. But I do think we share so much in our marketing and in our contact forms, where you really get the flavor of if you think you would be a good fit or what type of session that you want.
And I loved hearing about the spiritual side of your practice. I feel like we’re very aligned on our approach to the power of in-person and the power of falling in and creating that space.
Domina Elara
Yeah, the more I do it, I think I’ve done more in person this year than I’ve done for all my other years of doing this. I found myself falling so much more in love with it than I do with in person because I like that connection and I like what I bring to it. And I’ve attracted, I think a very specific subset of people that we align extremely well with. And it has just been so incredibly rewarding that I want keep pursuing more in-person things as well next year. But it’s, yeah, it’s been really, really joyful.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
I love that we can have so many different facets of our career and when we’re burned out on one thing, we can lean more deeply into another or just when our interests and shifts, our interests change, we can, I don’t know, it’s nice. I’ve enjoyed that about content making of being able to be like, I wanna do less of this or I wanna do more of that and just be able to sort of do whatever feels best for you at the time. If folks don’t find you, where can they?
Domina Elara
So I’m on Blue Sky and on Twitter as Domina Elara. I’m on Instagram as Dominatrix Elara. And my website is dominatrixelara.com or you can find more information at dominaelara.com. And I am on all major clip sites, but I’m most active on my fan sites like loyal fans.
Mistress Danielle Blunt
And if you want to find me, Google mistress blunt, because who knows what site will be up or down. But it’s all there. Well, it was so lovely chatting with you and we should probably do this again.
Domina Elara
Yeah, I really enjoyed that. Thank you so much for your graciousness, your lovely energy and and your insightful questions. It was really wonderful spending time with you.
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