Excerpted from The Sex Lives of African Women: Self-Discovery, Freedom, and Healing by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah permission of Astra House, published March 1, 2022. Copyright © 2022 by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah. All rights reserved.
MISS DEVIANT
Miss Deviant is a fifty-two- year-old Black lesbian from the UK. She invited me to interview her at home in South London, and we walked up the communal stairs that her male sub had cleaned the day before while wearing nothing but an apron. She told me that she had her sub clean the public areas of her flat only when her neighbors were away.
We sat in her living room and I sipped on peppermint tea while she told me about working in the sex industry, being part of the bondage, domination, and sado-masochism (BDSM) subculture, and how she had fallen in love with a younger woman after identifying as heterosexual for most of her life. She showed me pictures of herself at work. Usually dressed in tight black latex, smiling while she inflicts pain on her subs, who tend to be white men. Part of what I found fascinating in my conversation with Miss Deviant is how she used her role as a dominatrix to subvert traditional gender roles. Her subs tend to be rich, powerful white men who perform very little labor in their own homes, and so sometimes she deliberately assigns them to perform acts of service for their wives and partners.
It would begin with a phone call.
“Your mistress is coming, you need to be prepared.”
Click clack, click clack. I deliberately wore high heels because of the sound it would make on the wooden floors in his kitchen. His instructions were to be naked, kneeling on the kitchen floor, facing the door, head down low. He was forbidden to look at me. Nearby would be a mug of boiling hot water with two teaspoons in it. Sometimes I would put the teaspoons on his nipples. Other times I would walk around him, and leave. Sometimes I wouldn’t turn up at all.
To amuse myself I would call him and ask him to wank with Brillo pads. The state of his cock later would tell me he did it. I f***ed him up the arse. It was awesome. That is how I became Miss Deviant by name and nature.
I was adopted as a baby, I was sexually abused as a child, and from the age of eleven I was constantly propositioned in the streets. I remember thinking as a kid, What is on me? I had a very boyish frame, but maybe that was the attraction. In my teens I would confuse sex and love. I was wild. I would have sex with lots of boys. By the time I was sixteen I was homeless and living on the streets, running around the West End of London. At night I would queue up for a bed at Centrepoint, but the following day everyone would have to leave by 10 a.m. I got referred to Riverpoint, a sister project at Hammersmith, and from there I got a job as a chambermaid in a hotel at Earl’s Court. I kept seeing massive bags of condoms when I cleaned the rooms. I couldn’t figure it out. I had never thought of using condoms personally. I knew I should; after all, this was the eighties, and AIDS was everywhere. One time I was asked to help two long- term residents pack up to leave. They were chatting about business being bad and going back up north. “Have you got your own business?” I asked. “Nah love, we’re toms.”
At that time, I was earning twenty-five pounds a week. I sat on this information for a few days; it just kept playing over and over in my mind. I wasn’t a virgin and they had told me that all they did was to walk around the street and get customers. I started to walk around, and it was like my eyes were open for the first time. Not all the girls were in miniskirts like you see in the films. This was reassuring because I was still quite boyish at this time. I decided I would have a go at this. One night I went out and walked the streets. I had no condoms, but this guy eventually picked me up and we went back to his room. He f***ed me every which way for about two to three hours. I still remember his smell, and the contortedness of his face from the exertions of f***ing me. It was vile. I’m not doing this again, I thought. When he finally finished with me I went back to my hotel room, and put the twenty-five pounds in my bedside drawer. After a few minutes I took it out and looked at it. I did that over and over again. I had earned an entire week of wages in a few hours.
I started to hang out with this West London crew—all the boys were pick- pockets, and all the girls were prostitutes. I had a ponce but he did it with such aplomb and style. Pimps were organized, had several girls, and charged each girl an amount. Ponces would take everything you had. My guy was adamant: “You do not touch drugs. Don’t do class A drugs.” I was always in trouble with my ponce because I would go off raving with my friends. I don’t know what saved me. He never beat me although he was renowned for beating girls.
One time one of my friends disappeared. I knew she was attached to an agency in Soho and I was worried about her so I went there and demanded, “Where is my friend?” They told me, “She’s gone to Germany, we’re looking for more girls, do you want to go?” A week later I was on a plane to Germany. I had never been outside the country before. At the airport, two guys walked up to me, said something in German, and then grabbed my bag. It wasn’t until I was in their car that I thought, Uh-oh, this isn’t such a good idea. We pulled up at a red-light district in Bremerhaven and who do I see but my mate in the window. We just screamed and ran towards each other. Germany blew my mind. In London I was constantly running from the police, always being nicked, being hauled before the courts. In Germany I was sitting in a window, registered to work, and had to go to the clap clinic once a week. A van would come round once a week and get all the girls who hadn’t gone to the clinic. The shame! It was always the English girls having to get into the van.
After two years the normalcy of the situation started to get to me. It was very common to have the mother working behind the bar, the daughter doing admin, and the father being the general pimp in the area. At twenty-one I decided I had had enough and wanted to get out of the industry. I came back home. I couldn’t find a job and started working in bars in Soho. There you didn’t sell sex, you sold drinks, although you could make private arrangements if you wanted. It was one of those places where you would say to a man, “Buy me a cocktail, sir,” and when his bill came it would be £300 even though you had only drunk a Coke. I just felt sorry for the guys. To a couple of guys, I would whisper, “Yeah, you just need to go, the guy is coming with the bill.” I didn’t last very long there, and started working in restaurants and legit bars until I met a friend who was working for the local government. That’s how I drifted into social work—it is full of people who have been abused, and middle-class white women who want to help the little people.
I spent the whole of my twenties being f***ed as opposed to me f***ing whom I wanted to f***. In my thirties it became really important to me to lead my sex life. I would say to guys, “If you let me take control you will have the best sex of your life,” but I still wasn’t managing to do this successfully. I was still passive during sex. I started to take a bit more control with husband number three, who was more open-minded. He liked anal sex, and having his bottom played with, but he was also dominant, and liked to tie me up.
At work I had a close male friend, and every Friday we would go to his for drinks. We called it “washing off the week.” One night we were very drunk and he told me that he was a submissive and a masochist. I remember think- ing, There is no way in hell that is for me. He said, “If you are not submissive and you’re not a masochist what do you think you might be into?” I could literally feel a light bulb switch on. I got a really weird yummy feeling in my stomach. It was the same feeling I had had when I was seven or eight. I was a tomboy, and brought up in a very middle-class family surrounded by lots of books. The boys in particular had war books. I remember reading one of my brother’s books and there was a passage where someone had a flannel over his face, and water was being poured over the flannel so he had a sensation of being drowned. I remember reading that passage over and over again and it gave me that same tingly feeling in my stomach. I now know that it was waterboarding.
Still, it took me until my thirties to discover BDSM. My submissive and I started to get emotionally tied to each other. I considered leaving my husband, and then pulled myself together. My sub was hurt for a while, our friendship came to a halt temporarily, but now we’re good friends again and often speak fondly of our summer of love. I drifted back into my marriage but felt unfulfilled. We had been together for ten years, and married for two. For the first time in my life I was settled and had lived in one place for twelve years; I had never experienced that before. As a child, I had been in care and moved around a lot. I started to feel trapped in the marriage. I was also doing drugs quite heavily by then; that was the catalyst that brought the marriage to an end.
In my forties there was a change of government, the Conservatives came into power, and there was a cut in social workers. I was applying for jobs and not getting any. I didn’t believe in signing on for welfare, so I wondered what to do next. Should I try escorting? I was discussing this with my friend with whom I had the summer of love and he said, “Why don’t you become a professional dominatrix?” I started to research on the internet, I advertised on dating sites as Ms. Bossy Boots, I made it clear in my profile that I was expecting remuneration and that I would boss men around. A guy messaged me and told me I was on the wrong website. He suggested I try Informed Consent, and so I did, and there lay before me the whole BDSM community.
I was in awe that there was a community, and by the range of that community. In BDSM there are no bounds, it is just your consent that stops you from doing whatever you want to do. There was a group for pro dommes; I went on that page and said, “I want to be a pro domme, is there anyone who can talk to me?” They were so scathing. Two people sent me good responses, one of whom was R, who I am still friends with today. She told me, “Don’t become a dominatrix, incorporate domination into your natural personality; then you will become a domme that’s you . . .” I am known as the smiling sadist—I can really hurt people while singing, dancing, and clapping. I thought, This is awesome, I can do this as me. I felt comfortable in the pro domme community—everybody came to the table as they were. I realized that I could use my sexual being without giving up my sexual being. I started doing sessions topless; I would allow guys to orally pleasure me although I didn’t find it pleasurable.
My friend was horrified. He said, “I have been seeing pro dommes for years and they don’t do that.” I believe that as a pro domme you should be able to do what you like. I would do naked sessions, wearing just stockings, and would slap men if they got a hard-on. I started to change the way I dommed. I made it clear on my website that “I do not guarantee happy endings” but still seven out of ten guys would ask, “Can I have a happy ending?” I would say I cannot guarantee you a happy ending and they would say, “But I am paying you.”
I had an awakening in the last three to four years about being a woman in this world. I realized that male submission is bulls**t. Men can dip into it but when they go out into the world they are not advocating for equal pay. I have met a lot of male dommes and I find them very predatory. A lot of men call themselves dommes because it gives them access to women. I was at a party once, and a male domme tied up his female sub intricately and left her in the kitchen where she was struggling to get loose. People were around and laughing, I could see she was getting very frustrated. I recognize that could have been part of their play but I didn’t like it. Her domme was not connected to her. He was talking to someone else in another room. I hate to see a male domme playing with a woman unless I feel a particular connection between them. In the BDSM world you do not interrupt people’s scenes. You can get banned from parties for doing things like that.
A lot of pro dommes have female subs to sexually satisfy their clients. Towards the end of my pro domming days I decided I wanted a female sub for myself and not for anyone else. I was desperate to dominate a woman; I had flirted with women in clubs and the energy was different. I advertised for a female sub and E approached me. We exchanged a few messages on Fetlife, we met up, and I instantly fell in love. It was like hitting the jackpot. She had just gotten into kink herself. She is a beautiful Black woman, androgynous, slight build, shaved head, and rides a motorbike. She is seventeen years younger than I am. I think I have always been bisexual but prior to E I had never had full-on sex with a woman. Sex with E is fire. Until I met E, my sexual relationships with guys were all about them asking, “Did you cum, did you cum, did you cum?” It was so irritating. It wasn’t about me cumming; it was about their male ego. E has given me sexual freedom. I am still finding my feet in terms of sex with her. She says that I’m pansexual, that I’m attracted to souls and personalities more than body types or gender.
Over the past two years with E, she has made me view women very differently, and myself very differently as a sexual being; she has rounded me up into being a more complete person. E wants to be of service to a mistress; I could give her that experience but it wouldn’t be real, and I want her to find her feet in the BDSM community, so I introduced her to another mistress. They had some practice sessions and now E is going to serve her for real. The first time she went over she ended up staying later than she had intended to. I started feeling anxious: What is she doing? Jealousy crept in. When she rang me to say she was home, she sounded so excited, I was trying not to rain on her parade, but she could tell something was wrong. Eventually I explained to her how I felt, I asked for one or two days to process, and I felt better after a day. Now we are looking for a playmate for her.
There is always going to be a risk that she could fall in love with somebody else, and they could form an emotional attachment, and of course I would be devastated, but for all my experiences in life what I do know is that I would come out the other side. I think we would always be friends unless one of us f***s the other over. She is such an important woman in my life outside of our relationship. If she formed a relationship with someone else, I would have to separate myself for a little while to heal, but I like to think that with everything else I f***ing got over in my life, I could get over this too.
The Sex Lives of African Women is available from Amazon and Bookshop.
Hear Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah speak on Saturday, February 11, 2023 at the Residence 11 Desire Summit on Sex and Relationships in Los Angeles and livestreaming worldwide. Get tickets here.