I Told My Mentor I Was a Dominatrix

Something seemed off when I signed into Interfolio one late September morning, during the break between two classes I was teaching. I scanned the dossier a few times, wondering if it could be a glitch, and then it hit me: My mentor had withdrawn her letter of recommendation. In fact, she had withdrawn all of her letters, from 2016 to now. The revelation rang in my ears, like crystal shattering on the floor.

My mentor — let’s call her Anne — was the sole reason I finished my dissertation. While she wasn’t my adviser or even in my primary field, she was my cheerleader and confidante. We had become quite close. She said she felt in loco parentis; I called her my “dissertation mom.” But things fell apart when, desperate to quell her fears after a summer teaching gig fell through, I outed myself to her as a sex worker.

“You will lose all credibility,” she told me in a long, difficult email. As it turned out, in Anne’s eyes, I already had.

The power dynamics that structure mentorship in academia are nebulous at best. In my own department, the only formalized mentor-mentee relationship was the somewhat-arbitrary pairing of graduate students at varying stages of their degrees. Mentorship between students and faculty members was, by contrast, an entirely informal, ad hoc alliance. Boundaries within these relationships are similarly opaque. Mentors can resemble friends, collaborators, parents, and even, occasionally, lovers. But these relationships are never fully severed from the institutional power a mentor has over their mentee — an imbalance that mentors prefer to overlook, even if mentees never really can. Your mentee may be your friend. Your mentor is not.

This unspoken power differential is amplified by stark socioeconomic stratification. Tenure-line faculty will generally acknowledge that adjunct salaries and graduate stipends are comically insufficient, but their empathy stops short of understanding the material realities of living in poverty. Even though my “fully funded” Ph.D.-program stipend was approximately half of the local living wage, for instance, the faculty regularly implied that those of us with part-time jobs weren’t “serious” about our academic work (another reason I kept the sex work I did as a struggling student — off and on from high school through graduate school — to myself). And when it comes to the plight of adjuncts, these same faculty members seem blissfully unaware that, in the “real world,” everyone is an adjunct — every hustle is a side hustle. If it’s so bad, they ask (without looking for a real answer), then why don’t you leave? Alas, there’s nowhere to go.

Most tenured faculty have dealt with low stipends at some point in their careers, but few have scraped by on them amid a postrecession economy, a student-debt crisis, and the austerity-fueled explosion of the adjunct sector. Assistant professors who have been there often discuss the “survivor’s guilt” that sours the rare joy of snagging a tenure-track position; they know that, for no good reason, so many qualified and deserving candidates will never get that chance. The job market was always “bad,” but it’s unfathomably worse now. If your mentor happens to reject — or refuses to sympathize with — that reality, though, then biting your tongue until it bleeds is probably your only option.

Between these two poles — the perennially guilty, early career researcher and the smug senior scholar with their head in the sand — lie the faculty who genuinely want their students to succeed, and believe that they can, but who feel powerless to halt the collapse of the professoriate. They don’t fault their students — but they don’t fault themselves, either. It’s the economy, the academy, in which we are all just pawns.

Do not remind these gentle souls that they are not, in fact, powerless.

This past summer, a few months before embarking on my fourth round on the academic job market, and without any courses to teach for the semester, I found myself in a financial snafu. With no money in my checking account and no paycheck on the horizon, I had about a week to cobble together a couple grand before rent was due. The clock kept ticking; there was no lifeboat in sight. I was hungry. So I swallowed my pride, reluctantly dusted off my corset, and dialed up the old dungeon. By the end of the week, I was back in the sex trade, beating, humiliating, and degrading men (and sometimes women) for $90 an hour, plus tips — slightly above my hourly adjunct pay before taxes. I made rent with $60 to spare.

“Money is always nice to have,” Anne wrote to me, “but it doesn’t sound to me like this is about the money.”

For graduate students and contingent faculty, though, especially those of us who lack the family wealth to buffer poverty-level stipends, academia is always about the money.

But Anne wasn’t talking about academia. She was talking about sex work. “If this information comes out in any way, shape, or form, it will destroy your academic prospects,” she wrote, frustrated. “Come on, is it worth it?”

The academy’s collective reluctance to talk about “worth” in concrete terms suggests to me that most tenured professors don’t understand how much money adjuncts actually make. Recently, Erin Bartram started collecting adjunct salaries. Her data indicate that most adjuncts’ earning power is similar to mine: I make around $4,000 per class, before taxes.

“Increase your income or reduce your expenses,” Anne repeated, exasperated. I teach four classes per semester and occasionally a summer course; at best, I make $28,000 annually, after taxes. There are few nonessential expenses I can afford to eliminate.

Matt Roth for The Chronicle

Generations of academics have sustained the professional myth of the “life of the mind,” failing to account for bodily experience within their conception of academic labor. In the popular imagination, academia is an arena of purely intellectual pursuits, wherein the body is simply a vehicle through which the brain receives and produces knowledge. Thus, when a student finds that her bills outweigh her stipend and decides to bartend, or drive for Lyft, or copy-edit, it is her brain, not her already-vulnerable body, that her advisers lament.

Sex work, on the other hand, exposes the scholar’s body in a way that highlights the very vulnerability and, indeed, the humanity that academic work politely ignores. It lays bare the prevailing truth that bodily exertion cannot be acknowledged unless it is in service of intellectual work — never mind survival. The academic sex worker, selling her body to subsidize her brain, is a mirror: See how my candle burns at both ends. Look at how I set myself ablaze for you.

At the same time, the academic sex worker illuminates the insidious class tension that structures academia. Look at me, whip in one hand, Foucault in the other. Am I not decadent? And yet, I have the audacity to claim, with a face beneath my foot, that I suffer from poverty?

As a curious foil to academic labor, which is both difficult and underfunded, sex work is often misconceived as easy and lucrative. It is neither. Sex work — an umbrella term for an industry that includes escorts, strippers, dominatrixes, sugar babies, adult-film performers, and phone-sex operators — is labor intensive. My own field of domination requires physical strength for corporal sessions, mental agility for role play, a keen awareness of time management to schedule and perform the components of a scene, and the stamina to take session after session over an eight-hour shift.

Like with adjuncting, my income from sex work seems reasonable on paper, but that’s because it reflects only the hours spent in session, not the time that goes into training, planning, or promoting. While a particularly skilled and successful Domme may pull in six figures a year, sex work is more often a means of making ends meet. I, for instance, earn about $500 a week — hardly enough to make a dent in my six-figure student-loan debt. Hypothetically, if I work seven days a week and retain steady clients, my annual income between domming and teaching may brush $50,000.

There’s another insidious misconception about sex work, which presumes that the sex worker is traumatized and striving to regain agency; that she is broken. Domination especially invites this stereotype: I, a survivor of rape and domestic violence, beat men as I have been beaten. But my relationship to domination is professional, not recreational, and assuming the position of my oppressor is in no way therapeutic. It is survival.

And yet the term “survival sex work” perpetuates stigma against sex workers by suggesting we are either hedonists, unable to divorce our sexual proclivities from our professional lives, or victims, reluctantly sacrificing our bodies as a last resort. The Madonna-whore complex for the 21st century. The reality, as always, is more complex.

While some of my dominatrix co-workers rely solely on sex work for their incomes, the majority of us are simply underpaid in our vanilla careers. My co-workers include: a school counselor, a union organizer, a geneticist, a dental hygienist, an art teacher, and, of course, several students — all but one in graduate school. Most have college degrees. Many have master’s degrees. Some are mothers. One thing we all share, though, is the burden of stigma from friends, family, and colleagues who believe that our work signifies a broken moral compass, rather than the reality that the conditions under which we must work are immoral.

“Academia and sex work are mutually exclusive,” Anne insisted. (This is, needless to say, demonstrablyuntrue.) To her, my sex work wasn’t the result of academia rejecting me; rather, it was evidence that I had rejected academia. I had chosen my body over my mind, and she could no longer support either. So, she wanted to teach me a lesson. “This,” Anne told me, “is mentorship.”

What the academic sex worker needs from her mentor, though, isn’t confusion or derision. She needs to know that, despite the academy’s devaluation of her labor, her work is valuable. Despite an income that excludes her from the middle class, she still belongs in the classroom. The academic sex worker has a voice, and she needs her mentor to hear it.

The structure of mentorship is invariably more meaningful for the mentee than the mentor. For the mentee, especially first-generation-college students unfamiliar with the hierarchies and unspoken bylaws of academia, a mentor provides comfort, guidance, advice, and protection. When I confessed that I had been working as a dominatrix, what my mentor heard was that she had failed to support me — or, perhaps, that I was unworthy of her support.

She tells me I betrayed her.

My already-precarious academic career is on life support, sustained by a colleague’s half-hearted, last-minute letter of recommendation to replace the one that Anne rescinded. I struggle to dominate, especially when I see academic clients — a local film professor, a retired Freudian, a biochemist — none of whom seem to be suffering any consequences for their participation in the sex trade. No, they collect their paychecks, leave their offices, and come to pay me, a junior colleague, for the pleasure of kissing my feet.

Sometimes, they brag: “I have a Ph.D., you know. From McGill.”

“Is that so?” I ask. “Mine is from Michigan,” or Penn, or Irvine, or wherever I like to pretend I earned my doctorate. They rarely believe me, and I stop trying to intimidate them with anything but my body.

I’ve started lying, like I wish I had to Anne. I cry more, I sleep less, I doubt my own ability to mentor my students. Am I, too, capable of such cruelty?

As a Domme, I am paid to be consensually cruel. Anne’s cruelty is both gratis and gratuitous. Despite her disdain for BDSM, she is a natural at it.

And yet, I miss her. Her abandonment echoes through me, my hollow body, and I feel an absence in my heart as though she took the space she occupied in it with her.

My students will never suffer this loss.