the pleasure's all mine

This book, by Joan Kelly, is the memoir of a professional submissive. I picked it up with a great deal of interest. I've read a number of books on sex work, it's a topic that I find endlessly fascinating. I've read essays and books by women who do professional domination (Mistress Ruby Ties it Together by Robin Shamburg is a great example). People talking about professional submission is far less common, and as I understand it, doing it is less common as well.

This book was a fun, light read. It's sexy in places, funny in others, and it has a wonderful chatty quality to it. But I did have some problems with it. The narrator has difficulty maintaining her own boundaries, to a pretty serious degree. When women try to violate her boundaries, she says "no" or walks away. But when men violate her boundaries, she thinks it's sexy. That bothered me. There is a difference between someone being dominant and someone not caring about their partner's feelings. And it's especially dangerous considering that she does professional submission in private with relative strangers.

It worries me to think that people who are interested in submission but who don't have much in the way of knowledge might use this author's story as a guideline or model. It seems like she mostly evaded death, trauma, and criminal prosecution out of luck. It definitely wasn't out of common sense. So, a fun read, but definitely NOT the book you should read to learn about BDSM. Three stars.