“They come for the body, but stay because they’re chained,” Paula Dreidemie says with a smirk. She sips demurely on a dark red wine. It’s lunchtime, and Paula, a dominatrix who operates a dungeon out of a storage unit in Barcelona, has suggested a local eatery down the block from her underground office. She’s wearing a black mesh top and red lipstick. She looks like an old Hollywood villain as she removes her headscarf, releasing corkscrew brown curls and blunt bangs.
“You might not believe it,” Paula says. “But there’s a big market for being kidnapped.” Her thick Argentine accent curls around every word as we dig into decadent plates of lamb, octopus, and some type of vegetable soup. The scrawling menu is in Catalan, which neither of us speak, however Paula’s Spanish has gotten us each a glass of wine and a substantial three-course meal that we can only speculate about the ingredients.
Paula is a 33-year-old writer, filmmaker, and artist whose interest in studying and practicing theories of punishment, pain, and discipline has led her down an unconventional path into the psycho-sexual world of domination. Her practice of BDSM, a popular short-hand for bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadism, is more elaborate than a spank or blindfold. It’s a state of mind that enables Paula to completely dominate her clients, physically, mentally — and even intellectually.
I met Paula a year ago when she was working in Paris. She had turned a basement that once housed charcoal in its dank stone cavern nearly two centuries ago into an office — a totally unnerving, torture chamber kind of office, where she stashed clients who had paid her to be kidnapped. A year later and Paula’s operation has moved over 600 miles, away from longtime clients and her fiancé. Fortunately, the prospective clients are just as freaky in Barcelona, she assures me. “Each city has their own fetishes, because it’s related to culture,” Paula explains. “What is forbidden here? What is a really nasty thing in this culture?” Paula says. “They’re obsessed with poop here. Probably something to do with the Catholic Church,” she says, shrugging. Paula’s most devoted clients never had to say goodbye to her, though, and make the trek to Barcelona for her niche services.
Photo: Mirella De Mar
Known to her clients as Goddess Tisiphone, the fair but cruel namesake of the ancient Greek goddess of vengeance, Paula morphs into her dominatrix alter-ego by channeling the vicious femininity into a political exercise of dominance and re-education. When you picture a dominatrix, what may come to mind is an imposing woman dressed in studded latex, paid to humiliate her clients for sexual pleasure. In the case of Goddess Tisiphone, clients pay to be kidnapped, humiliated, and ultimately educated by Paula.
In the quaint, working-class district of Barcelona’s Sants, Paula’s new office is a basement storage rental where she’s set up her dungeon with an extensive book collection. Slowly, she’s tackling the laborious, and expensive, task of rebuilding her library in her new country’s language. With these books she will re-educate her clients in matters of social justice, workers’ rights, feminism, queerness, gender ideology, colonialism, art and more. “The literature [assigned] is changing because the world is changing, but we learn to find pleasure even when the world is falling apart,” Paula says.
A typical day’s work may include an “afternoon meeting” where she’ll smoke hand rolled joints as a wriggling prisoner hangs from the bolted metal chains that she’s installed in the ceiling. Later, she’ll quiz him on the philosophies of Sacher-Masoch, whose introductory book she has left for him to read. “I play a game of you’ve been a good boy, you’ve been a bad boy, and test them on the books that I leave.” Maybe, she’ll leave him for a while and grab some dinner. Maybe she’ll lean back in her chair with a cool nonchalance and watch.
Paula’s domination is a mental state which doesn’t require her stripping or — counter to general notions — nudity on anyone’s part. While the requests to be kidnapped — or freakier solicitations like being “eaten” — come directly from the client, her decision to leave books (from Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, The Communist Manifesto, A Room of One’s Own to “anything Mark Fisher”) and then quiz her shackled guests in a punishment-reward system, is entirely from Paula’s conception. “I think I would tear up if someone came to me and asked to be politically deconstructed,” Paula says, with a mocking wipe of her eyes. “I just let [my client’s] speak and then I choose a book that will help them.”
Photo: Mirella De Mar
Most of her clients are older, rich, white men. But not because they’re the only ones who have the desire of complete submission, she explains. “They’re the ones who have been taught to feel comfortable with the idea of paying for this type of pleasure.” Paula’s keen eye for understanding people’s relationship with pleasure and pain has developed not just from studying philosophy texts or classic literature. Paula’s relationship with BDSM is also personal, appearing in her relationships before she even owned the language to describe domination.
While Paula’s first paid domming gig was at a dungeon in Brooklyn at the age of 28, her dominatrix practice may date back to grade school. “I think I’ve always been a dominatrix,” Dreidemie tells me, strumming her fingers against her chin. “I remember I had this classmate who would carry my books and do my homework. I would use him as a horse during breaktime in front of everybody.” Paula starts laughing, adding, “But he was happy to do it!” There was also an after-school-hours subordinate. “I had a neighbor who would play games with me. He would leave crying everyday but the next day he would always come back.”
Decades later and Paula has successfully carved out a career built around an interest and an encyclopedic understanding of domination. But more than just being a skilled dominatrix, Paula is an artist who enjoys practicing her craft. “[Being a dominatrix] is being an artist. It makes me grow as a person and brings me so much pleasure,” Paula says. “I would be doing this even if it wasn’t my job, so creating a space where I can do this in a very conscious and consensual way is very gratifying.” Paula throws a balled napkin into the saucy, remnants of a large beef dish and looks at me with excitement: “Now want to see my dungeon?”
Photo: courtesy Alessandra Schade.
