The sound of a cane striking bare buttocks is a sharp, somehow wettish, crack.
‘Thank you, mistress,’ whispers George.
George is naked, pale, hairless and small, and seems to diminish further with each echoing thwack. He has a wobbly, round belly and kneels on skinny, bowed legs. His shoulders slump, his eyes are downcast and his little penis is in total retreat. His backside is striped pink and the droopy ears of his leather dog mask sweep the floor with every flinch at every stroke.
‘Thank you, mistress.’
The room is old-blood red, lit by a single, struggling globe. In one corner is a massive polished-wood St Andrew’s cross, padded at its centre in thick black leather; in another, a thicket of switches and canes. A pulley and chain hang from the ceiling. From pegs on one wall dangle lengths of rope, cuffs and gags; on another, a strait-jacket, a rubber full-body suit and a breath-control mask; on the next, cats-of-nine-tails, floggers, straps, paddles and a plaited bullwhip.
George sees none of them. His eyes stay on the floor or, if he can sneak a glimpse, on Mistress Saskia’s ankles above her high stilettos. George has a thing for feet.
Thwack!
‘Thank you, mistress.’
Mistress Saskia is tall and willowy, lightly freckled, with dark eyes under arching brows, high cheekbones and a short, black Betty Boop bob. She has a lavish, Gothic tattoo on her right shoulder and a series of designs above those ankles. She is compressed into a two-piece mauve latex catsuit: a strangling bodice that flattens her breasts and a long tube of skirt, cross-laced down the back to show a little of her trim, bare bottom. Her voice is scornful and commanding.
Five minutes ago she had the submissive George suspended upside down from the ceiling, disciplining him with pinched nipples and flicks and slaps of a leather cat. Now she is finishing him with six from the cane. He must not cry out or they will start again. ‘Take it!’ she tells him.
‘Unhh!’
‘Right, start again then! That’s six. Don’t think I’m joking, slave! If I have to tie you down to get through these and gag you, I will. Understand me? Try again …’
She snaps her wrist and lays the cane across his poor, purpling arse. Pauses, then gives him another.
‘Thank you, mistress,’ responds George, his voice ascending the register with every strike.
‘There’s one to go, slave, isn’t there. It’s not going to be very nice. Don’t think it’s over. GET DOWN!’
She peppers his rump with open-handed slaps. Four, a pause, four more, and finally a full-force, thunder-crack smack. ‘Now crawl out,’ she orders. ‘Go on, get out. Get out of my room! Go. Go!’
George, head bowed, arms limp, pauses momentarily at the door and whispers.
‘Thank you, mistress.’
Mistress Saskia, dominatrix, works at a nether end of Melbourne’s euphemistically titled adult industry. She is part of a thriving and, apparently, increasingly accepted – or at least tolerated – workforce.
Sex sells. And in what once was the world’s most liveable city, it sells very well.
Melbourne’s Yellow Pages has 218 listings and 87 display ads, across 21 pages, for escort workers and agencies, and 35 for striptease artists and their booking companies. There are 93 licensed brothels and 1909 people registered under the Prostitution Control Act as licence-exempt prostitution service providers. Sex workers doing shifts at brothels or working for other ‘service providers’ do not need licences, so no-one knows exactly how many there are, nor how many work the streets – but it’s in the thousands.
Then there are topless waitresses; nude models; bondage and discipline dungeons; lingerie showgirls and sexy-wear salespeople; lap dancers; jelly-wrestlers and fetish website models; and Bunnings-like chains of sex shops. Long lines of after-work suits queue outside lap-dance men’s clubs. There are double shows, libido stimulants, hot vibes and blonde-on-blondes. They advertise in newspapers and on late night TV, on billboards and mobile hoardings pulled around the CBD behind motor scooters, and these, suggests one operator, have ‘desensitised’ Melbourne into a blase consensual relationship with a once underground industry. It is a trade overwhelmingly staffed by women. Which invites the old question: What’s a nice girl like you doing in a job like this?
Dominica squirms in Ronaldo’s lap. She is wearing a theatrical pout and nothing else. Ronaldo is wearing a dopey half-smile that sits somewhere between guilty pleasure and humiliation. Exactly a week from now he’ll be married to someone else.
Dominica has already pulled down his jeans, lashed his bum with his belt, and used it as a bridle while she rode him like a horse. Now she guides his hands as they massage bubble bath suds around her breasts and 18 of his best mates hoot and cackle at his discomfort.
It is 10.30 Saturday night and they are under a party light-strung carport in outer west suburban Delahey. There’s a karaoke machine beside the fridge and a couple of tables laden with chips, dips, snags and sushi, bourbon, scotch and beer. This is the second of Dom’s three private strips of the evening. The next, around midnight, will be a double act for a couple of dozen aggressively crowding footballers at Bundoora. It’s always a risk with privates so late in the night: by the time you arrive the guys are well-pissed and playing up. The grog goes in and the brains go out.
But this one is just fun. The blokes are Filipinos with ocker accents and sensibilities, laughing, joking and applauding. They are friendly, solicitous and, within the context, respectful.
There are two schools of thought among strippers about doing privates, says Dom. One is to put on a sexy performance, the other is to give a more ‘comic’ show. She leans to the latter. ‘You’re not going to, like, turn on this room full of 30 guys,’ she says. ‘They’re not into this stuff all the time … they’re embarrassed.
‘It’s like a social ritual. You throw a buck’s night and you’re obliged to get strippers. The best man, it’s his job to get the stripper along, and so I see it that I’m really there to give them a bit of a laugh and, you know, humiliate the buck basically.’
Dominica has just turned 21. She is an elfin figure with long, straight brown hair, a pretty, open face and a smile that says she’s in on the joke. She’s been stripping for a year, mainly weekends and some lunch shows, but when she pulled up tonight in her battered sedan, wearing brown hipster cords, T-shirt and rimless glasses for her shortsightedness, she looked exactly what she is the rest of the time: a university student.
A straight A student at her ladies college, she won an Enter score in the high 90s and is now majoring in history/politics at uni. She came to striptease after a couple of ‘crap’ part-time jobs: ‘You’ve only got so much time on this planet. I wanted a job that will bring in the most pay for the least possible hours. And stripping was it.’
Coming from a hippie family where everyone was unselfconscious about wandering the house naked, she says: ‘I’ve always been comfortable with nudity and I thought, “Well, it sounds like easy money, I’ll give it a go.”’ Doing her books the other day, she found she had cleared $22,000 in the past six months.
But she says, almost apologetically, she still hasn’t told her parents – which is why Dominica is not her real name. ‘Not because I thought they’d crack the shits or throw me out of home, but mainly because I think they’d really worry about me.
‘Maybe one day. I do think about it. We’ve always had a really open relationship and I’ve always been totally truthful about everything else, so it does conflict within me. There are times I want to tell them and there are times I’d rather let sleeping dogs lie.’
She has no illusions about society’s attitudes to what she does. Recently she told an old school friend, whose reaction was ‘Oh, Dom, I thought you were a feminist.’
And she is. But there’s something about the job she finds empowering. ‘I don’t think it needs rationalising. If it works for you, that’s cool. I don’t think there’s anything immoral about it, certainly. It’s not hurting anyone. It’s me and it’s my decision.’
Even the double shows and hot vibes don’t make her uncomfortable. ‘It’s not something I’ve agonised over. I guess I’m a very intellectual person, so what I think of as myself is up in my head, so I’m not really being violated.
‘It’s really a lifestyle. The only thing with me is that it’s different from 95 per cent of the other girls out there. But I’m having fun and it’s a good way to make good money very quickly … and the money is important. You wouldn’t do this stuff for peanuts.’
Crystal stops and waits a few seconds before tapping on the hotel suite door. She concentrates, head back a little as if sniffing the wind. She is just a bit psychic, able to pick up on unseen signals. In 19 years of knocking on strange doors, never quite knowing what’s on the other side, that’s been a valuable gift.
Crystal has become attuned to her senses, able to feel if there’s someone else in there who shouldn’t be. She works each job to ensure she is always in control. Does the booking, and does it her way: listening carefully on the phone, getting a feel for the other’s voice or if there’s someone else in the background. Inside, she does a quick sensory recon, checking if anyone’s hiding in a closet, say.
She never lets the men behind her. She’s always focused on them, always looking at them, even in the sexual position, because you never know if they’ve got a weapon somewhere. She’s only been wrong once, in Warrandyte in 1990. Somehow didn’t notice the bars on the windows and was raped. But tonight nothing seems amiss. She puts on her best smile, knocks, and meets another very nice gentleman.
When she was 16, Crystal shocked a teacher by telling her that she wanted to be a call-girl. She was joking – in fact she’d considered becoming a nun – but looking back, suspects it must have been her forte all along. She has been an escort, on and off, since 1990, after getting into prostitution four years earlier to pay off a business debt.
She is 45 now and winding back – ‘you have to look at the age limitations in this job’ – and has diversified into a straight business as a masseuse, but still sees a few clients each week. Business is through word of mouth or her newspaper ad: ‘A lady of quality. Private escort’. When gentlemen call she quotes them $160 an hour, asks what they’re looking for, and provides an accurate description: ‘I’m a tall, elegant blonde; five foot eight; size 10; 38-inch bust; blue eyes and middle 40s.’
When she began doing this, she says she sat down and worked out what men really wanted. ‘Most – and I emphasise most – do prefer a nice lady, who smells good, looks good, talks nice, isn’t drug-fucked, and has a genuine smile on her face.
‘I’ll always spend 15 minutes having a chat, making you feel comfortable, finding out what you do for work, whether you’re tactile. I might put my hand on your knee, get you a coffee, might sit on a couch holding you. And then I’ll say, “Would you like to go up for a massage?” It’s more personal, more ladylike.’
But she always advises girls to stay out of the game. ‘It does consume your life and there’s a price you pay for everything you do. But it has its benefits too. If you’re legit, pay your tax, you can give yourself a good education, raise your children well, buy a home. But too many girls don’t have a goal or a time to get out. A lot shoot it up their arm, live with hoons and give it all to them.
‘I’ve made my money work for me,’ she says, sweeping an arm around the living room of her new $600,000 eastern suburbs home.
Crystal says she likes both the job and what she gets out of it. She meets a lot of interesting people and rubs shoulders with some powerful ones. She gets taken out to nice places and pampered. It’s a bit of a buzz.
And then she has sex with a total stranger. Yes, she says, but you need to be able to switch off, to separate yourself from doing the job. ‘I never do anything I don’t want to, it’s my choice, my body. I mean I know what I’m there for, but the actual sex act is really only a small period of the time. The rest of the job, whether it’s two hours or five, I do a lot of talking. And I’m a good talker.
‘Young girls today think they don’t have to do anything for the dollar because they’ve got the looks, the nice figure, but they don’t give themselves. That’s my bread and butter. I give myself.’
The Beret Man wraps another layer of Gladwrap around Steffanie’s naked, immobile body. He steps back, checking the effect, nods and takes another photo. Dressed all in black, grey pony-tail falling from beneath the beret, he moves back in, adds strips of duct tape. Takes another photo. Then another and another.
Mummified in cling-film, Steffanie keeps her eyes tightly shut. This isn’t so bad. Later, when he gets the knife and fake blood or when he dresses in his military uniform and starts filming her, will be much worse. That’s when she finds it so hard not to laugh.
This is Stef’s part-time gig. Three or four hours every Monday afternoon, playing out women-in-peril scenarios for a series of fetish and bondage websites. She has been doing it for eight months, at $100 an hour, and though it was a little freaky at first, she’s come to trust Beret Man. ‘Now I don’t really think about it much. I tell some of my friends about the stuff I see and they’re like “What?” They’re shocked, but nothing really shocks me any more. Not too much.’
She is 20, tall, big-breasted and bottle-blonde with perfect teeth displayed behind a ready smile. After school she tried a year at graphic design then another as a dental nurse, but hated it and quit. After she was laid off from her next job, part-time at Coles, she saw an ad for nude models and thought she’d give it a go, mainly for a stir. But the money was so good she kept going back. Now she works topless waitressing, even did her first strip the other week. She plans to start her own website, ‘just fluffy stuff’.
‘My family all know what I do and are fine with it,’ she says. ‘When I start my site, Mum sews, so she’s going to help with the costumes, and Dad’s an accountant, so he’ll look after the money. My younger sister, she’s like: it’s fine, just don’t tell her the details.
‘It’s just something that happened, but now I couldn’t do a nine-to-five job, I’d be bored to death. Not after this stuff. It’s too much fun, always something interesting going on.’
And the aficionados of her website adventures? ‘I wouldn’t want to meet any of the people who are looking at this, over in Germany or wherever, wouldn’t want to know them. But I’ll take their money.’
Mistress Saskia lets a long sigh escape as her slave disappears through the dungeon door. ‘That,’ she says, ‘was bloody hopeless.’
It hadn’t gone the way she wanted. She’d forgotten poor George was hard of hearing and the mask had only added to his deafness. So he couldn’t follow her commands, lying on his back instead of his belly; not putting his wrists together to be tied; giving her that blank stare when he was forbidden to look at her at all. Worse, she’d had to yell.
She hates having to raise her voice at them. Much better to keep it soft, monotone and pleasant, which gets that really nice control thing happening: ‘It’s really quite evil, but niiiice. You can say the most evil things to them, tell them what terrible things you’re going to do to them – but with a lot of love in your voice.’
Mistress Saskia loves her job, harshly ministering to a clientele of submissives, masochists, fetishists and bondage devotees at the Correction Centre in St David Street, Fitzroy, at $140 per half hour and $240 for the hour. ‘But you can’t be in this industry specifically for the money,’ she says, ‘or you’d go completely mad.’
She came to it after leaving her country town about 10 years ago and briefly drifting into brothel work. She’d been sexually abused as a girl and, though she didn’t realise it at the time, thinks the work gave her back her ‘sexual power’. But she didn’t enjoy it and someone suggested she try BDSM – bondage, discipline and sado-masochism.
‘I was just really natural at it, I think because I’m a creative person.’ She trained under a dominatrix for eight months, has worked in chambers in New York and London, and is now one of the Correction Centre’s most popular doms, with glowing customer testimonials – ‘so caring throughout, yet so devilish at the same time!’ – on its website.
There’s a growing trend lately where people want to experience ‘a different sexual lifestyle’, erotic sessions with a bit of kink. But Mistress Saskia is old-school. ‘I don’t do sex. They don’t touch me, I don’t take my clothes off. It’s very strict.’
She specialises in humiliation, discipline, torture and bondage with esoteric sub-specialties including fluid play, breath-training and equestrian and puppy training. ‘I’m really interested with playing with people on this level. It’s dark. Sometimes I’m the only person they tell their secrets to, their fantasies and fetishes, and I get to play with that.
‘You’re constantly thinking of ways to torture people. Everything’s about power. You go to Bunnings or Officeworks and suddenly everything’s there. You know: paper clips! I can’t walk into a supermarket kitchen section without thinking, “Hmm, what would that be good for?” And a hardware shop, wooo, it’s heaven.’
But she knows what other people think. She’s had them turn away, call her a prostitute, seen old girlfriends turn insecure when their partners are around ‘as if I’m this sexual monster’. In fact she’s in a ‘vanilla relationship’ – straight, no whips – and works part-time in a bar for ‘balance’. Her mother knows what she does and, despite taking a year to get used to it, is now ‘fine with the details’.
And, while she might be a sadist, don’t think she’s cruel. ‘No, I’m soft,’ she insists, a feline glint in her eyes. ‘I’m a kitten.’
‘Who wants to see tits?’ A fingernails-on-blackboard voice chainsaws through the chatter in the chintz-decorated dining room above Swan Street, Richmond. ‘C’mon, guys! Who … Wants … TITS!?’
The Irishmen on table 11 do. And the four suits-and-ties – manufacturer, management consultant and two accountants – certainly do. They’re already blowing approval through their party hooters and digging in their wallets for twenties. When Maxine Fensom collects enough, her two waitresses will peel down their lace teddies and work the rest of the lunch topless.
It is an unusually quiet Friday at one of Maxine’s Naughty Lunches, but Max works the room in her usual ringmistress mode: teasing, cajoling, gleefully abusive. Her patter is a mix of double entendre and flat-out crudity. She wears a black Chanel dress, cut low to display her pneumatic figure and a pair of black hoop earrings engraved with a diamantine boast: ‘Sexy’. She has a mischievous face, waist length hair and the mouth of a dockworker – every third word an economical four letters. But it’s all part of her schtick.
Since 1988, Maxine, 46, has managed to parlay experiences gained in a short, failed stint at psychiatric nursing, dance trouping and lingerie lunches and a flair for self-promotion into an impressive X-rated empire. She is Melbourne’s most indefatigable entrepreneur of sex, running not only her lunches, but Maxine’s Elite Strippers; Maxine’s Escorts; Miss Nude Australia contests; Hookers and Deviates balls as well as importing a range of lingerie. All from an ever-ringing clutter of five mobile phones.
Max describes herself as a pornographer – ‘just for a joke’
- then says she wants to be accepted like anyone else. ‘I’m just a nice, normal girl running a business and providing naked talent.’
Still, she has a clear eye for the realities of the skin trade. ‘Sure, I think Melbourne people are adventurous and sexy,’ she says. ‘You can see they’re obviously interested by the numbers who go to Sexpo or men’s clubs. But I also think what they’re offering is not sexy. The clubs aren’t sexy at all - it’s solitary, it’s not fun and it’s a bit sad.’
And a career span for strippers and escorts? ‘Realistically, I think within five years you should be able to get in, be smart, make a stack of money and get out.’
Financial advisors offer to talk to her girls and she laughs. ‘They’re not interested, no way. They just want to buy a new dress.’ They want to create a lifestyle, and it’s a lifestyle that requires upkeep: porcelain teeth and breast implants that need to be redone in 10 years.
‘And they do it. But, really, after you hit 30 or 35, what happens? Are you still going to have the pink talons and the peroxide hair, pumped-up lips and the big tits and look like a stereotype of Pammy Anderson?’
Deb Osmond totters on one high heel in Inkerman Street, St Kilda. Her other shoe is in her left hand because it’s given her a nasty blister, which is one more thing you don’t need in her game. She’s pinked her hair with lipstick, and squeezed into a sensational black op-shop frock which reveals most of the big bright tattoo on her left boob. The bag slung over her other shoulder is bulging, a couple of beer bottles poking out. She’s just finished a $100 job and the client, a regular, always likes a drink afterwards.
Now she’s looking for a lift to Brunswick to score some speed.
Deb is 43 and turned her first trick not far from here, in a car outside the Gatwick Hotel, 30 years ago. She was a 13-year-old runaway who’d fallen in with some bad sorts and they forced her into it. Literally put a gun to her head. She still remembers the fella she did it with. He was a musician and kept his trumpet on the back seat of his car. ‘God, I hated him, he was gross. And he was old, as old then as I am now.
‘I didn’t know a great deal about sex. I didn’t know whether you got paid for it or if it was something you only did with your husband, because it wasn’t talked about in our home.’
She’d been a pretty good kid until then, she says. ‘I had an extremely good upbringing. Grew up in Middle Brighton and went to a ladies’ college. No violence at home.’ But her parents had separated and she couldn’t cope, so she ran away.
The crims who turned her out were soon arrested, but she kept selling herself. ‘I was still on the run and I thought I’ve got to survive, so I’m gunna keep working. But I’m not going to work for any other arsehole, and I never have.’
Deb still works the streets of St Kilda, still servicing clients in cars or hotel rooms, but has wound back, making just enough money to get by. ‘That’s the beauty of the street, you don’t clock in, you don’t clock out, you work when you want to and on who you want.’
It wasn’t like that in the beginning. She got into the pills and then the smack and most of those days are a blur. But she was making thousands for a while. ‘I got big tips ’cos I was so young – there’s a lot of sick bastards out there.’
She gave up both heroin and the game when she had the first of her four kids and took a series of square jobs. She worked in a fish and chip shop, did spot welding, worked in supermarkets, assembled medical equipment and classified as a professional knitter, but came back when the family was struggling for money.
‘I don’t feel bad about it,’ she says, ‘because I don’t think it’s a degrading job. It’s a job I enjoy. Most of my clients, regular clients, are also friends; I don’t have a problem having sex with them. What I don’t enjoy is other people’s low opinions. A lot of upstanding citizens are two-faced, very nasty people. It’s made me very bitter towards society as a whole.
‘You get car loads of people driving past and calling us a slut. Obviously they didn’t learn anything at school: we’re whores, not sluts.’
These days, Deb pretty much sticks to herself. She doesn’t have a circle of friends but doesn’t have time to get lonely. She goes op-shopping, does arts and craft or just reads a book. She doesn’t save her money. ‘To what purpose? Because society says you save up and buy a house? I don’t think so.’
She can’t see retiring either. ‘I could be 80 and still have clients. There might be someone out there who fancies old fanny.’
And to the old question, ‘What’s a nice girl like you …’ she quickly answers: ‘Being as naughty as possible.’
And smiles, almost as if she really believes it.