Kiosk - Fantasy Female

Fantasy Female: The Real Life of Victoria King

by Eva Vieyra-McDaniel

Editors' note: The names "Victoria" and "Katie" are pseudonyms intended to protect the subjects' privacy.

A NOTE WAS WAITING for Victoria with the front desk concierge when she arrived at the Surf and Sand Resort in Laguna Beach.

“Welcome Mistress, please make yourself comfortable. If you need me, I am on cell.”

After working her way through a shrimp cocktail, beef tenderloin, calamari, bread pudding, and two martinis, Victoria blows cigarette smoke out the open window. Her client, a man who identifies himself as “Slave Rubbish,” has kept her waiting. Now he’s going to get it.

Half an hour before the midnight session is set to begin, Mistress Victoria pulls a cushioned bench from under a vanity table in the bedroom. Two feet of rope is attached to the leg of a table, atop which the barely touched calamari goes cold. The table leg will become a means to pull the handcuffed hands of her arriving submissive an uncomfortable distance from the rest of his body. An electric bug-zapper will be used as an instrument for inflicting pain.

“There’s always a way to turn every room into what you need it for.”

For almost ten years, the life of Victoria King (a.k.a. Mistress Victoria) has been an exercise in duality. There’s the duality of her own life: one part Victoria, a single mother trying to make ends meet, and one part Mistress Victoria, professional dominatrix. Next are the dual roles she performs on the job: fantasy and nightmare, the naughty babysitter and the demented nurse. Finally there are the double lives of her clientele: middle-aged, high-powered business executives who pay hundreds of dollars an hour to be put in their place. After a session of nipple torture, spanking, cross-dressing, or whipping, they drive home with only the cane marks on their backsides as a reminder of the world they’ve just returned from.

For both Victoria and her customers, life means reconciling one world with another. While Victoria’s profession is not illegal, it doesn’t take much more than the hint of suspicious activity to send the police to her door. Victoria’s biggest problem is that mainstream society has no idea what she does but is quick to ostracize those who seek her services. While Victoria is the first to admit that the practice of domination belongs to the underworld, the reality is this underworld does not lie far below the surface of the everyday.

On a Thursday morning, the Starbucks is teeming with businessmen and idle Orange County suburban moms. Victoria sits in an oversized green lounge chair with her shaggy salt-and-pepper pup, Pete, and although her outfit is less than extraordinary, she has an air of importance about her. Her short brown hair is swept away from her face, a style few middle-aged women would attempt since it enhances any imperfections. No bangs to shade or obscure; Victoria’s hairstyle alone hints at boldness. Brown Prada sunglasses, beige Prada purse, muted tan UGG boots— her outfit is a subtle yet obvious signal of status.

Like the other professionals seated around her, Victoria is in casual-business mode. They’re sipping their lattes, chatting, and, like Victoria, explaining their jobs to the other people around them. Victoria curls her lithe five-foot-nine frame in her chair, looking over at the largest group of businessmen on the Starbucks patio. She smiles slyly as she nods towards the cluster.

“I can tell you,” begins Victoria, “that in this crowd here of about twelve people, I’d say at least eight of them have had the thought of, or have experienced, domination—whether it’s been with a professional or for the home. No doubt.”

Victoria is not here to network. She’s here to describe the work she’s been doing to pay the bills and put her daughter through school after her divorce left her a single mom with a small child to support. For the first time, Victoria feels like she is ready to tell about her transformation from typical, suburban homemaker into professional dominatrix.

Victoria first became aware of the subculture of domination and submission when her younger sister Ava left Orange County to move to the Hollywood area, then buzzing with the edgy 1980s punk scene. Unlike Victoria, Ava had always tread on the wild side. Ava started her career as a stripper before moving on to working as a submissive in one of the large “houses” in Hollywood. A “house” is a business where multiple dominatrices see multiple submissive clients, or where clients come to dominate professional submissives. This kind of work, Victoria says, is really hard, especially for the submissives, and young women frequently burn out from it. After some time in the “houses,” Ava moved on to starting her own private domination service.

At the same time Ava was making a big change in the direction of her life, Victoria was going through a period of change herself. By 1997, Victoria and her husband had divorced, and Victoria needed to earn a living for both herself and her four-year-old daughter, Katie. She needed to find a way to make money fast, and it was then that Ava began to tell Victoria more about her work.

Yet while Ava was open to discussing her work with her sister, Victoria was less than accepting of her profession. “I had a completely different image of what she was doing. I thought it was just the scum of the earth. I grew up Catholic— I still feel my morals are really, really high. I just thought that these people were the abusers and the sick, psychotic, child-molesters—who knows? I was just like any other person out there, really, who didn’t understand, didn’t have the knowledge— trust me!”

(continued on page 2)