By S.C. Parent

When I chose to work as a professional submissive at a dungeon, I thought I’d have a chance to satisfy my curiosity about BDSM, while hopefully making some money in the process. I never imagined I’d become part of the strongest community of women I’ve ever encountered, and forge meaningful relationships with coworkers I now call friends. But that’s exactly what happened—and my initiation into that community began on my first day at the dungeon, before I’d completed a single session.

“There’s a client coming in who likes to see new girls,” Nora* told me as she applied mascara in the gazebo, a space where the all-female dungeon staff could hang out between sessions. “Make sure you’re sitting up front, and he’ll definitely session with you.” I was surprised by Nora’s friendly advice—as a new employee at a well-known California dungeon, I’d expected to be ignored or even hazed—but I did what she said. The client came, we sessioned, and I made more money than I ever had in an hour; I also established the first of many strong relationships with coworkers at the dungeon. In this case, my friendship with Nora would last long after the client had moved on to the next girl.

Over my first weeks at the dungeon, where I’ve worked for nearly six years while pursuing a writing career, I got to know a wildly eclectic group of coworkers: college students exploring fetishes for the first time; forty-something women with children; artists of all persuasions. We hail from all over the US and beyond; we come from different racial and economic backgrounds, and hold varying religious and political beliefs. Yet as soon as we step into the dungeon, where we session with predominantly male clients, acting out scenes of domination and submission, we’re linked by an experience that people outside our line of work can’t understand. Most of us must hide our place of employment from family, friends, and the world as a whole—and that shared secret creates an almost instant bond between us.

For many of us, the knowledge that, as my coworker Ava puts it, “we’re all doing something ‘taboo’ together” provides a unique sense of intimacy that is all the more powerful because we come from such contrasting walks of life. Another coworker, Tori, says “it’s nice to meet other people in my industry and see how different we all are, but we share this strange job.” We’re willing to enter an environment many find intimidating or look down upon, and as Ania, who’s been at the dungeon four years, says, our “shared deviation from the norm” allows us to become a sort of “secret society” of dungeon women.

During my years at the dungeon, this “secret society” I’ve become a part of has transformed my life, as it has many of my coworkers’. Ava says her three years at the dungeon marked “the first time I had female friends for such a long period of time,” and as for me, I didn’t have a single close female friend when I embarked on my dungeon adventure. Suddenly I was surrounded by many likeminded women—the dungeon generally employs twenty to thirty women at any given time, with five to eight ladies on each shift—and in the lulls between sessions, we have plenty of time to get to know each other. What’s more, we’re working with our clients’ “deepest darkest fantasies,” as Ania puts it—and it’s an environment that encourages us to share our own secrets as well. With my dungeon coworkers, I was able to voice my own “taboo” fantasies for the first time. If I came out of a session exhilarated from a heavy caning, I didn’t have to hide the fact I’d enjoyed the experience, or that I hoped to top it with my boyfriend that evening. Similarly, Rebecca, who’s spent six months at the dungeon, appreciates that she can share elements of her “personal intimate life,” and “nothing will be shamed.”

In my first months at the dungeon, I was also happy to find the workplace culture was one of support rather than jealousy. It would be disingenuous to claim jealousy doesn’t exist at my workplace, but employees who approach the job as a competition typically don’t last long. Rather, most of us learn that when we support each other, as Nora did by giving me tips about a client on my first day, we all find more success. We share information about clients’ preferences, teach each other to use dungeon equipment, and offer comfort and commiseration after difficult sessions. We also “protect each other from predatory clients,” my coworker Elizabeth says, by warning each other about clients’ bad behavior.

Our most meaningful vulnerability at the dungeon occurs not with clients, but between us as women. We’re already sharing the big secret of our workplace, and as we get to know one another better, many of us connect through shared mental health issues as well.. Tori says work is like “coming to therapy,” and Ava found the ladies of the dungeon could “relate” over “experiences with anxiety or depression.” In addition, we all bond over one mental health struggle: the negative effects of sexism. At work we can vent about men who slut shame or cross our boundaries, both within the dungeon and in the outside world. The dungeon also offers those of us who are naturally submissive—like myself—the chance to stand up for ourselves. I would never have considered becoming a switch if I hadn’t had the chance to watch so many skilled dominant women at work. These women taught me how to spank and tie up a man, and more importantly, to refuse to accept mistreatment—a skill I’ve put to use in the outside world. I no longer feel the need to be polite to men who cross my boundaries in public, and even if I’ll never actually kick a man in the balls outside of work, it’s nice to know I’m capable of doing so.

While our dungeon community allows us to fight back against sexism, we also help each other deal with mental and physical health issues outside of work—and this, in my opinion, is the most magical quality of our secret sisterhood. One group of seven dungeon ladies, included me, drove an hour to spend time with a former coworker who was recovering from a double physical and mental whammy: she’d just undergone jaw surgery and broken up with her long-term boyfriend. We had a girls’ day that lasted past midnight, including a Clueless viewing and ice cream, and as Ava sums up the experience, “it felt really great to have a dungeon family.” Meanwhile, Tori says dungeon friendships literally “saved my life,” as two of her coworkers convinced her not to jump off a bridge when she was suffering from depression. Now these three ladies have formed a punk-rock BDSM band.

I too had a time when my dungeon friends saved my life, albeit in a less literal sense. The first two years I worked at the dungeon, I was in a serious relationship with a verbally abusive man, but the more I came to admire my confident and independent coworkers, the harder it was to accept his behavior. One morning when my boyfriend and I were planning to spend the day together, a comment he made became the last straw, and I broke up with him on the spot. I reached out to my dungeon coworkers, and within an hour I had three friends gathered around me at a coffee shop. As I dried my tears and looked at the strong and supportive women surrounding me, I realized that with this community on my side, I could make it through anything.

Working in the BDSM industry is not an easy job—it’s physically and emotionally draining, and can isolate women from an outside world that disapproves of our choices—and the same can be said of working within the adult industry as a whole. Of the eleven women I interviewed for this article, all but one said they consider their employment at the dungeon “sex work,” and I do as well. Clearly, the stereotype of sex work as a career that damages and isolates women is not always true, and women in other areas of the sex industry also support each other. Just as we share advice and warnings about dangerous clients at the dungeon, sex workers do the same online through Reddit groups and Twitter. In person, sex workers connect through organizations such as the Sex Workers Outreach Project, a now-international organization founded in Australia, which provides peer support groups “where sex workers can talk without judgment,” according to SWOP LA’s former services director.

The public is already well aware of the negative aspects of the sex industry; it’s time to acknowledge the fact that for women like myself, who lack a sense of security elsewhere in our lives, a community of sex workers can provide a true sanctuary. Among the women of the dungeon, I found a place where I could reveal my secrets and vulnerabilities, and receive encouragement and understanding. Ultimately, I learned that as sex workers and women, we are strongest when we come together and support each other despite our differences—and it’s a lesson the world could stand to hear more of.