If you’ve seen the Netflix show Bonding, you might remember the character of Rolph: a largely silent hulking figure, who spends most of his time in the kitchen of dominatrix-in-training Tiff. Wearing a gimp mask, tight leather shorts, and a little apron, Rolph does household chores for Tiff, who barks orders at him from across her apartment while she relaxes and reads a magazine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a fairly reductive representation of a broad and complex kink. Kinks for cleaning and doing menial tasks for a dominant woman are a subset of the BDSM community. Enthusiasts call themselves “sissy maids.”
On Pornhub, there are hundreds of videos of sissy maids. Often dressed up in French maid outfits, complete with fishnets and high heels, men do tasks such as vacuuming, dusting, and doing dishes. Sometimes the videos are explicitly sexual—they might be rewarded for doing some particularly thorough dusting with a hand job or a prostate massage—but often, the thrill is in the act of service itself, in being an unseen helping hand.
Legendary L.A.-based pro domme Mistress Damiana Chi introduced us to two of her sissy maids, who go by Steffie and Stacy. They do everything for Mistress Damiana: taking out the trash; vacuuming; doing laundry; cleaning the bathroom. Anything she asks. Both identify as male in their day-to-day life, but use female names and pronouns when in their maid roles. They also dress up in frilly clothes, corsets, high shoes, and make-up.
“Sometimes she’ll lock me in the bathroom for six hours, and you’d better believe that bathroom will be spotless,” Steffie says over Zoom. “It would upset me to imagine Mistress cleaning her own toilet.”
Once a keen runner, Steffie has been slowed down by bad knees, but cleaning for Mistress Damiana gives her a different way to relax. “Anything else I’m worried about just goes out of my head.”
Stacy, who is in her mid-fifties, quit a stressful corporate job working 70+ hours a week and now works in law. Being a sissy maid gives her a release from daily stressors that almost taps into the spiritual, she says.
“Obviously I don’t know what it’s like to be a monk, but there’s something very pure energetically about serving someone else,” she says. “There’s that story about how monks would immaculately clean every pebble on a path. I’d do that, happily, if Mistress asked me to.”
Alfred Evelina / 500pxGetty Images
Mistress Damiana has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. “We live in a world where we have a lot to worry about,” she says. “When Steffie and Stacy are cleaning, they have no worries and can just focus on the task at hand. But it’s more than that: There’s a sense of a higher purpose.”
Society’s binary concept of gender often dictates our behavior: We’re told a man should work hard and exhaust himself with long hours to be the breadwinner, and that an appropriate release from this is something physical, such as working out. Historically, women have been expected to stay at home and clean, cook, and generally serve others.
“I definitely grew up in a very nuclear setting,” Steffie says. “I was taught growing up that men are men and women are women, and that their place is in the home. Though I do think that attitude is changing, slowly.”
One could argue that by identifying as female in their roles as maids, Stacy and Steffie are inadvertently contributing to this outdated stereotype of the housewife—but Stacy doesn’t see it that way. “I can only speak to my own experience, and I know I can’t atone for years of historical oppression, but in a way, it’s a small act of penance—balancing the scales in my own small way,” she says. “I hold women in very high regard. I think I respect women more than I do men.”
Stacy has had a hard time explaining her interest in being a sissy maid—as well as her more submissive sexual preferences, generally—to partners, many of whom have responded negatively. “I’ve definitely had women who want me to be the dominant partner,” she says. “Not just sexually, but in the relationship more broadly. And then they’ve really struggled with me wanting to be more submissive.”
These bad responses held Stacy back from exploring her sexuality for a long time. For a while, she even tried forcing herself to behave in a dominant way that didn’t feel natural. “I felt like I was lying, like I’d created this false role, and then I had to inhabit that and play up to it,” she says. “It was very difficult.”
Part of what she loves about the cleaning kink is how it’s helped her to break down gender binaries and to explore facets of herself in a more complex way than society prescribes. “I was very compartmentalized for a long time,” she says. “But I’m not just a guy; I have a lot of girl energy. I’m very attracted to female energy.”
Stephen Quaderer, CEO of the ThotExperiment, a sex positive digital ecosystem for sexual exploration, explains that binary ideas of masculinity and femininity are limiting and harmful. “The societal construct of manliness elevates assertiveness as one of its defining characteristics, to the point of self-centeredness, or even sociopathy,” he says. “Being deemed ‘not manly’ carries significant societal stigma, for both parties in a relationship.
“For a woman, any indication that her lover is less-than manly will also bring with it a heaping helping of shame,” he continues. “These constructs, and the stigma they carry, can make it difficult and distressing to even consider engaging in a male-submissive/female-dominant relationship—a perfectly healthy, fulfilling, and loving dynamic.”
Mistress Damiana says that people looking to explore this kink with a partner should think carefully about their expectations, and whether a partner will be truly willing to meet their needs.
“I think both parties need to truly want to explore this,” she says. “It can lead to a difficult situation if one party initially agrees to explore something sexually with their partner, but in reality they’re trying to force the interest.”
Finding the right partner can be challenging, but it’s worth it to keep searching. (Kink-friendly apps like FetLife and Feeld might help.)
“We can break down harmful social constructs, like false sexuality binaries or one-dimensional relationship dynamics, by challenging them directly, as often as possible,” Quaderer says, adding that it’s important to “live your truth, even—or especially—when it conflicts with how society says you ‘should’ be living in your relationship, or exhibiting your sexuality.”
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io
Comments are closed.