From London to a session: a flight to Munich, or video
I meet guests in person only in Munich, at Studio 60; for now there are no sessions in London – not for an hour, not for an evening. For anyone coming from London, the difference lies in the flight, not in the procedure:
- In the calendar you choose the format – one hour, the three-hour Intensive or a 45-minute Remote session – then the day and the time, always in Munich time.
- One click opens WhatsApp or Telegram with a message that already contains the price and the reference. The appointment is not agreed until I confirm it myself.
- A €50 deposit secures it and is credited against the fee. You reserve and pay for the room directly with Studio 60; the rest of my fee is paid in cash when we begin.
I speak German and English; write to me in English and you will be answered in English. If you would rather begin without travelling, choose the remote session: 45 minutes by video, from €180 – and humiliation in particular, working as it does with words, travels well through a camera. What I mean by it is set out under Humiliation and verbal play; what an hour in Munich costs, under Prices and booking.
London by night: Soho, Vauxhall and Torture Garden
A night out in London often begins in Soho, the quarter bounded by Oxford Street, Regent Street, Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue. For decades Old Compton Street has been the heart of gay and queer London, lined with bars and cafés. A few streets away is Ronnie Scott’s, the jazz club founded in Gerrard Street in 1959 and at home in Frith Street since 1965. Beneath the arches of Charing Cross station, a few minutes from the National Portrait Gallery, lies Heaven, opened in December 1979 and one of the first clubs anywhere to call itself openly gay.
South of the river, Vauxhall has grown since the nineties into the scene’s second home, often called ‘VoHo’, a blend of Vauxhall and Soho. Many of its clubs sit in the railway arches beneath the line into Waterloo, among them Fire on Parry Street. The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, built between 1860 and 1862 on land that once belonged to the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, is regarded as the oldest surviving queer venue in South London and is known for drag and cabaret. In September 2015 it became the first building in the United Kingdom to be listed for its significance to LGBTQ history.
For fetish there is Torture Garden, founded in 1990, which bills itself as the largest fetish club in the world. In London it moves between venues such as Scala in King’s Cross, Electrowerkz in Islington and Fire in Vauxhall. The dress code is strict: a considered look from head to toe is required; jeans, ordinary suits and cotton T-shirts stay outside, and anyone who comes only to gawp is, in the club’s own words, in the wrong place.
London has a great many professional dominatrices and fully equipped studios, and the scene is as international as the city. I name no names, and I link to no one. This page is meant for those who fly to Munich for an encounter with me, or who meet me on camera.
Forty-five women without names
I was in London in November, not for work, and one afternoon the rain fell so steadily on Trafalgar Square that the tourists huddled beneath the portico of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The National Portrait Gallery is just round the corner, on St Martin’s Place, side by side with the National Gallery. Since it reopened in June 2023 after three years of renovation, it has had a new entrance on its north side: three bronze doors, each four metres high. Tracey Emin drew forty-five women’s faces for them, and not one of these women is named. The stone roundels on the old façade, by contrast, show nothing but men, painters and writers of centuries past. An institution that has been gathering the faces of a nation’s notables since 1856 now leads you past the nameless first. I liked that.
I climbed to the earliest pictures in the collection, the Tudor and Stuart faces. A man was standing in front of a small, dark portrait of a sitter with a ring in his ear. It is the Chandos portrait, the first picture the gallery acquired, in the year it was founded, and to this day nobody knows for certain whether it really shows Shakespeare. He stood as close to it as the attendants would allow and murmured words like attribution, provenance, workshop.
‘Without the name,’ he said, noticing me beside him, ‘this would be a respectable portrait of an unknown gentleman. With the name, it is priceless.’ He spoke the careful English of the salerooms, in which every syllable has its price.
‘And without your name?’ I asked.
In English you cannot hear a du, the familiar form my own language would have used. He heard it all the same. He turned round and looked me over as he had just looked over the picture: frame, condition, provenance. He dealt in Old Masters, I learnt, from a gallery in St James’s, a few minutes’ walk away, and had been valuing pictures for thirty years. That nobody had ever dared to value him was written all over his face.
He quoted Wilde, the way men of his trade quote Wilde the moment they feel cornered: every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. So says the painter Basil Hallward in the first chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray. ‘Basil says that because he is afraid of betraying himself in the picture,’ I replied. ‘And Dorian locks his portrait away so that nobody sees what becomes of him. In that novel nobody wants to be looked at. Everyone just wants to look.’
He asked what I did for a living, and I told him: dominatrix, in Munich. He did not laugh, and I gave him credit for that. Instead he began to assess me, aloud and in a connoisseur’s vocabulary, as though I were standing on an easel. ‘You’re appraising again,’ I said. ‘I don’t need a valuation to know what I am.’ After that he fell silent.
Outside, the rain had stopped. We walked the few steps across to the square, where Landseer’s lions gleamed wet at the foot of Nelson’s Column, and he held out a gilt-edged card. I did not take it. ‘If you want to be seen, you’ll find me,’ I said. ‘If all you want is to appraise, find yourself another picture.’
Condition report
For eleven days I heard nothing. Then, on a Sunday evening, an email arrived without a salutation, and it was a catalogue entry: ‘Lot 1. Male, fifty-four years of age, art dealer. Good condition for age. Minor retouching. Provenance impeccable.’ Beneath it, an initial: H. It was witty, and it was a wall. I wrote back that a catalogue leaves out whatever lowers the price, and that nothing else interested me.
We had the preliminary talk by video, in English, over two evenings. Humiliation that strikes home first needs a map of the places that are to stay untouched. His list was short: nothing about his divorce, nothing about his father, nothing about his weight. Open to me were his vanity, his arrogance, his habit of pinning a price on everything, and his famous eye. At ‘origins’ he hesitated for a long time, then wrote beside it: ‘My accent. Should you find it.’ He had grown up in Yorkshire and had spent decades breaking himself of the vowels he came from.
Then his health. He had been living with a replacement left knee for two years; he could kneel only on a cushion, and never for more than ten minutes at a time. As his safeword he chose ‘Varnish’, the layer that protects a painting and yellows over the years until a restorer removes it. We also agreed on a wordless signal, the flat of his hand, in case words failed him. I told him what I tell everyone: the word ends everything, at once, with no explanation, and nobody is disappointed afterwards.
The first weeks belonged to the camera. Sundays at nine in the evening in Munich, eight in London, forty-five minutes. He stood, his jacket over the back of a chair, and read me a condition report he had written on himself, the kind restorers draw up for a painting: craquelure, losses, overpainting, yellowed varnish. I interrupted him wherever he had retouched. ‘You’ve written “slight vanity”. Strike “slight”. Read it again.’ He read it again, and again, until the sentence no longer sounded like a catalogue. At the end of each evening I asked about him, not about the report. Mostly he answered with one word: ‘Quiet.’
After the fifth session he wrote that he wanted to stop. It came too close; he could not bear to be described, not even by himself. I did not try to change his mind. I wrote to him that he was free to go whenever he needed to, and that it would cost him nothing. Then there was silence. Twenty-six days later a single line arrived: ‘Lot 1, re-consigned.’ I took him back, and we never spoke about the pause. Soon afterwards he asked whether he might see me. I gave him Munich, Studio 60 and one condition: that he book the room himself and send me the confirmation before I agreed to a time.
The hand mirror
He flew out of Heathrow the evening before and spent the night in Munich, so that no delayed flight could cut our time short. At four in the afternoon he was at the door, on the minute, sober, and volunteered that he had drunk nothing but water on the plane. Under his arm he carried what I had told him to bring: the photograph from his gallery’s website, printed and framed. Good light from the left, the hint of a smile, a pocket square.
Once more we went over what had been agreed: the list, the knee, the word. Then I took his jacket and tie from him, the uniform of his profession, and hung both on the hook by the door, where he could see them. The framed photograph I propped on a chair against the wall, at eye level. From my bag I took an old oval hand mirror with a silver back and a small blind spot at the rim, where the silvering had gone.
‘Describe the man in the photograph to me,’ I said. That he could do. He talked for three minutes, fluent and polished, about bearing, light and the composure of the gaze; he could have placed the picture in any evening sale. Then I held the mirror up to his face. ‘Now this one.’
The first sentence took him a long time, and what came was catalogue again: male, mid-fifties, fatigued. I did not let it pass. ‘You’re describing him as though you wanted to be rid of him. Say what you see.’ He saw a man waiting for someone to tell him what he was worth. I had him repeat the sentence three times, slower each time.
Then I spoke. Calmly, almost dispassionately, and only on the ground he had left open to me. About his eye, which never looks but always measures. About the vanity he takes for taste. About a man who appraises every face in London and can bear his own only in photographs he has chosen himself. I had him kneel on the cushion and put him up for auction before an empty room. ‘Lot 1. Do I have a bid?’ I waited. The silence in that room was louder than any saleroom. ‘Nobody. The lot goes unsold.’ He flinched as though I had struck him, and I had not so much as touched him.
After eight minutes, before the agreed limit was reached, I let him get up, for the knee’s sake, and asked after both, the joint and the man. ‘Both are holding,’ he said. I reminded him of ‘Varnish’. He nodded and did not say it.
Then I did something he had not reckoned with. I turned the frame on the chair so that the picture faced the wall, and laid the mirror glass-down on the table. Now there was nothing left in the room to throw him back at himself except my gaze. I looked at him and kept silent. One minute, two, four. He tried a joke, and I forbade him to speak, except for the one word that holds in every hour. He tried to look at the floor, and I forbade him that as well. His hands did not know where to go. At some point – I had long since stopped looking at the clock – he said something without being asked, and he said it in the vowels he had laid aside in St James’s: ‘I’m scared there’s nowt underneath.’
‘There is always something under the varnish,’ I said. ‘You only have to bear someone looking.’ Then I went on looking at him until he held my gaze and no longer looked away. That was the hour. Everything before it had been priming.
The locked room
Wilde first published the novel in the July 1890 issue of an American monthly, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine; the book followed in 1891, expanded and with a preface made up of nothing but aphorisms. The story is well known: a young man stays beautiful, and his portrait ages in his place. Every cruelty, every lie leaves its mark on the canvas, not on his face. Dorian locks the picture in a room on the top floor of his house and keeps the key on him.
It is often read as a novel about guilt. I read it as a novel about hiding. Dorian’s misfortune is not that he becomes guilty, but that nobody may ever see his real face, and that a lock hangs between him and the picture. When at the end he takes a knife to the canvas, the servants find a dead man on the floor, withered and wrinkled, whom they recognise only by his rings, and the portrait once more shows the flawless young man. Whoever never shows himself is overtaken at last by what he has hidden.
Consensual humiliation turns this story on its head. We bring the picture out of the locked room, set it in the light, and the man stays in the room while somebody looks. In the preface Wilde writes: ‘All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.’ In the studio we share that peril. It has limits that the guest has drawn himself, and a word with which he can surface again at any moment.
In hours like these, power lies not with the one who speaks but with the one who looks. H. had spent his life on the looking side, as a man who appraises and names the price. In Being and Nothingness Sartre describes how the look of the Other makes me into an object: I am ashamed, and for a moment my possibilities are no longer my own. For H. the same look – chosen, bounded and furnished with a way out – was something else: permission to stop being his own curator.
Another line from the preface came to mind that afternoon: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.’ My mirror showed H. nothing he did not know. It showed him his own way of looking. Lord Henry, the novel’s tempter, maintains that the one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. All his life H. had been afraid of remaining unsold, unremarked, unvalued. In that hour in Munich he went unsold, and he was still there. Freedom, for him, did not merely mean that he could leave the game at any time. It meant that he had left it once and come back of his own accord.
Between the lions
After the hour I gave him water and let him sit, a blanket over his knees, until his hands lay still again. We spoke little. He asked whether he should take the photograph with him. I told him to leave it with me, just as it stood, facing the wall. When he put his jacket back on, I saw that it no longer quite fitted him, although it was the same one. The next morning he flew back to London.
A good month later a message came, not a catalogue entry this time, only a few sentences. He had been back to the National Portrait Gallery, not to the early pictures, not to the man with the ring in his ear. He had stood at Tracey Emin’s doors, down at street level, and counted the forty-five women whom nobody has ever valued and who are there all the same. Then he had crossed over to the square and sat down between the lions, for an hour, in the midst of strangers, with no newspaper and no phone. People had looked at him the way Londoners look at a stranger, fleetingly and without judgement, and he had not appraised them in return.
The week after, he wrote, a collector had asked him, in jest and over a glass, what his own portrait might be worth. He had replied that it was not on the market. It stood in Munich, looking at the wall.
I did not answer him. Some messages need no reply, only someone who reads them. The photograph is still with me, face down, and I have never turned it over again. Anyone who wants to know what H. looks like will have to look at him.
Two voices from the guestbook
What follows is not invented. Both entries are in my guestbook, written by real guests who have nothing to do with the art dealer from St James’s: he is a character, they are not. I give them here in faithful translation from the German, the first one abridged.
‘I am older than most of the men who come to Mistress Alexa. In my life I have been connected with three Mistresses, all good, all different. What Alexa has is a calm in her practice that I had not experienced before. She knows who she is. […]’ — Klaus T., 63, guestbook entry (translated from German)
‘After six weeks I wanted to quit. It was too much. She did not talk me into staying. She told me that I could go if I needed to. I went. Three weeks later I came back. She took me back without saying a word about it. That was lesson enough.’ — Slave M., guestbook entry (translated from German)
Anyone who has read the story will hear an echo of it in both voices: a calm that needs no valuation, and the right to leave without the door closing behind you.
Verbal humiliation in a real session
The story compresses. A real session of verbal humiliation is prepared more slowly, and agreed more precisely, than any story can show. Humiliation, verbal play and ASMR are included in my hourly fee; psychological torment, which works with uncertainty and long waiting, I take on only for sessions of 120 minutes or more. The fee is €250 per hour, €300 for hours from 8 pm, plus the room fee paid to Studio 60.
Before the first hour we settle:
- Off-limits subjects. Family, body, work, origins, relationships: whatever you rule out does not come up, not even as a hint. Whatever you leave open, I may use – and only that.
- Props. A photograph, a mirror, the clothes of your profession – whether we work with anything of the kind, we agree beforehand. How a room at Studio 60 is equipped is for the studio to say, not for me.
- Safeword. It ends any action at once, even in the middle of a sentence; there is also a wordless signal. Along the way, I check in on where you are.
- Health. Knees, back, circulation and medication belong in the preliminary conversation or in your profile in the Safe Room, especially if you are to kneel.
- Afterwards. At the end there is time to come back to yourself. What was said in the room stays there; recordings are made only with prior consent.
With me, humiliation is aimed at the role you take on in the session, never at the person who walks back out of the door afterwards. No intercourse, no oral sex. More under Humiliation and verbal play and Limits and safety; why the mind is the real stage, in the essay Mental dominance.
From London to Studio 60: flight, time difference, planning
London to Munich is just under two hours in the air, on a direct flight from Heathrow, for instance. Then there is the time difference: Munich is always one hour ahead of London. Munich Airport lies just under 30 kilometres north-east of the city; S-Bahn lines S1 and S8 take around 45 minutes into the centre. By rail, the Eurostar takes you to Paris or Brussels, where you change for Munich – though that takes the better part of a day. You receive the studio’s address with the confirmation.
My advice to guests from London:
- Fly the day before. A delayed flight home is a nuisance; a delayed flight out costs you the session. Lateness does not extend it, and anyone who is 30 minutes or more late without sending word counts as a no-show. Spend the night in Munich and you can make your way from the hotel to the studio at leisure.
- The appointment first, then the flight. Ask in good time and book your travel only once I have confirmed, especially for the three-hour Intensive format.
- Arrive sober. No drink in the lounge, none on board; anyone who has been drinking will not be received.
- Room and screenshot. You book and pay for the room at Studio 60 yourself and send me the confirmation as a screenshot.
- Bring euros. The rest of the fee is paid in cash, in euros, at the start; withdraw or change money beforehand.
- Discretion. It holds on both sides, in London as in Munich.
Guests from Switzerland have a story of their own under Dominatrix Zurich, and the Rhineland has one under Dominatrix Düsseldorf.