Interview with Mistress Didi, fetish therapist
By Scarlet Apron*

With a tongue sharp as a whip, sultry beauty and A+ smarts, instruction from Mistress Didi is no session as usual.  Empowered by the healing arts and her storied history as a private BDSM practitioner, the energetic native New Yorker is now concentrating on revitalizing NYC’s fetish and cross dressing scene with her classes, events and videos, such as Classic Cross Dresser™ Conservatory and Classic Fetish™ Therapy.  Not one to suffer dunces or apple-polishers easily, Mistress Didi aims to educate a new generation of subs, doms, kinksters-of-all-feathers in old school skill and etiquette.  nsightful and engaging, here we find the Party Domme at home, ready with a few well-learned lessons.  

Life as a child?
I grew up in a family of lots of women and artists which is why I’m a feminist and artist.  My mom was very political and I loved growing up marching on Washington in a time when people actually cared and marching mattered.

First inkling of kink?   
It was in kindergarten.  This little boy was annoying me and I have very little patience for those creatures, so I said to him, “You know, you need a spanking.”  And he said, “Oh yah? Well, why don’t you give me one?”  So, I spread him into position against the wall and told him to stay.  You know those paddle balls?  I pulled the ball off and just whacked him on his behind.  He was shocked.  I whacked him again and he totally got into it.  The kindergarten teacher watched for a minute before coming over and saying, “OK, we can’t play like that here.” 

How and when did you go pro domme?
I was in college.  I went to a party in a very bad mood and this guy came over and said, “I love your boots, may I kiss them?” I said, “You may lick the bottoms of my soles, but don’t slobber on my leather.”  He decided he was totally in love with me and I made him buy me and my friends drinks all night.  It turned out he was a CEO of a very high-powered corporation and he had friends and they all wanted to have the same domme so they could play.   So, for a very long time I had the same seven submissives.   When I did anything professional, quote unquote, it was a performance and all very private.  They even flew me to Monaco to do a scene at a funeral at the request of the deceased.

Whoa…
That is how the world used to be.  People offered me tributes for sessions.  It’s not like I got $200 an hour, my tribute was a trip to the Caribbean.  They came down, we played, and I stayed on the rest of the week.  They went back and gave me spending money.  And now with the hoochies and the sleaze-ification of pro domination and BDSM in the media and mainstream, I am not to be considered a pro domme.  I will not playing that way.  That’s not playing, that’s sex trade.  And I have no problems with the sex trade people; just don’t call yourself a domme because you’re not a domme. They are sex workers.  They don’t have technique and they don’t have training.  They have no clue.

Where did you get your clue?
I grew up as a dancer and I’ve studied the body my whole life.  I’ve always been fascinated by what makes people tick.  I’ve studied acupressure, acupuncture, all kinds of healing therapies.  That was my other life.  Suddenly, I realized there’s a fine line between pleasure and pain and crossing it thrills me.  I’m a Libra, so I have two sides that co-exist and we’re in a symbiotic relationship.  This confuses people because I’ll beat them, but then I’ll give them a cold remedy.  I believe the BDSM lifestyle is a healing therapy and it helps people evolve.   

You do a lot of community outreach, what’s your mission?
I want to change three things.  First, people don’t understand that BDSM is not sexual deviance. The dom/sub lifestyle isn’t about someone lacking something inside of themselves.  It’s about accepting oneself fully, exploring your self-acceptance and allowing yourself to evolve from that place further into self-love.  The kink is the icing on the cake of your self-love and acceptance.   Second, I want to dynamically present education to clear up the ignorance around the dom/sub relation.  People outside of the scene know nothing about it.  What’s worse is how many lazy people in the scene don’t bother to educate themselves either and then hurt other uneducated individuals.  Folks think subs are people with a history of abuse.  We know that isn’t true.  The third, really annoying thing is all these kinksters coming into the scene who actually believe they are gifted fetishists.  They offer nothing; are all about their own hype; try to top from the bottom; have no training; no concept of social grace; are obnoxious and in desperate need of attention.  The vast majority of these people are cheating on their relationships.  They claim they want to be subs, but they don’t go home to their wives to share this part of themselves.  They think their significant other won’t go for it.  First of all, you don’t ever actually know what another person is going to say.  To think that you do is your fantasy and not necessarily the reality.  I’ve trained people how to go home and slowly break their partners into the lifestyle.  My vision is that people won’t have to hide anything anymore.

What’s Classic Fetish™ Therapy?  How do you fix people?
I don’t look at it as fixing and broken.  I look at it as evolution.  We can’t be stagnant beings, just dying inside, like walking zombies.  But look at corporate America, that’s what you’ve got.  They go to a horrible job they hate, come home, deal with the family they didn’t really want in the first place but that they have from obeying social and religious conditioning.  They sit in front of the TV, eating crap and get up the next day to do it all over again.  Fetish is an outlet for creativity. Most people don’t know they have creative ways to express themselves.  If you let yourself have that thrill and be OK that you’re into it, the behavior takes on a different form than that of a taboo.  You’re not making yourself wrong for having this thrill, you’re making yourself right for owning your enjoyment of it and, of course, accepting responsibility to enjoy it safely. And the more you affirm yourself, the better person you become and that’s how fetish works, because it’s an affirming lifestyle.   You become a better person, which is going to benefit the world

How do you prepare for a scene? 
I’m actually an empath.  I connect with the lucky person who I allow to play with me and sense their energies.   I allow an energy transference of my energy into theirs and their energy into mine by teaching them to synchronize their breathing with mine.  It’s kind of like channeling; I’m always conscious of what it is that I want to do while being so connected to that person, it’s almost as if they are feeding to me where my kink can go and how far I can push their limits without damaging their psyche.  That’s thrilling to me and thrilling to them.  When I sense that a person is so shut down that they are not receptive to my energy, I won’t play with them.

How does being black effect your ideas of domination?
Interesting you should ask that.  It’s a quandary, in a way.  People have different expectations of you based on income or religion or size.  That’s the way it is.  As a black domme, I get a lot of crap from black women.  I get a lot of crap from white women.  I get a lot of crap from black men.  I get a lot of crap from white men.  I just get a lot of crap, in general, when people have certain ideas about a black woman and I don’t fit their stereotypes.  They choose to assume I’m one of those hoochies in the sex trade who’s gonna hang someone upside down and kill them.  But, that’s their fantasy; not my reality.  If they weren’t so lazy, they’d read about me on my website.

What do you enjoy about helping men effeminize?
I like to refer to it as ‘blossoming’ and getting in touch with the woman within because what I do is not a forced thing.   My process is something they allow themselves to experience.  It’s a beautiful, evolutionary process. Why should women have all the fun with hair, make-up, lingerie and all those joys?  There’s nothing better than being a woman.

Part two to follow.

For more information on Mistress Didi go to www.PartyDomme.com

*Contact Scarlet Apron at scarletapron@yahoo.com or myspace.com/scarletapron with fetish news and events.