I Like Pissing Myself: On Self-Contained Sexuality

I am Aro/Ace. I am also a successful professional Dominatrix.

By “successful,” I mean I can support my basic needs from the income I make pro-Domming, and for the most part, I enjoy my work. It satisfies a certain need for creativity and no-strings-attached interpersonal interaction that is not easily found elsewhere.

I work “in-house,” which means I Domme exclusively out of one particular dungeon, which handles the upkeep of the space, advertising, and booking. All I have to do is show up and be ready to session.

Working in-house, you can imagine I meet a lot of different people, both in-session and behind the scenes. The other Dommes are primarily other queers, which goes over the heads of most of our clients. The majority of my in-house colleagues lean toward being futch dykes or non-binary transmascs outside their Domme personas—once, through natural conversation, five of us ended up comparing photos of our “pre-sex work haircuts,” which ranged from neon green mullets to fully shaved scalps. All of us have since grown our hair back out, natural and long enough to appeal to the mostly male gaze of our client base. But to a degree, we still treat our work personas like being in drag.

In session, I’m in drag as a horny biromantic bisexual. If I were straight up honest with clients that, yeah, I’m not actually attracted to you, not even a little bit, and there’s nothing you can do to change that, well. I wouldn’t make much money. So, I put on the mask that says, yes, I do find you attractive, and yes, I’m a nymphomaniac, and no, I’ve never done sex work out of financial desperation, I’ve only ever done sex work because I just love sticking random objects up strange men’s assholes so very much, and oh, your main kink is cross-dressing/med-fet/ball-busting/insert-other-random-fetish-here? Mine too! 

I’m not exactly lying. I do enjoy engaging in all of the kinks and fetishes I allude to on my dungeon bio. I consider my in-session persona “drag” rather than “closeted and oppressed” because the playful nature of BDSM and kink makes it so. At a basic level, roleplay and feeling powerful and/or desired is fun; psychoanalyzing myself, as an adult, I admit that growing up alienated by the absence of sexual and romantic attraction has made me intellectually ravenous to understand sex of all kinds.

Three years in, as one of the most established Dommes at my dungeon, I’m grateful to have found queer community among my colleagues—largely because participating in sex work lets us call out, analyze, and make fun of the performative nature of sex and attraction when we’re dicking around behind the scenes. Our dressing room culture is ceaselessly blunt and hilariously NSFW. Someone cracks a crude joke to the right, someone else wall-twerks against the lockers to the left, and most things that come out of our mouths would have us instantly hauled off to HR in any vanilla work environment. As an ex-Evangelical with a history of scrupulosity, unleashing what my mother would have disdained as the “sense of humor of a twelve-year-old boy” feels like lancing a wound. 

We’re also constantly discussing the grosser logistical elements of kinky sex—instructing 80-year-old men how to douche properly before getting pegged feels like it happens at least three times a day. When a known client with a golden shower kink comes in but hasn’t picked a Domme yet, in the locker room, we’ll be chugging water, having mastered how fast we must consume liquid to unleash the most torrential coffee-free downpour onto a chest/face/cock when it’s time. When we pass each other in the halls, the typical greeting is to shake our tits in each other’s faces or swoon with all the drama of an anime simp and porno-moan, “Ooh, Mistress!” An in-joke parody of how many clients sound just before orgasm.

In notable ways, my Aro/Ace-ness eliminates obstacles from my work that I’ve seen colleagues face. I never deal with outside partners getting jealous because I make my living in the adult industry. I don’t catch romantic feelings for clients who, odds are, are married and essentially cheating on their spouse. The only boundaries I must negotiate are my own, whereas I’ve seen colleagues turn down lucrative opportunities because accepting would violate boundaries they’ve established with their partner(s) at home. When I see the sagging, wet-dough-like bodies of elderly men, I am no more or less repulsed than if I was engaging erotically with someone closer to my own age, deemed “societally attractive.” 

Whenever a new client arrives at the dungeon, those of us on shift gather in the office with the manager to watch the soon-to-be bitch-boy on the elevator camera. “Ooh, he’s not just dungeon hot, he’s hot hot!” some Mistresses might proclaim when someone young or silver fox-like comes in. Conveniently, I never worry about getting nervous and fumbling a session due to my own attraction; instead, I get to stand overhead, impassive, while the client devolves into a trembling horny mess at my feet. 

Yet problems do sometimes arise due to being Aro/Ace in a highly sexualized space. While our crude dressing room antics usually feel liberating, when I’m feeling less certain of myself, I’ve caught myself extending the “allo mask” outside of sessions by overplaying my personal experience with partnered kink. A part of me fears I’m not allowed to be an authority on the subject unless I play in the lifestyle scene AND the professional scene, never mind all the research, training, and ethical self-negotiation I’ve done to practice the craft of BDSM artfully and responsibly.

Beyond the shitty feeling of tripping into masking among queer community, clients sometimes ask mid-session what they can do to make me cum too. I understand why they ask, but I find this question exhausting. Even if I wasn’t Aro/Ace, as a sex worker, I would feel this way: a question like that is an intimacy over-ask for the $300/hr house price. Besides, few ProDommes are in the biz to chase their own orgasms, orientation aside, myself included. I ProDomme to pay my bills doing something I don’t hate that stimulates me intellectually and creatively. I’m there as a fantasy roleplay provider; the point is never my orgasm, it’s my client’s. I don’t want to try and orgasm with a client anyway, because first of all, the involvement of any other person when I’m trying to cum is a turn off, and witnessing that outright breaks a certain suspension of disbelief for the service-minded of the bunch. 

What I get from Domming is having power over someone else’s sexual expression. In the same way a therapist must be impartial towards their patients, I can impartially guide someone through a cathartic, if erotic, experience. To say that the only point of engaging in BDSM or other kinky play is for all parties to orgasm is a vastly limiting view of human erotic potential, not to mention ableist.

Yet I’m not entirely removed from the sexual component of kink. I don’t want to fall into the trap of saying, “I’m asexual, but it’s okay, because I’m also kinky!” Asexuality isn’t something to apologize for, and no one should engage in BDSM just to “make up for” a lack of attraction to a kinky partner. But I AM kinky. Specifically, I’m a fetishist. 

And the only way I have ever been able to cum has been by having fetish-focused sex with myself. 

I didn’t always allow myself to view my own fetish through a lens of gratitude for a self-contained sexuality, as I do now, instead of shame. When I was twelve, the same time most of my peers started dating or experimenting sexually, all I could think about was piss. While classmates talked about constant thoughts of this crush or that, who was a good kisser, and under what circumstances they wanted to lose their virginity, I was busy being confused by the strange-good feeling of holding my bladder for longer and longer periods of time. This confusion took me down a rabbit hole of what, at the time, I didn’t understand was fetish porn—I genuinely thought people were making videos of pissing themselves or potty dancing outside locked bathroom doors just because. 

I couldn’t explain why I was drawn to this content or what was up with the weird tingly feeling it inspired around my groin. All I understood about it, for the longest time, was that it was weird and sinful and I should be ashamed of myself—thanks to my mom looking over my shoulder at just the wrong moment while I was on my phone reading omorashi erotica.

I was sitting on her bed, scrolling on the now-defunct site Experience Project. It was the evening, and at the time, my parents’ bedroom was often the “hangout spot” where my siblings and I watched Friends reruns until bedtime. I’d only had a smartphone for a couple of months, and in rural Oklahoma in 2008, having consistent Internet access via cellular data was itself a new experience. 

I’d first become intrigued by the whole watching-someone-piss-themselves thing because of The Sims 3. If you didn’t tell your Sim to go to the toilet, their full bladder would eventually win out, and no matter where they were or who was with them, they’d end up squatting down and burying their face in shame while a puddle of urine formed beneath them. To pubescent me, an overbooked, overachieving, must-not-get-clocked-as-Autistic (though I didn’t know that’s what was Different about me at the time) kid, the involuntary loss of control and burning humiliation I imagined might follow such an act made me feel like confusing, happy snakes were curling around each other in my gut. 

I figured if I could make my Sims piss themselves in the game, other people might have recorded and posted their own Sims’ torture (similar to the sadistic trend of putting your Sims in the swimming pool, deleting the ladder, and watching them flail around as they drowned). Watching recordings posted to YouTube of Sims pissing themselves turned to watching YouTube recordings of real people pissing themselves. And as a decidedly bookish kid, from there, of course I had to see if anyone was writing stories about such a thing—which was how I found the threads on Experience Project.

The story I was reading at the time was just getting to the oh-so-humiliating good part when I felt the mattress sink down beside me and a warm cheek brush against mine as my mom rested her head on my shoulder. “Whatcha reading?”

My chest immediately constricted in panic. I tried to quickly close the tab and pocket my phone, but my hands were shaking, and my mom was not one to be fooled. 

Gaze heavy with warning, she pulled the iPhone from my grip. Her eyes moved back and forth across the digital page. Her brow pulled together in horrified, confused disgust. “I like pissing myself?”

It was the title of the story. The moment blurs in my memory from there. I’m not sure how I convinced her to give me my phone back momentarily, but even now, I can feel the ghostly weight of her repulsed stare as I quickly clicked out of at least a dozen tabs. Way too many tabs. What had I been doing?

When I was done, Mom held out her hand in demand. I handed my phone over, throat tight with the fear that maybe I had missed something, maybe she could still find my browser history, maybe she would see that her daughter wasn’t the perfect, smart, beautiful, successful girl she wanted, but was actually a sinful, repulsive, weirdo freak.

My parents took my phone away and grounded me for a month. When my younger siblings asked me questions about it, I brushed them off. Those happy gut snakes I’d been cultivating through my experimentation calcified into a medusa head of stony shame.

As a sheltered Evangelical, I genuinely did not understand that what I had been watching and reading was porn. Notably, I never liked when I could see the people’s faces in the videos I came across—what I would later learn was a common experience among other Ace fetishists—and I assumed the only thing that “counted” as sex, and therefore as porn, was penis-in-vagina intercourse. No one ever outright explained the difference to me either. Our sex ed class at my Catholic middle school was taught by a 90-year-old priest and focused almost singularly on how premarital sex was a sin. According to him, if a girl got pregnant, not only would her parents be disappointed, but the drama department would never again consider her for a lead in the school play (this, absurdly, worried me greatly—if the so-far-absent swoop of passion that was allegedly so difficult to resist overcame me, would I be kicked out of my favorite extracurricular?). 

It wasn’t until I was eighteen and experimenting with masturbation for the first time that I remembered the tingly-groin feeling I used to get from omorashi content. Thinking of those old videos in my mind’s eye while touching myself was how I experienced my first intentional orgasm. Finally, this gave me half a clue over the pleasure-seeking appeal of sex (if not attraction) and why my childhood best friends were suddenly way more interested in spending time with their boyfriends than me.

But learning how to make myself cum felt more “out of the frying pan, into the fire” than liberating. I was going through many of the common experiences other Aro/Ace teens of the era have since reported—fear of being left behind by my friends, exasperation over familial pressure to date, disproportionate revulsion to anyone expressing romantic interest in me—but understanding I had a fetish made everything worse. I fell into a frustrating cycle of arousal/masturbation/self-disgust. Who could love someone like me, who was actively terrified of penetrative intercourse, hated wasting my limited free time dating, and could only become aroused by the thought of someone pissing themselves? 

I continued wrestling with my relational self-worth through freshman year of college, when I moved to New York City to attend NYU. For a while, I thought I was a lesbian, because I still hadn’t heard the terms asexual or aromantic, and the binary option of lesbianism seemed to make the most sense, given how I’d never been interested in any of the guys interested in me (today, I consider myself sapphically aligned, minus the sexual/romantic attraction elements). This led me to tentatively poke my head into the campus LGBT center in search of resources, but I got cold feet before actually reaching out. 

My saving grace didn’t arrive until the end of sophomore year, and when it did, well, for all my fellow aromantics, the best way to describe the feeling is to paraphrase the love-at-first-sight experience portrayed in Natalie Cole’s song “Orange Colored Sky”: I was walking along minding my business, when, flash! Bam! Ali-ca-zam! 

Love came and knocked me on my ass.

The summer of 2016, I was alone in the dorms for two weeks to take an expedited digital filmmaking class. I thought I’d put on something background and campy so I wouldn’t get distracted from my schoolwork. One of my roommates recommended Supernatural before leaving for the summer, and I figured, what the hell. I curled up in my sleeping bag—all my bedding and belongings were already packed into boxes to go back to Oklahoma post-film course—and pulled up the pilot on my laptop.

That was it.

It’s almost mystical, the way I got so hooked, so deeply, and so irrevocably. I fell into undeniable infatuation with the Supernatural story. In retrospect, this feeling—falling in love—had to be what allos were experiencing romantically all the time with other humans, especially when they spoke of “new relationship energy.” I had only ever felt such overwhelming obsession about stories. 

The next two weeks, I remained tediously sleep deprived in class and on set. I couldn’t stop myself from staying up late into the night to binge each next episode. At the time, eleven seasons of the show had aired, with the twelfth set for release in the fall. Since most of my homework the previous two years as a Dramatic Writing major involved binging television, I was up to the challenge.

An old Tumblr gag says the Supernatural fandom has a gif for everything. By the time the film course ended and I went back to Oklahoma, I was the walking embodiment of that idea. My sister wanted to talk about her boyfriend? I made the conversation about Supernatural’s gay subtext. We were going out to eat at a diner? I spun references about pie left and right. We were taking a road trip to Los Angeles? I begged to be dropped at the classic car show in hopes of seeing a ‘67 Impala.

A part of me found this obsession—addiction—terrifying. I wanted to escape, and yet I didn’t. I had never experienced such uninhibited euphoria. I didn’t know I could even feel such joy.

Even now, writing this, I’m filled with such immense gratitude, like a warm balloon is expanding inside my chest, thinking about those first forays into fandom. Whether my inaugural watch of Sam and Dean Winchester’s saving-people-hunting-things adventures marked quality storytelling overlooked by the industry at large, or I just needed an escape that desperately, everything else in my world suddenly became vastly less important than a kitschy genre TV show.

Far too soon, I finished season 11 and ran out of show to watch.

I had not let myself look at or read anything sexual since that fateful shaming encounter over the omo erotica. Even as I got myself off thinking about people pissing themselves, I intentionally avoided broadening my erotic horizons, for fear of what else I might discover about myself.

But I really, really, really wanted to read about Dean and Castiel having intimate, kinky sex.

Enter fanfiction. If moving to NYC got the freedom-from-shame ball rolling, fandom picked it up and shot it into the sex-positive sky like a special-interest-fueled cannon. Reading and writing fanfic soon cemented themselves as my primary hobbies. I couldn’t resist endlessly imagining the Supernatural characters engaging in all kinds of kinky queer intimacy. I devoured pages of Ao3 results, scoured old LiveJournal accounts that survived the Strikethrough content purge, and dove deep into the Wayback Machine to recover old fics otherwise lost to time and censorship. 

Ultimately, I learned more than I ever imagined existed about all the ways people could love each other and themselves. Seeing the vibrant variety of debauchery depicted across fanfic bolstered a tentative allowance to begin exploring the branches of my own fetish again, which led me to diaper fetishism and the AB/DL community. I’ve since had the joy of witnessing others with interests aligned with my own become more connected and sure of themselves online and in-person across the past decade. For my slow burn growth of self-acceptance, I credit the fanfiction writers, many of whom are queer, who re-imagined and built upon Supernatural’s source material as a freely gifted labor of love. The founding ethos of Ao3 in particular as an anti-censorship, kink-positive community, opened my mind to the world and, at last, to myself.

Now, a decade past my initial forays into fandom, I’ve gone no-contact with my mother, tried and failed to like being in a serious amatonormative relationship, become disabled, and finally, turned my gaze towards kinky sex work.

I initially approached the prospect of pro-Domming with intrigue and desperation. Developing chronic pain forced me to part ways with my nonprofit job, and I had reached the point of selling my furniture to make ends meet. I needed work that would let me make a decent chunk of change quickly without a lot of physical effort. Much of pro-Domming is very physical, but some things—like foot worship or watersports—don’t have to be. Armed with an arsenal of fanfic writers’ filthiest imaginings, which I correctly believed could be transposed into real-life role-plays, I figured, “I’m not really using my own sense of sexuality. Might as well loan it out.”

And here I am. My erotic fanfic obsessions, coupled with the inner work I’ve done surrounding the interplay of shame, empathy, and sexuality, positioned me better than most to thrive in the world of facilitating kink for pay. Part of me still gets protective about naming my own fetish out loud; I often find myself speaking to clients as if my “real” kinks were the ones adjacent to what actually gets me off—professing an excitement over golden showers, when really, I’m mentally crossing my fingers that someone will let me tie them up and force them to piss themselves. But those most intimate truths aren’t something my clients are entitled to.

Today, I am in love with myself and my self-contained sexuality. At age 30, while many of my close friends in the hetero-normative world are turning their attention towards marriage and babies, my own desires have crystallized into something both serene and perfectly nasty. While I do crave interpersonal intimacy, I don’t long for romance or sex with anyone besides myself. I especially can’t imagine putting myself in the shoes of a select handful of my clients, who allegedly “need” sexual interaction with a person they are attracted to so badly, they are willing to risk blowing up every other aspect of their lives to get it. I am content capitalizing on my Aro/Ace sensibilities to thrive in sex work, immune to the kryptonite of sexual and romantic attraction that seems such a burdensome concern heaped upon the rest of the world. It would be a lie to say I don’t still feel anxiety over the practicalities of aging solo in a world designed for pairs. Yet the time my allo peers put into intertwining their lives with a romantic partner or partners, trapped in a constant merry-go-round of compromise, is time I’ve resolved to spend creating, experiencing, and loving on my own terms. 

Sex work is forging my path to solo financial stability. I credit my own self-contained sexuality—as an Aro/Ace, as a fetishist, as a fangirl—for my success in sex work. Within the next year, I will have the financial means to secure my own apartment, and thus the autonomy to spend my time only with those I please—knowing the answer will almost always be spending my time with myself. 

Likely, curled up in bed with my e-reader, getting off on omorashi fanfiction.