Isabel Ortiz pm, Apr 11, No nurse get-up was donned that day, and she had foregone her standard head-to-toe latex: the dominatrix who appeared in the photographs wore jeans, a tank top, and something like a snarl twisted across her doll-like features.
Ever attentive, her slave was quick to reply. When I ask her to describe the woman in the image, the question extends between us like a tightrope -β smooth, slippery, and a little slack. The term is unsatisfying to both of us. As a professional dominatrix, Lady Elizabeth lives in constant suspension between planes of communicable wants and the dark, moving shapes of the physical realm.
Her purpose: to bind together the known and the unspeakable, coagulating desire into its most powerful corporeal embodiment. It is fitting, in this sense, that I first encounter Lady Elizabeth through her website, where the seduction of image tugs against her purported affinity to word. Flipping through her photo gallery, readers need not be able to articulate their fantasy so much as point to the visual aid that renders it in dazzling Technicolor: Lady Elizabeth in a hula skirt, coconuts in hand; Lady Elizabeth in white riding pants and a riding crop; Lady Elizabeth in a cowboy hat and jeans, brandishing a bullwhip.
Lady Elizabeth in a floor-length black latex tube dress, red hair swept over one shoulder, testing a plaited leather cane in her tightly clenched fist. I discover the site on a Monday. Lady Elizabeth Foster is famous for her dalliances in French intellectual circles, her riotous parties, and her slew of illegitimate children. To me, the phrase seems somewhat redundant. Confronted with the sharp-edged patent leather ambiguities of the domme world, however, I find myself on unsteady ground.
I am not only BDSM illiterate, but unversed in the principles of articulating desire through these words β be they safe, dangerous, or otherwise. The voyeuristic pleasures of my one-way mirror vantage into domme world soon become impossible to sustain. Despite my good intentions, the gesture reads strangely. Lady Elizabeth gingerly lifts the foil covering my paltry offering; we pause for a second as she appraises me, eyebrows arched. Cringing slightly, I follow her inside. Lady Elizabeth requires three levels of screening before her clients can enter her dungeon.
