In Praise of Messy Lives (28 page)

When she talks about the future, she imagines living on an animal sanctuary in upstate New York. She would like to have wolves, giraffes, lions—which, she tells me, you can get special permits for. She would like to have three children, two girls and one boy, two blond and one redhead, and she likes the names Isis and Skull. She tells me that her mother jokes that if she had a child she would leave him outside making a snowman. And then he would be frozen when she finally went out to find him. We both laugh. I think of Goethe’s line “Behind every joke there is a problem.” Alexis is thinking that same thing. “I guess I’ll have to find a man who is kind of like my housewife, who has more maternal or domestic instincts than me.”

For an angsty dominatrix, Alexis has a straightforwardly warm and beautiful smile. One day she posts a generically pretty blond smiling actress headshot-style photograph, which is startling in the context of her oeuvre. Beneath it, she writes, “Suzy Sunshine,” maybe a little embarrassed by the undeniably conventional prettiness of the photo, but the commenters, her Facebook admirers, subs, ex-subs, remote subs, aspiring subs, and other assorted
observers, rush toward interpretation. One writes, “Girl next door,” and Alexis writes “yuck” and someone else writes, “Dear Alexis is not the girl next door. Anything BUT,” and someone else writes, “This kitten bites.” and someone else suggests she should model and Alexis says she doesn’t want to model. But somehow in the tangle of comments it is clear: everyone, even the most twisted sub, is drawn to the smile.

Another time I see the smile is in a picture she has of herself when she is maybe eight or nine. She is riding her reddish horse, an Arabian mix, Ember. She is lying as flat as she can against her horse’s neck, pressing every possible square inch of her body against her, beaming gloriously. Her parents, though not rich, bought her a pony because she loved to ride, and boarded it upstate within walking distance of a train station. In fact her mother put nine-year-old Alexis on the phone to negotiate the price of the horse with the seller. Alexis was especially good with high-strung or difficult horses, which Ember was, because she knew instinctively how to handle them. She says, “I would think to myself, Please let me never never get into boys.”

When I watch a few trailers of her fetish films, I am surprised to catch in one of them the smile. Alexis is a cowgirl domme, holding down a slave, while another cowgirl domme is doing things to him, and there’s the radiant smile. Is she acting? I can’t tell.

We are talking about
Story of O
, a famous French novel from the fifties about sadomasochism. I am somehow simultaneously bored and very disturbed by the extremes of how O is transfigured, how she loses herself, how she vacates herself in the course of her baroque sexual enslavement. The novel culminates in a scene where O is wearing an owl mask, and is led on a chain naked into a party, where it occurs to none of the guests that she is human. When Susan Sontag writes about O she talks about “the voluptuous yearning toward the extinction of one’s consciousness.”

I mention the scene where O is branded and passes out, and Alexis mentions that she once took part in a branding. She was with another domme who had a sub who was a math teacher from Ohio and wanted to be branded. The other domme sent a slave on a long drive to get a blowtorch, and they somehow found a branding iron that said “m.” It was just what they happened to find, but they thought maybe “m” could stand for “mistress.”

Alexis thought that she could hold the blowtorch because she had done welding before. She was nervous, and the slave was nervous, but she held it steady, the flame blue and red. She stood in a leather bikini and stilettos, holding it very still, while the other domme took the branding iron and put it on his skin, which melted white. After it was over, the dominatrixes started laughing, not a mean laugh, she explains, but nervous, relieved, scared. They had never done anything like that before.

Alexis said to the other domme, “Are you just going to leave him like that?” And the other domme got some Neosporin, and a bandage.

But now she thinks that was going too far; she would never do
anything like that again. That was the early stage of her fascination: she was intoxicated by the extremes, she wanted to take things as far as they could go. It was like going to war, you came back and you were desensitized. But now she is done with that. In certain moods, i.e., the one she is in this afternoon, it sounds like she is done with the Scene.

One of Alexis’s ex-subs is taking her to the play
Venus in Fur
that evening. He is the one who is a descendant of Freud.

I ask her what one wears when going to a play about sadomasochism with an ex-sub; I ask because I have almost never seen Alexis in anything but faded jeans, and today, cat-hair-covered black leggings. The answer is Prada black pants, black blazer, heels. This somehow raises the question in my head of whether the ex-sub still looks at her, and thinks, like the character in
Venus in Fur
looking at his mistress, that she is “half of hell, half of dreams.”

At the theater a girl one row behind her gasps out loud when the actress leads a man by a dog collar. Alexis can’t believe that the girl is shocked by a dog collar, that she reacts as if the actress has kicked a puppy across the stage.

Afterward, Alexis talks to the Freud descendant about it. He says that people are shocked by the explicit talk about power relations
that underlie all relationships: the exaggeration of everyday servitudes and subjugations is what alarms them. This makes me think of a line about couples from the original novel
Venus in Furs
, written in 1870 by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch: “Whichever of the two fails to subjugate will soon feel the feet of the other on his neck.”

Alexis’s dungeon-slash-studio floats above an anonymous midtown street; the dungeon is very clean and well lit and tastefully furnished for a dungeon. Somehow it feels like early morning here, even though it is two in the afternoon. There is a skinny gray cat wandering past the giant wooden cross, and a fluffy black one curled up on the thirties morgue table, and another black one rubbing his back against one of the two mannequins with wigs who are bound together with ropes, and four or five others wandering past the metal wheeling rack for costumes, and one curled up asleep on the low mattress that is there for late nights.

Alexis is tired from staying up until two shooting photographs of a Viking girl covered in silver body paint with a goat skull. Alexis had made her an elaborate helmet with fur, and built and painted a three-dimensional silver rock wall for the background.
In one of the pictures the Viking girl is holding a sword aimed so directly at the camera that you can’t quite see what it is.

I think of other people I know with what Alexis calls “anger issues,” the way it seeps into and poisons the lives of those around them, in socially acceptable ways, in ways not visible to the outside world, how things happen, minor dramas in the kitchen, books or other objects thrown or torn into pieces, fetishes unnamed and unwanted but still playing themselves out, accidental rituals of humiliation, humdrum or otherwise, little banal stories of O on the subway ride to work, the boring everyday way people “voluptuously yearn toward the extinction of their consciousness,” or not even that voluptuously.

The Viking girl already sent Alexis a text this morning saying she is having second thoughts about the topless photos with silver body paint because her fundamentalist Christian family in Texas might see them. Alexis is more or less taking the position that body paint is clothes.

Somewhere in the middle of this, Alexis is telling me about a dinner party she went to with her parents on the Upper East Side, at the house of an important judge. They are sitting around the table, the judge, his wife, his son who goes to an all-boys school, his eighty-five-year-old mother, with dyed red hair, Alexis and her family, and a couple of other Upper East Side friends, eating a pork roast from Lobel’s, with horseradish sauce and wine brought back from Italy. They are talking about things they regret not doing. Someone turns politely to the important judge’s eighty-five-year-old mother and asks her what she regrets not doing. She says, “I wish I’d been a stripper.”

In the dungeon, the window to the fire escape is criss-crossed
with bars. Alexis takes another sip of her orange soda and lights a menthol cigarette.

I would like to one day see her at the animal sanctuary, walking with the giraffes, a straw-haired toddler at her ankles, paint still under her nails.

Huge thanks and a glass raised to my editors: Noah Eaker, Susan Kamil, Sam Tannenhaus, Jennifer McDonald, Jennifer Schuessler, Laura Marmor, Hanna Rosin, Jacob Weisberg, David Plotz, Meghan O’Rourke, Ann Hulbert, Sue Matthias, Tina Brown, Elissa Schappell, Rob Spillman, Susan Morrison, and Colin Harrison.

“The Great Escape” originally appeared in different form in
New York
magazine.

“The Alchemy of Quiet Malice” originally appeared in different form on Slate.

“Unquiet Americans” originally appeared in different form in
Tin House
.

“Beautiful Boy, Warm Night” originally appeared in different form in
The Friend Who Got Away
.

“The Naked and the Conflicted” originally appeared in different form in
The New York Times Book Review
.

“Writing Women” originally appeared in
The New York Times Book Review
.

“The Bratty Bystander” originally appeared on Slate.

“Reclaiming the Shrew” originally appeared in
The New York Times Book Review
.

“Making the Incest Scene” originally appeared in different form in
Harper’s Magazine
.

Parts of “Joan Didion” originally appeared in different form on Slate and in
Brill’s Content
.

Parts of “Susan Sontag” originally appeared on Slate and
The New York Times Book Review
.

“The Ambiguities of Austen” originally appeared in
The Weekly Standard
.

“Rabbit at Rest” originally appeared on Slate.

“Do Childish People Write Better Children’s Books?” originally appeared on Slate.

“The Perverse Allure of Messy Lives” originally appeared in different form in
The New York Times
.

“The Fantasy Life of the American Working Woman” originally appeared in
Newsweek
.

“Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?” originally appeared on Slate.

“Profiles Encouraged” originally appeared in
Brill’s Content
.

“Elect Sister Frigidaire” originally appeared in
Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary
.

“Love Child” originally appeared on Slate.

“The Perfect Parent” originally appeared in different form in
Financial Times
.

“Whose School Is It, Anyway?” originally appeared in
Financial Times
.

“The Feminine Mystique on Facebook” originally appeared in different form on Slate.

“The Child Is King” originally appeared on Slate.

“One Day at a Time” originally appeared in different form in
Financial Times
.

“Twitter War” originally appeared in different form in
Financial Times
.

“The Language of Fakebook” originally appeared in
The New York Times
.

“The Angry Commenter” originally appeared on Slate.

“Gawker Is Big Immature Baby” originally appeared on Slate.

Also by Katie Roiphe

Uncommon Arrangements
Still She Haunts Me
Last Night in Paradise
The Morning After

K
ATIE
R
OIPHE
is a professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She writes a column on life, literature, and politics for Slate and writes for
The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review
, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her two children.