Text of an email I received after yesterdays post…

I don't know how you can call yourself a mistress when you post links of pictures of yourself in bondage as you have done today. It's really unfair to those of us who are true Mistreses, and I think if you are really an honest person as you try to put yourself forth then you should change your name. You are doing a diservice to us real Mistresses.

It blathers on for a bit, but that's the main thrust of it…

Where to begin with emails like this? First off, the woman pictured on this page, the URL you included in your email, is not me. That's a picture of Maura, Max's submissive. There is a rather superficial resemblance – we're very roughly the same height, weight and hair color and age – but it ain't me.

However, let's address the spirit of what you're saying. Now, if you've read my blog for any length of time, you've gotta know I care less than nothing about upholding any kind of "true Mistress" crap, so I don't know why you're pulling that one out on me. "Mistress Matisse" is my professional name – it refers to my career as a dominatrix. I don't expect people I meet socially to address me as Mistress, unless they are negotiating for a scene with me.

Not being a switch does not confer any magic status upon someone. If being only a top or only a bottom makes you happy, that's just fine with me. But if you try to set yourself up as somehow being more "real and true" than someone who switches, you're deluding yourself. If I'm a "true" anything, I'm a true BDSM person - and I usually describe myself as a top because that's most often how I relate to other BDSM people. But I think dominance and submission are points on a scale, not absolute black/white distinctions. Hell, I'm bisexual, too, so you can't really expect me to embrace a binary system. (Being poly probably doesn't help, either.)

It's always amazing to me when people take on a sexually deviant identity and then try to set up restrictive rules about how that identity must be expressed. Hey, if you want to create an inflexible structure for yourself, I'm cool with that, although I might scratch my head over it privately. Why would you bother leaving behind other people's repressive rules just to straight-jacket yourself all over again?
However, the idea that you can inflict your rules of identity on me is laughable. To me, that would be the ultimate submission – letting someone else decide how I could and could not express my sexuality. I'm far too dominant for that!

What's really amusing to me is this - there actually is a very artsy picture of me with my wrists all wrapped up on rope on Jon McDermott's site. I've done art/bondage modeling on a number of occasions, and I have no problem showing the pictures. Here's one, and here's another….I think they're gorgeous shots. And I'm much too secure in my identity to have the slightest qualm about showing them.

I have a stock answer for any in-person remarks I get on this issue, and that is: no one who has bottomed to me has ever expressed any doubt about who was in charge in my dungeon. I'm quite confident no one ever will.