Soft Core

Let’s call it Dream House.

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Dungeon conjures up the wrong image. Close your eyes and revise it: a pea-green four-bedroom in a quiet cul-de-sac, toeing the border between

Berkeley and Richmond. Bought in the eighties when this neighborhood was still working-class: pit bulls in scrubby yards, cars on blocks. Today the house could go for a million. The place is dated, paint flaking in spots, but the yard is well loved. Picture a garden full of roses, a girl in a kimono picking cherry tomatoes, another lying on a towel reading the Marquis de Sade. If the towel is white, it came from the Medical Room. If the towel is green, it came from the Student Dorm. There are always cars parked nearby, never directly in front, men coming and going with guarded expressions. They know that if the American flag is hung off the porch, Dream House is open for business.

Sometimes the men bring bottles of wine. Sometimes they bring standard-sized envelopes stuffed with twenties, forgetting that their business address is printed on the front. Most will call themselves Michael or John. They are everyone: teachers, lawyers, junkies, techies, bodybuilders, gentlemen, bisexuals, creeps, the underemployed, the clinically depressed, the barely legal, the newly betrothed, fathers, brothers, lovers, losers, always someone’s son. They come in Porsches and beat-up sedans, they come in Ubers from the city that cost them a fortune, the lucky few get a ride from their wife.

Some men will be flashy and some will be coy. Some will act like they hate me, while others beg to kiss the space between my toes. To some I really am a deity. The old sex work cliché will prove true here too: many of my clients just want to talk. They want to talk about their gang-bang fantasy, their unfinished novellas. They want to talk about ponytails and being pimped out. They speak of relationship woes and new medications with weird side effects. They speak of dry mouth, speckly vision, unexpected weight gain. One man told me, during a session, that it was his fortieth birthday.

You know what I regret most from my youth? he asked, lying back on the bed. Not fucking more women. He flapped his hands despairingly. Now it’s too late.

As an ex-slut, his comment gave me pause. Had I been bettering myself during my ho era? Not decreasing my value but stockpiling experience? This thought made me feel tenderly toward my younger self, that skittish girl beholden to her appetites, chasing any smidge of warmth. Men’s bodies were the best blankets. It seemed smarter, in the long run, to have more warmth than less, to hoard this animal currency that never went out of style. The forty-year-old man on the bed—pudgy, salt-and-pepper hair—looked suddenly cold to me, as if parts of his body had never been touched. He needed me to share my heat, to coax his body into shapes he had forgotten he could make. Studying him, I felt generous and overly qualified, a beacon in hot(!) pink.

The training period at Dream House was minimal. Most of what I was taught revolved around hygiene. Always wear gloves when changing the sheets, Hugo told me. Always put your stockings in a lingerie bag before washing them. Otherwise they’ ll run.

For the first two weeks, I shadowed Miss Ophelia. I was instructed to stand in the corner during her sessions, watching her work. This was an added bonus for her clients, many of whom had exhibitionist fantasies. They locked eyes with me and made melodramatic noises as she flogged them. In between sessions Ophelia would show me how to sanitize dildos, sort whips, fold towels. There were so many towels, color-coded and washed into nubbly stiffness. After two weeks, if Hugo approved, my name would be added to the roster of dominatrices on the Dream House website and men could book BDSM sessions with me.

But how will I know what to do? I asked, panicked. Ophelia and I were putting away toys. What if I get booked to, like, tie someone up?

She shrugged. It’s kind of sink-or-swim around here. What’s the craziest thing you’ve had to do?

She smiled gently. I don’t HAVE to do anything. OK, I said, chastened. But you know what I mean.

She thought about it for a moment, pensively tapping a Magic Wand against her thigh. I used to see this dude with a belly button fetish, she said. He’ d stick his finger in my belly button and swirl it around. One time he put lipstick on it and pretended it was telling jokes. Like, “What’s the difference between a chickpea and a lentil . . . ?”

I would learn from Ophelia that Dream House had a spotty reputation in the Bay Area kink scene. It was considered the budget dungeon, dingier and cheaper than the well-appointed Victorians near Lake Merritt or Folsom Street. It was either busy or dead. When I started working there, it was $200 a session, up from last year’s $175. Regulars would call the unlisted number to complain of the price hike.

Wankers, said Hugo. Ignore them.

There was one particular wanker who called almost daily to ask if any Mistresses catered to adult babies. Most girls knew to hang up on him right away, but if you said yes, he’d ask if any Mistresses catered to poopy diapers. If you said yes, he asked if any Mistresses catered to big, wet, stinky, messy, yucky poo-poo wee-wee uh-oh in his little widdle piddy pants. And if you didn’t, for some reason, hang up right then, he’d switch back to his regular voice and ask, Well? Does anyone do that? This is a serious inquiry. I’m looking for someone who can clean my yucky poopy woopy panty-wanties . . . and on and on.

The worst thing is, said Ophelia, that’s not even his kink. How do you know?

Most adult babies are sweet. Nonconfrontational, you know? This dude gets off on wasting our time. He wants you to feel embarrassed. She flipped off the rotary phone. What a freak.

Next to the phone was a leather-bound notebook frilled with multicolor Post-its. This was referred to as the file. After every session, girls were required to write down the name and birthday of their client, plus a general summary of the experience. The idea was to keep track of our clients’ tastes and habits, weeding out the men who didn’t play by the rules.

When I was bored between sessions and waiting for the phones to ring, I studied the file. It read like a dream journal, the hastily jotted entries like freaky haikus. Some were fanciful, some were curt, some I couldn’t decode. I read it and time-traveled through twenty-plus years of kink at Dream House, so many different men with so many different desires who all looked the same in my mind’s eye.

Easy cross-dress scene, we played dress-up & did BJ lessons on dildos, client expressed interest in breastfeeding 4 future sesh, very sweet & tipped well! —Miss Angelica 

We role-played as therapist and patient . . . he’s in love with his mother, needs hypnosis to snap out of it, ends up worshipping me, etc etc . . . client was respectful & chill (& kinda hot), he has a thing for black tights & pencil skirts . . . A+ sesh!! —Miss Justine

Not good match. Too grabby. G/S, JOI. Boundary-pusher, NOT recommended 4 new girls. Do NOT book me w/ him again —Miss Valentina

 Client very shy & nervous, handed me “ letter from wife” that said he was a bad boy & needed a beating, eventually he relaxed, responded well to thuddy pain—PLZ NOTE: HAD BIGGEST BALLS IVE EVER SEEN, like medical condition??!??! Literal watermelons. He seemed not to mind or be restricted by them . . . other than that, pretty average sesh —Miss Amazon

What made the entries all the more amusing was the neutrality with which they were dispatched. The secrets of men scribbled out like grocery lists. Their fantasies, their flaws, the failures of their bodies . . . relayed with no more passion than a school nurse’s note.

After my first week of working as a professional dominatrix, my clients began to bleed together. The latex-lovers and cross-dressers and masochists, the sissies and piss-drinkers and self-described brats—they all got mixed up into one gnarly soup. My sessions didn’t become less interesting, but they did lose their shock value. After a month I could gaze upon the fuzzy butthole of a lawyer bent over my knee and barely register disgust. If I was lucky, I’d enter a flow state; if not, I got bored and pushed on. I got used to grown men not wiping well or at all. Ophelia would call this their Hershey’s Kiss.

When I look back on my time at Dream House, a handful of sessions stand out to me, but I know there are so many I’m missing. Perhaps if Dino had been around, I’d remember more of them now. I would’ve loved to come home and tell him all about my day, saving up potent details—the bubble-gum texture of a sub’s cock in a cage, the aquatic cuteness of a micropenis, how all cucks wore too much cologne, how fisting someone’s asshole felt like trying to find a wedding ring that’s been baked into lasagna. As it was, I had no one to shock. The dogs didn’t care. Poopy buttholes couldn’t faze them.

Did I feel simpatico with the clients whose names and birthdays I can still recite to this day, Pledge of Allegiance– style? Tim, 10/10/75. Pasqual, 6/9/69. The oldest client I can remember was born in 1939; he wanted to be kicked in the balls. Who knows. All I know, in fact, is this: Men are dying to be let in on the secret pleasures of girlhood. They feel cheated out of ease and glamour, friend-kisses and hushed gossip. Heterosexuality is defined by a longing for wholeness. Terror undergirds desire. Most straight men long to suck a dick, if only to know how.

I saw a man with a human furniture fetish. He asked to be my dance floor. I played Donna Summer over the speakers and boogied on him for an hour straight. We both had a wonderful time.

I saw a man with tremendous BO. Terry, 12/6/70. It filled the foyer as soon as he entered. Ophelia told me to put Vicks VapoRub under my nose. It’s an old hooker trick, she said. If he asks, just say you have a cold. I ran to the bathroom and looked in the medicine cabinet, but all I could find was Tiger Balm. I smeared too much on my upper lip and spent the next hour in agony. When I spoke, tears filled my eyes. Terry, bound and gagged, pretended not to notice.

I had a well-to-do client with a cigarette fetish. He brought nice wine for us to drink. I immobilized him with Saran Wrap and shotgunned smoke into his mouth. I ashed my cigarette in his wine and made him chug it. I put two, three, four lit cigarettes in his mouth all at once. He got so light-headed that he had to lie down. How do you feel? I asked, masking my panic. He flashed me a peace sign and murmured, Out of this world.

I saw an obese cross-dresser who told me he slept in his double-D breastplate every single night. He wore it under his Notre Dame T-shirt. He wanted me to pee on him, but I just couldn’t do it, despite drinking two Diet Cokes in a row. He tipped me OK, but I could tell he felt cheated.

There was a regular at Dream House named Junior. Everyone had sessioned with Junior. He didn’t care which girl he saw, he’d take whoever was free. A session with him was always the same. He would bring you a pair of high-waisted granny panties, brand-new with the tag. You would put them on, then he’d sling you King Kong–style over one shoulder. With his free hand he would jerk his dick until he came. This took about six minutes. The rest of the hour was spent chatting, sitting crisscross on the floor. He lived in the Tenderloin with his elderly parents and worked as a janitor at a middle school. He was infamous for taking extremely long showers. Hugo disliked him for this reason alone; the rest of us found him disarming and sweet.

There was a man who claimed to be a composer for Broadway musicals. He was visiting San Francisco for work and had a cannibal fetish. He booked me for a double with Miss Buffy in which we pretended to be the queens of an all-girl island. We tied him up and pounded his flesh with our fists to tenderize him. Mmmmm, we said. Man-burger. Man-bun. We made squirrelly little munching sounds as we nibbled his digits. Suddenly he began to sing. He had Sondheim’s repertoire memorized. Isn’t it rich? he warbled. Isn’t it queer? Eventually we joined in. Send in the clowns!

I remember a session with a man who looked like Jeff Goldblum. As per his request, I wore seven-inch Pleasers. He threw himself at my feet. Please, Goddess, he cried. May I please be permitted to touch your perfect right foot? I said yes, and his body started to shake. In slow motion he reached out and dragged his pointer finger down the length of my heel. Oh god, he moaned. He cradled my foot in his hands, exactly like you’d hold a baby bird, and I was surprised to find my body responding. His extreme gentleness aroused me. It was so pure it was almost violent. He pressed his lips to the bottom of my shoe and whispered, This is the seat of your power, your divine feminine grace. Then he began to cry, his tears collecting between my toes. Thank you, Goddess. I know I am not worthy to experience such bliss. I will never forget this moment. He clutched at my hem like a peasant. I extended my left foot and snarled, Go on. 

By mid-November I’d established a new routine. I worked at the strip club Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and went to the dungeon Monday and Wednesday. I felt less bereft with only two days off. These days were spent mostly sleeping. When I woke up around 3:00 p.m., I took the girls out. We walked all over the neighborhood, making eye contact with everyone. When we got home, I tended to the chores I’d put off: laundry, emails. The hours fizzled away, leaving nothing behind them. My work was the only thing keeping me sane, as it

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From Soft Core. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Brittany Newell.