I’m A Devout Christian And A Dominatrix. A Funny Thing Happened When I Began Letting God Guide Me.

I stand on a street corner in the middle of downtown Chicago in the summertime. My nerves are starting to show. I scroll on my phone and take in a few deep breaths.  

I don’t exactly blend in with the crowd in my flowing white dress, feather earrings and wavy red hair, and I pique the curiosity of a few passersby who shoot me puzzled looks. Finally, a tall blond man in a business suit approaches me and gives me a hug. 

“Hi, you must be Lady Viviane,” he says with a slight Dutch accent. “Let’s go in.” He motions to the large glass door of the restaurant behind us.  

He leads me through the restaurant, and we settle into a discreet booth that gives us just enough privacy to enter another world — the world of Lady Viviane. 

“This is really nice,” I say, flashing a smile across the table. That nervous girl outside is now gone. We proceed to have a lovely conversation about spirituality, sexuality and the forces of the universe. He gives me a foot massage under the table, showering me with compliments while we eat our crab cakes. 

My new friend then kindly asks me if I would mind giving him some of my “holy water.” I nod and take my wine glass to the bathroom. Peeing in a wine glass over a toilet in an upscale restaurant in Chicago is not the easiest thing to do or to hide. But as I glide back through the restaurant holding my wine glass full of golden nectar, it just looks like white wine to the average onlooker.  

I set it on the table. He drinks it and sighs, saying it’s delicious. He wraps a $400 cash offering in a cloth napkin, slips it across the table and says how grateful he is to have had the honor of serving me.  

By now, you may have figured out that I’m a professional dominatrix, or rather, Lady Viviane is. 

A dominatrix typically dominates her partner psychologically and physically, helping them explore various erotic desires. But Lady Viviane does much more than that. She’s a teacher who calls on her disciples to learn the vast secrets of the universe hidden in our kinks. She is beautiful, classy, witty, powerful, confident and spiritually masterful. She’s everything I want to be, and I get to be her — for exactly two hours.

I didn’t choose to be Lady Viviane; she chose me. She took a plain, little minister’s daughter, whose self esteem was crushed by the weight of physical insecurities and transformed her into  a confident, wise woman helping to liberate people’s sexuality.  

But it didn’t happen overnight. To get here, I would have to change an old cultural belief buried deep in my psyche that was running the show: that it was impossible to embrace my Christian faith and have a healthy relationship with my sexuality.  

Growing up a minister’s daughter, I loved certain aspects of my faith, but eventually left the church when I left home for college at 18 because I was disgusted with its teachings about sexuality. 

As a young adult, I threw myself into finding God in other places. From ayahuasca ceremonies to witchcraft, tantra retreats, new age festivals and BDSM parties, I looked everywhere. While I did have moments of profound, cosmic experiences with God, I could never quite integrate them into my everyday life or find consistent inner peace. Most of those years, I was sick, confused, lonely, broke, and just generally unhappy.  

This was the state I was in when I was introduced to BDSM and the concept of female sexual domination. I had just moved to Santa Cruz and my roommate was a tantra coach. She began to tell me stories about these kink play parties she attended and would often show me videos of the professional dominatrixes who were there. Immediately I was struck by the confidence that just seemed to ooze out of their pores. 

As our friendship continued, I asked her many questions about this magical dynamic in which women ruled the world, and how she felt basking in their commanding presence. Her fascinating stories planted the seed that I too could walk through life with the same sexual power.

At the time, I’d turned my professional vocal training and passion for singing into a semi-successful business teaching voice to women. However, my career was about to take a wild new turn. 

A few days after leading a women’s voice retreat in Oregon, I got a totally random call from a man in L.A. who had found me on Yelp and wanted a tarot reading from me. I was a very mystical voice teacher and often incorporated other modalities; fairy tarot was one of my specialities at the time. After giving him a tarot reading and several coaching sessions, unpacking his desire to be submissive, he finally asked me: Will you please be the dominatrix for me? I eventually said yes, even though I had absolutely zero professional and very little personal experience with kink at the time.

He was in L.A. and I lived in Santa Cruz, so our sessions were over the phone. I stumbled my way through the first few sessions, but he would give me feedback afterward. Slowly my confidence grew, I kept getting better and soon I was providing wild, hypnotic experiences that allowed him to slip into total submission.

With my phone experience and support from friends in the industry, I knew it was time to take Lady Viviane into real time. I set up my own practice in the Bay Area and began to see clients in person. 

Although I was exploring my own erotic desire to be sexually dominant and I knew I could provide powerful, healing experiences, my main incentives for becoming a dominatrix were to stop feeling ugly and “not good enough,” transform into a confident goddess and make that money, honey. I remember thinking one day, “I’m going to make thousands of dollars by having men worship me and tell me I’m beautiful?! I’m all in!”