Lindsay Goldwert - Bow Down: Lessons from Dominatrixes on How to Be a Boss in Life, Love, and Work

Lindsay Goldwert

Bow Down

Lessons from Dominatrixes on How to Be a Boss in Life, Love, and Work

A Glamour Best Book of 2020

Tiller Press

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2020 by Lindsay Goldwert

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Tiller Press hardcover edition January 2020

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Interior design by Jaime Putorti

Jacket design by Patrick Sullivan

Author photo by Mindy Tucker

Leather Buckle, Mask, and Ball Gag by Shutterstock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goldwert, Lindsay, author.

Title: Bow down : lessons from dominatrixes on how to get everything you want / Lindsay Goldwert.

Description: New York : Tiller Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019046242 (print) | LCCN 2019046243 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781982130466 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982130473 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sexual dominance and submissionSocial aspects. | Assertiveness in women. | Control (Psychology) | Self-realization in women.

Classification: LCC HQ79 .G65 2020 (print) | LCC HQ79 (ebook) | DDC 306.77/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046242

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019046243

ISBN 978-1-9821-3046-6

ISBN 978-1-9821-3047-3 (ebook)

For my nieces, the world is yours.

I felt luxuriously involved in an unsolvable mystery, my favorite way to feel.

EVE BABITZ

In order to protect their privacy, all the professional dominatrixes are referred to by their professional names unless theyve given me their express permission to do otherwise.

Q uestion: What do sex, power, and money have in common?

Everyone wants more of it but nobody talks about how to get it.

We think everyone has more of it than we do.

Once we get it, we worry about how to hold on to it.

Ive never been your typical money writer and podcaster. When it comes to saving money, Id rather interview a comedian about her budget woes than talk to a dull financial planner. In 2015, when I debuted Spent, a storytelling podcast where interesting people share their biggest money mistakes, I wasnt looking for answers to how Americans could fix their finances. After all, everyone knows how to be better with money: save more, spend less, sacrifice pleasure today for satisfaction tomorrow. Theres no one answer as to why we struggle with money. We all have a million little answers for why we cant get it together:

I was sad, so I shopped.

I grew up poor, I was desperate to feel rich.

I didnt want to feel stupid, so I didnt ask questions.

To ask people about their finances is to ask them about their families, their upbringings, their self-esteem, and their hopes and dreams. This is why so many people spend a fortune to attend get rich now workshops and blindly follow money gurus. We all want a set of instructions to teach us how to live our lives. Have you ever dropped hundreds of dollars on home gym equipment or a set of ludicrously intense fitness DVDs that promise to jump-start your road to health and hotness? Ive done it. I remember being so psyched while typing in my credit card number and then feeling like Id finally taken control when the package arrived. I would dutifully use whatever Id ordered for about two days. And then ennui. A week later, the DVDs (or in my case, fitness bands) were moved to my back bedroom, then into a corner, and then to their final resting place in the back of the closet, where they would gather dust.

What did I want from those fitness bands? I thought I was seeking a fun, low-clutter way to work out from home. Heres what I was actually asking them to accomplish: Help me fix years of self-loathing, feelings of failure, and instilled terror at the hands of gym teachers, mean girls, and internalized ideas of what I think Im supposed to look like at every age and in every situation. Also, please make me sound smarter at work and give me the strength to cut shitty people out of my life.

Thats a lot to ask from a few pieces of orange rubber tubing with flimsy plastic handles.

All of this got me thinking about why Id always struggled to get what I want in the macro sense. Yes, I wanted to get a handle on my eating habits. Yes, I wanted to have a career that I could be proud of. Yes, I wanted to feel powerful about my finances, have a great sex-filled marriage, and walk and talk with confidence. I began to realize that there was no product or treasure map that would offer me easy solutions to any of the above.

What I was seeking was a philosophy to live by.

Ive always been fascinated with alternative cultures and people who live one way by night and another by day. In my early twenties, while pursuing my masters in journalism, I performed stand-up comedy in rank basements in order to write a piece about the struggle to get famous. (Id also go on to perform stand-up comedy in my thirties.) I interviewed a porn star who briefly held the record for having participated in the worlds biggest gang bang to learn about what it took to get in (and eventually leave) the adult entertainment industry. When New York City began its crackdown on strip clubs in the early 2000s, I interviewed bikini-clad dancers, no longer allowed to dance topless, about their financial prospects and their next moves. I always believed, and still do, that you can learn more about the human condition from interesting people than from experts.

This book began as a fun, dishy exercise. Who better to ask about power dynamics at home and in the workplace than a professional dominatrix? It didnt take long for me to realize that this book would be harder to write than I thought. I was in a precarious time in my own lifemidcareer, midmarriage, and nearly (ack) midlife. At first I was asking questions that I thought women would want to know the answers to. Then I gave up the ghost and started to ask the questions that I wished I had the answers to.

When I told men I was interviewing dominatrixes about their work and all the things theyve learned about power dynamics, they said, Whoa, youre gonna learn a lot about whipping dudes.

When I told women I was interviewing dominatrixes about their work and all the things theyve learned about power dynamics, they all said, Youre going to have to tell me everything.