Femdom hosts of the podcast continue a conversation with Sex Historian Kate Lister. Today, the focus includes more BDSM education including kink and BDSM throughout history.
In addition to interesting information, we spice things up with lots of good and naughty humor. You’ll laugh, think and maybe even get excited. What more could you ask for in a podcast? If you’d like to listen to today’s episode about kink and BDSM check out this link to Spreaker: Part 2 with Sex Historian Kate Lister.
Ms Olivia: Welcome back to the Weekly Hotspot, kink conversation, BDSM advice and insight from the worlds of distance domination and phone sex. I’m Mistress Olivia here with Ms. Erika, and we are continuing the conversation that we started last week. You can read the transcript of the first part of our conversation here: A Curious History of Sex, meet Sex Historian Kate Lister.
Kate Lister is a Doctor of Literature and History, Senior Lecturer at Leeds Trinity University, in the UK.
What is sex work
Ms Olivia: Doctor Kate, where we left off, you were talking about your own history in sex work, and then also the blurring of the lines of how do you begin the conversation of what is sex work. I know for us, it was revelatory. When I started doing kink and BDSM distance domination, all of a sudden, I could look at my time in terms of pay per minute. I have always thought, well, I will just work harder, I can do more, I have the capacity, so I’m one of these people who just adds in this and this and this and this, and I’ll keep adding stuff in.
Doing sex work has helped me to put a monetary value and begin to look and say, all right, let’s see, if I’m giving you three hours of my time, what is that worth? And, does the other person appreciate those three hours?
Let me tell you, someone who pays $2.99 US per minute fucking appreciates those three hours.
Kate Lister: Absolutely.
Ms Erika: Absolutely.
Ms Olivia: So, speaking of doing distance domination, Erika, did you also have sort of a revelatory thing of, wow, my time is valuable in a tangible way that you didn’t have before you started doing this? 
Ms Erika: Oh, absolutely. Because, before, I was a salaried person, so you know that hours don’t mean anything. This is your value and your salary, whether you put in 20 hours or 60 hours.
These days, absolutely, my mind has shifted, and it really plays an important part in making me feel important as well. My time is absolutely valuable every moment of it, and I see the world in that realm.
If I have a challenge anywhere, I’m like, my time is valuable. I don’t care if it’s sex work or other work, my time is valuable. This realm really does give me that. I feel very appreciated when somebody spends their hard-earned money on spending time with me, and it’s my goal to make it the best time they’ve ever had. So, yes, you get value for your pay.
Kate Lister: I bet you do. You don’t get that as an academic, you know. It’s not the same. It’s that salaried thing, and your time kind of bleeds into the weekends and into the evenings, and you find yourself doing all this stuff. I often look back at my sex-working days, short though they were, and just think, no one was asking me to do a fucking spreadsheet then. There was no compulsory away-day training for how to do sugaring when I was doing it.
Ms. Olivia: I have to tell you, we actually do have training here at LTW Group. This is a female-owned, female-run company.
Kate Lister: I didn’t know that.
Ms. Olivia: I also come from a salaried background, communications, corporate communications, advocacy, that kind of thing, and I didn’t know how to run a business. I didn’t know how to be a business person. I learned every single thing I know about business doing sex work.
Kate Lister: I think that when I was doing it, because I was doing this sugaring thing, and I don’t think I would have signed up for escorting, because I still had this idea of, oh, well, I’m not doing that. I’m not doing that. Again, it’s that gray area, and it just allows you to be taken advantage of, because you don’t have a monetary value for your time.
It’s all very up to you to try and work out exactly what it is that you’re doing here. It took me a while to find my feet with it, and it took me a while to realize, actually, no, this is the monetary value. This is my time and this is how much it costs. To view it as that, and I think that it’s changed how I work in other areas as well.
I think as well, it’s getting older. I don’t think it’s just sex work. I think round about your late 30s, 40s, everybody, especially women, experiences this moment of going, this is bullshit. I’ve worked so hard, and why am I doing all this extra work? Why? Then they start to think, you know what? No, fuck off. I’m not working evenings, and I’m not doing all of this extra stuff, but I think sex work definitely, it makes you understand your worth.
It’s counterintuitive to a lot of the narratives out there, and of course, you always want to be careful, but I always want to say that my experience is only my experience, and it’s not the experience of a lot of other people, but I can’t say I regret it.
Ms. Olivia: I have to tell you, if you ever want to dip your toe into it again, you would be fucking fabulous on the phone.
Kate Lister: I just don’t think I’ve got the strength.
Emotional labor and sex work
Ms. Olivia: Actually, you bring up a really good point. This is emotional labor that is intense.
Kate Lister: The emotional labor of it, yes, it’s really intense. I know brothel workers, and a very good friend of mine works in a brothel. She describes it, and it’s kind of … I mean, it’s like a conveyor belt. It’s really intense. I wouldn’t be able to do that, like 10 guys in a day, but there’s something much more.
Once it’s done, and then he’s off, then I don’t have to sit there and go, oh, I’m so sorry to hear that about your wife. That’s terrible.
All of that, that’s gone. I was just like, yeah, I can … It’s the emotional labor and all of that stuff that goes with it. It can be exhausting. It really can be.
Ms. Olivia: I’m fine with the emotional labor as well, but I point out to people, listen, you pay me for my time. Yes, you pay me for my skill set, but you also pay for my time.
Kate Lister: Yes. I think that you have to learn that, because there’s a lot of boundary pushing in sex work. Because I was doing it on my own, and this is before Whores of Yore, it’s before I’d spoken to sex workers, and it was only through speaking to other sex workers that, first of all, I realized that what I was doing, it absolutely was sex work. It was. It was a version of it, and it’s bizarre that I didn’t absolutely view it like that in terms of it. Also, through speaking to other sex workers, that’s where you learn, no, this is bullshit.
Stop doing that. Don’t do that. You don’t have to be on the phone. If he wants to text you, then this is on the clock as well. If he wants to, da, da, da, da, da, and it was through speaking to other sex workers that I really got a grip on what I was actually doing, so I think that community is so important.
Ms. Erika: Well, now, if you ever want to listen in on a distance domination session-
Kate Lister: That would be interesting for me as an academic, as a person,
Ms. Erika: I’m sure that we could set that up. I don’t think I’m speaking out of my ass. I might be. I know that there are listeners here that would absolutely want that to happen.
BDSM: subspace, Domme space and distance domination
Ms. Olivia: You’re right. Absolutely, and you could speak if you wanted to or not, but one of the things that’s just fascinating to me is the BDSM experience doing distance domination because BDSM is, at its core, power exchange. Power exchange is energy and doesn’t necessarily have to be in the same room.
I have gotten into my Domme space with someone, and they have gotten into their subspace with me, completely doing distance domination, never being in the same room at all.
Kink and BDSM throughout history
Ms. Erika: And distance domination has evolved over the years, right, Olivia? Because we have the power of technology on our side, and we have what’s called remote-controlled sex toys, where the pet can purchase a toy, we get connected on an app, we go ahead and control that toy.
History of Sex and sex toys in ancient times
Ms. Erika: Speaking of which, in a recent article in the Irish Sun, you said, “humans have been creating toys to enhance their sex lives for as long as there have been sex lives.” What do you feel is the oldest sex toy that you’re aware of? It’s got to be the dildo, doesn’t it?
Kate Lister: You’re absolutely right. As soon as people were drawing on the walls of caves, they were drawing dicks. That’s just what people do, and we regularly find these.
It’s always really funny when they find prehistoric phalluses, because it always creates this thing. Again, we’re back to context. We don’t know exactly what that item was. We just don’t know.
To me, being a sex historian, I will look at…they’re basically carved stone penises.There was one in Germany that was 36,000 years old, and the debate comes on as, “yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s a dildo. That doesn’t mean that that’s what it was used for. It could have been a doorstop, for all you know. You just don’t know.
I’m looking at it going, no, okay, it is a dildo. People were doing that. As the technology improves and as preservation improves, then we start to get things that are like, okay, that’s definitely a dildo.
Historical dildos
Kate Lister: One’s carved out of ivory that’s survived since the 18th century. There was one found in France that was hidden inside a chair that used to be in a nunnery, which I love. It’s hundreds and hundreds of years old.
What we have to remember about these items, is these are for the rich, the mega rich.The plebs, people like us, aren’t using ivory carved dildos, not at all. What were they using, I guess? What would you use in a pinch? A root vegetable, maybe? Something like that.
Ms. Olivia: Well, figging is very popular.
Kate Lister: Really?
Ms. Olivia: Yes.
Kate Lister: Figging has changed so much since I was in this game. Figging is with ginger, right?
Ms. Erika: Yes. You peel the ginger, and it’s somebody who is into pain play.
Kate Lister: And now I’m going to have to look it up. I don’t know if figging is popular with women. You’re not getting ginger near my cunt at all. Thank you very much.
Questions for the Sex Historian from our podcast fans
Ms. Olivia: Preparing for your interview, we reached out to see if any of our fans had questions. We do have a question from a listener who goes by WellSpanked.
Kate Lister: Good name.
Ms. Olivia: LOL and yes, he likes to be spanked. His question is this: “Corporal punishment seemed to flourish in the Victorian era, or at least today it’s credited to have been popular then. Was it just as popular earlier and just not as well known? Was there really a surge in it? What are your feelings?
Kate Lister: I mean, there is a real sense when you’re reading through the literature and the historical records, like there’s some references to brothels and there are guides to cities from the 19th century and the 18th century that list houses of sex workers and the services that they offer. And there is a sense that there is a real fashion for it, that it becomes quite a popular thing.
Corporal discipline called the English vice
Kate Lister: It was known as the English vice in the 19th century. And it was known as something that English people in particular were interested in. Whether or not it was a new fashion, whether or not I just can’t imagine that no one had thought of doing it before, I’m pretty sure that corporal punishment will have been in force because that’s just what human beings do. That’s just part of our sexual makeup.
But one of the reasons that it’s so well documented in the 19th century isn’t necessarily because more people were doing it, but it might be that the reading rates had improved and that books were more widespread. Pornography was more accessible because it was more available. So it might just be that there was more porn talking about it than there had been before, than the actual practice itself was new.
Betwixt the Sheets podcast by Sex Historian Kate Lister
Ms. Olivia: You have a podcast called Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex Scandal and Society. Now, listeners, bookmark that podcast. It’s not trashy, raunchy like The Weekly Hot Spot podcast.
Ms. Erika: I recommend this; it is absolutely fascinating.
Ms. Olivia: I laughed so hard at the podcast about Casanova.I’m like, well, of course he is, bless his soul. And let me tell you something. He sounded so interesting.I’m like, yo, I’d do him in a heartbeat.
Kate Lister: Yeah, he’s fascinating, Casanova. Obviously, he’s known as this great lover and Lothario, but even his life was just completely bonkers. He grew up in Italy and he was very smart, very clever, and very charming, but not very rich, which is kind of a lethal combination. So he just became almost like this kind of hustling character who was really good at getting rich people to give him their money and become his patrons, and seducing women left, right, and center, and even having relationships with nuns.
Oh and he invented the lottery, apparently, when he was in France. We’re all like, how many lives did this guy live? But yeah, he’s fascinating. I recommend looking into him more.
Ms. Erika: I can’t wait to learn more. You have teased my pretty little brain to know more. Part of kink and sexuality is the continuum regarding involvement.
Feminization, crossdressing and submission in history
Ms. Erika: Here we have a large portion of what callers identify as being a sissy. It’s more of a BDSM term because 99% of sissies are actually submissive to a Femdom or to a man at our behest. Is cross-dressing, interpreting their bisexuality through feminization, has that been around for a long time?
Kate Lister: It probably was, but we’re trying to locate the sources with which to prove it is trickier. We know that there have been men paying to be dominated and to submit to women for a very long time because that turns up in not only pornography and erotic accounts dating back to the 18th century.
Famous BDSM Madame in London
Kate Lister: There are also some famous madams.There was one in London called Teresa Berkeley in the early 19th century. She’s written about in a handful of sources, nothing in her own words. It’s frustrating. She’s just very elusive. But she was the most famous BDSM provider in London at the time. And when she died, she had amassed a fortune, almost a million pounds in today’s money.
There are lengthy descriptions about what she used to flog her submissives, including things like stinging nettles that she would keep pliant in vases of water and canes and all manner of different implements of painful torment.
She was hugely famous and successful for doing that. So we know that there were lots of men wanting to submit to it.
Feminization and sissy training
Kate Lister: When it’s something like feminization, again, you need the language to try and identify that and you need the sources. A good record of that, I don’t know if you had them in America, I don’t think maybe you did, but they’re known as TARC cards.They were the advertisements for sex workes in phone boxes and they would exist all over the place before the internet when you had to advertise places.
There’s a museum in London called the Welcome Trust and somebody there, an archivist, went and collected these TARC cards dating back to the 70s.
You can see on those, there’s a really good record of what services were on offer. And then you get a lot of, what was it called? I think they call it feminization. I think the word sissy is used, but it was about creating a safe space for men to crossdress with them. That’s recorded there. But that’s like the 1970s. Again, you just have to find the records that prove it was there, which is tricky.
Ms. Olivia: And let me just mention, Harlots, Whores and Hackabouts is not available on Kindle. Get the book. The pages are nice and thick. It’s just beautiful. And there are fabulous examples of the TARC cards in there that are just gorgeous.
Crossdresser, sissy or transwoman
Ms. Olivia: For us, we make the distinction between a cross dresser, which tends to be a heterosexual male who wants to explore his feminine side, but he’s heterosexual. Sometimes I refer to that cross dressing man as a woman and the relationship is a lesbian relationship. There are all kinds of nuances with all of these. Sissy tends to be in the BDSM kind of category, usually with erotic humiliation. And then of course, trans women. We get a lot of trans callers. And I’ll say, you don’t sound submissive to me. I don’t recommend that you get into kink or BDSM unless you’re curious about that. But being trans is not a kink.
Kate Lister: Yeah, I agree with all of that.
Question about erotica and erotic stories
Ms. Olivia: Wellspanked has another question. Every 10 to 20 years, some piece of erotica seems to take society by storm and get wildly popular. Examples are Fifty Shades of Grey and Anne Rice’s Exit to Eden and Sleeping Beauty.
I thought Fifty Shades of Grey just sucked. I mean, it was just lousy literature and a poor display of BDSM. I’m not going to take us on safari, I’ll stay with his question.
Wellspanked wants to know, does this reoccur throughout history, getting wildly popular and then kind of simmering down?
Kate Lister: Oh, yeah.Yeah. I don’t know if it’s specific to BDSM books, but certainly there are books that are big blockbuster erotic literature.
The first one was probably Fanny Hill in 1732, I think it was, but written by John Cleland. And that became a huge smash. And then, of course, the writings of the Marquis de Sade. People are fascinated by that. And those were huge sellers as well. But again, it is quite underground stuff.
Whereas you can go into a bookshop and buy Fifty Shades of Grey today, that’s fine. You can buy the Marquis de Sade as well. But it would have been harder to get hold of back in the day because it would have, by polite society, by the ruling social norms, been considered obscene.
But these are hugely popular works and they do crop up from time to time.
BDSM and kink and pop culture
Kate Lister: In the Victorian period, there was an erotic magazine called The Pearl that was published from 1879 to 1880. And that’s full of BDSM, absolutely packed full of it. So they do crop up. They do.
But if the question is, did something become a huge smash with mainstream society, which Fifty Shades of Grey did, I mean, love it or hate it, it had an impact. It had an impact. And I think one of the things that it did is it brought it, it brought those discussions and that topic mainstream. It had always been there. Of course, it had. But that’s what it did that was different. And I’m not sure if that had happened before with a BDSM text anyway, not with a mainstream text. (22:17)
Male chastity
Ms. Erika: Oh, that’s a great point. Speaking of BDSM, one of the popular things that we involve ourselves in here is male chastity. And although it can be seen as a kink and a lifestyle, tell us a little bit what you know about male chastity throughout history. Is it something modern or is that seen in history?
Kate Lister: I mean, you get celibates and chastity all throughout history, normally associated with religion, your monks or people devoting themselves to chastity.
Then of course, in the extreme version of that, you’ve got eunuchs who have been around in various cultures and courts for thousands of years, probably. And they were castrated or have themselves castrated for many reasons. I mean, it could be a punishment, but it was also a role at court that people could get into.
It was a strange, awful way for poor people to be able to get their children into the innermost sanctums of the court. So was that a sexual thing? Was that a fetish thing? It had elements of it, but that’s slightly more complex.
And of course, what we’re dealing with as well is the dominant narrative in Western culture has always been that men are virile and men should have lots of sex. And that narrative has been pushed about most great men. So even if they did have a chastity kink or even if they didn’t want to have a lot of sex, I’m not sure that would have been widely publicized at the time because it was so heteronormative all throughout history, and this idea that you must be manly, so you must have sex.
Public perceptions of sexual desires including BDSM and kink
Ms. Olivia: In your book, A Curious History of Sex, you write, humans are the only creatures that stigmatize, punish, and create shame around sexual desires. You use a quote from Gabrielle Garcia Marquez: “Everyone has three lives, public life, private life, and secret life.”
And then you write, “paradoxically, our secret life is us at our most honest. We force this honest piece of ourselves in secrecy because the systems we have created have rendered it incompatible with our public and private lives.” Erika and I have talked about this on the podcast a lot. We feel incredibly, incredibly privileged and consider this almost a sacred trust to be allowed into those hidden private lives.
Secret sex lives and the role of sex workers
Ms Erika: We know things about people that they have never told another person ever. That has always been a part of sex workers, I think. Do you also think that?
Kate Lister: Oh, without a shadow of a doubt. And I think that, in some ways, it can be a very privileged space, and it can be a very good thing because people were made to be so ashamed of our sexual desires and our sexuality. And again, you need to be careful. You don’t want to remove that entirely, because you can’t just have a bacchanalian orgy on the streets. No one would ever get anything done!
You have to have some rules about this. But we’re so ashamed around sex, and about wanting sex, and the kind of sex that we want, that we often, people feel they can’t even express that to a partner, especially someone that you’ve been with a long time.
And then the dynamic between you shifts, and maybe you feel a bit embarrassed about whether you want to try this or that, or we are made to feel shameful about it. And the result of that is that people will often seek out sex workers to explore these fantasies that they wouldn’t say to anybody else.
And in some ways, that can be a real privilege, that you are witness to that, and that someone feels you can do it. But also, I think it makes the space quite vulnerable as well, because sex workers are often subject to abuse and violence. I have a lot of sex worker friends that sort of say they see men at their most honest in that exchange. And that can be a really good thing, and that can be quite a scary thing at the same time because there can be the where you’ve kind of let loose this entitlement, and this desire, and this sort of sense that I’ve paid for your time, therefore I’m entitled to do this.
That can happen as well. And that’s about shame. I read a piece of research once that said the time that sex workers are most vulnerable with a client is if he hasn’t been able to get an erection. That’s and example of shame again. Shame that becomes violence, and it can happen very quickly. Not for everybody, obviously, but for some.
As we were saying earlier, it’s a very complex experience. But the fact that we do create so much shame and stigma around our sexuality, and then someone’s given a space to explore it, that can be quite explosive in both good and bad ways.
Boundaries and phone sex
Ms. Olivia: We recognize that we are so privileged here, because one, we are Femdoms, so we’re in charge. Two, we are our own business people. So if somebody acts up, we can just say, I no longer want to talk to you. There are some phone sex services that you have to talk to every single person, no matter what they have to say. This is not one of them.
I’ve been on a call with someone who has broken boundaries, gotten out of hand, just acted like a fuckwad, dick, asshole, bitch face, just a jerk. And not to put too fine a point on it, they’ve been behaving badly. And I’ll just say, you know what? I’m done. Goodbye.
Kate Lister: And not all sex workers either have the confidence to do that, or know that they can do that, or are able to do that, because they still need the money. And again, we’re back to that secrecy again, aren’t we? And as long as there’s stigma around sex work, people will feel that they’re entitled to act like that. And that’s what needs to be challenged and called out is, yeah, I mean, I’m so glad that you were able to shut that down. But it’s, like you said, privileged, isn’t it? I was privileged myself, but not everybody can do that.
Ms. Erika: That’s right.
Ms. Olivia: Dr. Kate, we always end our podcast with final thoughts or questions for our listeners. So since you’re our honored guest, would you have a question or comment for our listeners?
Kate Lister: Oh, you know, one of the things I always think, and I’ve spoken about it a lot here, is sources and evidence that we just don’t have to understand sexual behavior. So I think I’d encourage all of the listeners, keep a sex diary, please. Write everything in it really honestly, like a physical, actual sex diary, and then laminate it and bury it in the garden.For future sex historians, it will be so valuable.
It will be so important, especially if you have kinky sex because then other sex historians won’t be sitting here going, well, it probably happened, but we just don’t have the evidence. Because you will have written a sex diary that was discovered thousands of years from now.
Ms. Olivia: Erika, you should do that. Print out your spreadsheets, laminate them and bury them.
Ms. Erika: Yes. And how lucky are our listeners to get an assignment from the one and only Dr. Kate. Get on it, fellas.
Ms. Olivia: Erika, what do you have? Question or comment for listeners?
Ms. Erika: Well, I just love this conversation. I wish I had more time in my life to really delve into it. But what I want from the listeners is, do you have an interesting factoid about history and sex that you want to share with me? I want to hear about it.
And my final thought is, when I do a blog post on this interview, I will include this link. Kate has a Sex Historian books list that she recommends.
And of the list, I’ve only read The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. So I have my reading list, and since I’m a nerd, I will, of course, assign it to all of you.
Connect with us
Now, when we end, we always give people a way to get in touch with us.
Ms. Olivia: olivia@enchantrixempire.com
Twitter: MistressOlivia1
Blog: Experienced Mistress
Ms. Erika: erika@enchantrixempire.com
Twitter: EncantrixErika
Blog: Intelligent Phone Fantasy
Dr. Kate Lister:
Twitter: WhoresOfYore AND K8_lister
Website: Whores of Yore
Ms. Olivia: Thank you so much for joining us. This has just been a treat and a half.
Kate Lister: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me on.
Ms. Olivia: I want to leave listeners with this quote from Dr. Professor She Who Must Be Obeyed, Kate Lister. This is about the modern day sex worker rights movement. Here’s the quote:
“The right to dictate their or our own working conditions without the threat of arrest or rescue, to work without harassment or abuse, and of course, the right to be seen.”
To you, our listeners, thank you to all of you who tune in for the sex and the raunch and the stories, but also end up seeing us as strong women who are, yes, sex workers. We will see you next time on The Weekly Hot Spot.
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