Sex and Absurdity: The Arrest of Mistress Mikey and
Society's Policing of Human Longings
By Nancy Ava Miller, M. Ed
A friend of the S&M community was
arrested in July and imprisoned. Her crime?—Professional female domination,
labeled "prostitution" by police. No sex took place or was offered,
promised, suggested, or otherwise discussed. No sex, that is, as we know and
love it or categorize it as such. No intercourse. No blow job. No hand job. Even
the cops admit to that.
Pre-arrest, the targeted lady, Michelin Nelson and
known to friends as Mikey, sponsored open S&M fetish discussions at her
home—this in addition to providing spankings, foot worship, bondage and the like
for men in need. Mikey once offered me free meeting space at her domicile for
one of my proposed PEP SM support groups and she hosted a pot luck dinner party
when I visited Philadelphia in 1999, where a bunch of us dominatrixes networked
and bantered about the ups and downs of the sex biz' and about how we might
learn from and help one another and better serve our BDSM community.
Mikey also tended Mistress Donna Gorton in the months
before her death from cancer, as dear Donna became weak and thin, as her skin
dulled to a gray-yellow tinge and she floated in and out of lucidity. For those
of you unhip to the Philadelphia SM scene, Donna Gorton, from 1993 till her
death in 1999, co-led (along with Mistress Sheila) PEP—Philadelphia SM fetish
support group. Donna, beloved by many kinkos and others, was a real mench, as my
Jewish mother might have said. And Mikey, too, is a mench, a good, decent person
who cares for and about others, who spent hours, days, and months seeing to a
dying woman, who is a dog-lover with a friendly mutt called Oliver.
Gossip wending through the SM grapevine has it that
Mikey will serve time for her "prostitution." There was, you see, a
similar conviction some years back in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Also a cronie—an
assistant of sorts—accompanied Mickey at the time her new arrest and, thus,
Mikey—no longer a mere harlot—is accused of promoting prostitution.
I'm tempted to cough up the stereotypical outrage and
frustration that pervade any intelligent mind
when useless, costly, and time-consuming police work goes into a project like
trapping a lady of the evening, a john or a harmless dominatrix like
Mikey-clichés like:
Don't the cops have anything better to do?
Why aren't the police pursuing the real criminals-the violent ones?
I felt the clichés coming on, for instance, when I viewed a TV film about a
sting operation geared towards nabbing horny guys seeking hookers. Oh!—The time
and effort and money and manpower and womanpower that went into that project!
Here was a cavernous room like a high school auditorium crammed with busy adults
and the other histrionics of whore-warfare: the makeover artists do-dadding
rouge and lipstick on a bevy of pretty, young, wide-eyed female coppers about to
descend upon city street corners to become bait for unsuspecting gentlemen; the
troves of trashy garments like hot pants and miniskirts to be donned by these
pseudo sluts; the dude-cops watching their lady-colleagues (the cuter ones only,
of course) transform from good girls to happy hookers or low-life look-alikes.
Experts (psychologists? Seasoned undercovers from the whore-beat?) milled around
the big room and lectured the would-be strumpets on how to behave, on how to
avoid being attacked, mugged, mutilated, raped, or abducted while luring
"potential customers" into the sting. As the female officers applied
Maybeline and practiced wearing high-heeled boots while swaying their rumps,
other gendarmes—mostly male-prepared to cruise the whore haunts in unmarked cars
or to swarm about pretending to be strollers in a sea of johns looking for
love—all this just to round up a few auto mechanics, dentists, college students,
and computer programmers transacting for some quick nookey with no noose
attached, unaware of the authorities closing in for capture.
It seems to me that human resources and intelligence might better serve society
if focused elsewhere, beyond the mean streets and the dominatrix's domain where
grown-ups seek solace or the comfort of bondage or the exploration of
overwhelming sexual obsessions or taboos. With poverty, true crime, disease, and
homelessness pervasive in our world; with US education crumbling before our
dazed gaze; with teenagers (no longer worried, as in my day, about getting
caught chomping Juicy Fruit in gym class) now sneaking rifles into windowless
schools resembling prisons and wandering corridors studded with metal detectors
and supervised by uniformed and armed security guards—considering all this plus
AIDS in Africa and orphaned babies in Romania, and ethnic cleansing, and the
Israelis and the Palestinians, and the war-ravaged lands, all of which could
be—cosmetically speaking—Dresden after the firebombing—considering all this,
doesn't a concentrated effort to round up johns or whores or someone like Mikey
Nelson seem absurd?
Please visit now one of our other websites!
.gif)
If you have any questions, concerns, or wish to add your link to our pages,
please email Nova at
PEP Web Mistress@aol.com or
Nancy Ava Miller at
Nancy@peplove.com. Or
call Nova, any hour,
(505) 859-7630
or Nancy, any
hour