Kinky? In This Economy?

In front of the massive bed in the back of an RV in a lot in Lewisville is a wall with so many leather and chain accouterments that they’re hard to distinguish from one another. The longer you stare, the clearer things become. There’s a cat o’ nine tails, latex ball gags and rubberized male appendages that look too big to fit in any human orifice. Probably more than a hundred items hang on the wall. Some, like funnels and an outrageously large hook, seem like they wouldn’t serve a purpose in this kind of place. The custom small cage right outside of the room and the cock-stomping table make sense for a sex dungeon, but what function could a beer bong funnel possibly serve? 

Mistress Pasha, the dominatrix who owns the RV she converted into a sex dungeon, says it’s for one of her regulars who likes pig play. He pays her to blend food and force-feed it to him through the funnel while he’s on all fours in latex pieces that mirror a pig’s anatomy. It’s his kink, and he pays a lot of money to fulfill it. That’s the price of being freaky. 

It took thousands of dollars to convert the used RV into a dungeon. The sex toys and contraptions inside add another couple of thousand to the value, putting a grand total for her mobile dungeon in the ballpark of $30,000. For dominatrixes, startup fees are high. Latex suits, kangaroo leather whips, modified gas mask hoods, leather buckle straight jackets and masturbatory tools of various lengths and girths are not cheap, especially in this economy. But it’s not just the collectors of kink who are burdened by the high costs of high-quality paraphernalia.

In the vast world of kink, there are few limitations, other than money. For the larger subsects of kinky — BDSM, latex and leather fetishes and even a marginal portion of furries — partaking, even with curiosity, takes a wallet bigger than your stomped balls. A worm-like depth toy, a dildo between 12 and 20 inches, starts at $150. A PVC mattress that vacuum-seals a kinkster inside is $200 on the low end. A latex snouted hood for horse play costs $350. If you want the custom hooves to match, the starting price is $3,000. And if you want a murrsuit, a furry suit custom-built to have conveniently placed zippers, you’ll need $9,000 minimum. 

As kink proliferates into the mainstream, even the vanilla are finding new uses for eye masks and spare rope, pushing the line for where playful ends and kinky begins. But for those looking to cross the line, with fantasies beyond a gentle throat squeeze and light slap in the sack, spicing up your sex life takes a lot more than an Amazon order you hope comes in discreet packaging. It takes a lot to be kinky in Dallas – a proclivity for the abnormal, a daring nature, a rejection of the status quo, and, most of all, thousands of dollars. It’s a good thing this city has almost as many millionaires as it does churches, because Big D is home to a large and wealthy kink scene.

“Seeing a dominatrix is absolutely a luxury experience,” she says. “I’m a higher-end dominatrix because I’ve been doing this for over 25 years. I have a lot invested in my equipment, my wardrobe, my education. … I couldn’t even begin to put a number on it.”

The trope that the clientele paying large sums to be whipped by a skin-tight leather-clad vixen are wealthy white men is mostly true, Fatale says.

“I’m definitely not as vocal and outspoken as I used to be [about politics] because I gotta pay the bills,” she says. “But I feel like a lot of my clients are gonna be Republican because they’re straight white men, and most of them are affluent.”

Regular clients spend thousands each month on hours-long sessions. But that’s not her entire clientele. You can be poor and kinky, just less often. 

“I do have subs that come in and let me know that they have been saving up for this session for months, and I really appreciate those,” Fatale says. “It’s harder to sympathize with clients when $600 for 90 minutes is nothing to them.”

She says people pay year-round to get their rocks off. Tax season and holidays see a dip in demand, but even when the economy dips, people have needs and desires to be filled.

Prices can increase based on requests. Financial domination (findom) clients are obviously paying more. It’s a kink that Fatale says is really misrepresented online.

“True financial domination is basically the sub signs over their entire paycheck to the mistress, and the mistress budgets out the money that they need for their rent, for their expenses, and then she keeps — manages the rest,” says the really sexy unlicensed accountant.

Findom, like foot fetishes or piss kinks, has been somewhat normalized, or at least is becoming entry-level kinky. The more outlandish requests, Fatale says, follow porn trends. Right now, pegging and the infantilization of men are in. Mommy-dommes, as she calls them, are “having a moment.” You win this one, Sigmund Freud.

She usually dissuades clients from pegging. The rectum takes training. But Fatale has one particularly notable client, whom she describes as a “size-queen,” and surmises he’s devoted his life to stretching his anal cavity, being able to withstand unimaginable sizes, and receiving “multiple ass-gasms” in return. He now stands as her definition of “kinky.”

He’s within a very small minority; most clients do not reach gratification. That’s not her job. Fatale and other dominatrixes do not provide sexual services. She very clearly states it on her website, and will not fulfill any requests that fit within the state’s definition of sex, including hand stuff. Other than that, there’s nothing she won’t do, except scat play. No amount of money could buy that.

“Just because something happens in porn does not make it OK to do in a session that you’re paying money for,” she says about men who expect an orgasm at the end of sessions.

Pegging is in a legal gray area, but by and large, a dominatrix isn’t there to make you feel good; quite the opposite. 

“It’s very easy to find someone to jack you off. The people who want more of an experience than that …  that’s what we offer,” she says. “It’s a lot of mental stimulation. For some, it’s a mental vacation, shutting out the outside world and focusing on the task at hand, which is worshiping the mistress’ feet or taking the spankings. That’s appealing for a lot of people.”

“I’m $450 an hour, and you shouldn’t be calling me if you can’t afford me,” says Mistress Pasha. “I do require a $200 deposit to book the session for new clients, and if I don’t like you, I require a deposit, which is nonrefundable.”

Mistress Pasha’s clientele is also notably rich white men who are often hiding their preferences from their partners.

“Middle-aged, married white men, affluent, doctors, lawyers, CEO type: That’s the majority of my clients,” she says.

The dominatrix, who describes herself as “the mature, blond-hair, blue-eyed, athletic goddess for whom you’ve been searching,” filters more extreme requests. One client has a minitarization kink. He likes to roleplay that a special pill has shrunk him to a swallowable size. Many clients enjoy forced feminization.

“The usual unusual are all the guys that want to dress up like girls and be sissies like Kristi Noem’s husband,” she says, referencing recently leaked images of the ousted Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon, in a synthetic breast plate used for crossdressing. “… That’s pretty run of the mill here.”

An unusual request for her is a client who requested that she defecate in his mouth. She said no.

The Commandant, another mistress in North Texas, charges $400 an hour. If you can’t pay, she suggests you save up because domination never goes on discount.

She has a few more rules than others. No age play, no race play and certainly no scat play. If you want that, you’ll have to go to another city. Like most, her prices fluctuate based on the request, but there are certain things within the world of kink she wishes were more accessible, like education.

“There are some things in this community that I think need to be more accessible for safety,” she says. “Classes should not be expensive to access.” 

While some education classes require payment, The Commandant herself offers free online courses to those wanting to learn without hurting themselves too badly. With impact play, or the consensual striking we most commonly recognize as part of greater BDSM,  skin is often broken. Knife play, a kink that involves delicately moving a blade across skin, occasionally making shallow cuts, takes a significant amount of research and care. Cock-stomping can easily cause irreparable damage to the reproductive system.  Even candle-wax play can cause unintended burns if you don’t know what you’re doing. But most people are left to learn by trial and error. 

She also hosts Kinkify, a pop-up dungeon in North Texas that hosts educational play socials with professional guidance. The Commandant makes very little in return for these events, normally breaking even, but if she can help a few more people have safe sex, then it’s worth it. 

“What [dominatrixes] are doing at the end of the day is genuine, safe exploration,” she says. 

A collector of kink regalia himself, Herman once spent almost two grand on a pair of handcuffs. He’s spent an equal amount on fetters and paddles. But quadruple figures are common for niche lifestyle kinksters, who are willing to pay for specialized equipment, he says.

“People who are niche, a lot of times there’s a quality that they expect, especially in the BDSM scene,” he says. “You’ve got a few different levels of customers, but a lot of the really hardcore people, they don’t want fuzzy handcuffs.” 

Herman says the truly kinky know their preferences, and they’re highly specific; whips made from rare moose hide, floggers made from bison leather or customized gimpsuits with perfectly placed holes.  But most of all, the things they want, you simply can’t get through mass production. It’s the economies of scale that keep prices high. 

“There are products like single-tail whips, a lot of times, there isn’t a machine that can make them,” he says. “So you’re seeing whips that have to be done by a craftsman. Once you really look at a few whips, you can truly see the difference in quality.”

Even outside of small artisan craftsmen, most retailers in the sex sphere use a long-tail approach, Herman says. Stocking a small amount of thousands and thousands of products, serving the tastes of everyone, but not necessarily capitalizing on one particular kink. In essence, this economic model means there are no best-sellers. 

“You can’t make 5,000 of [anything] really cheap,” says Herman. “It’s just not going to be that way unless the market really grows. I can’t see that barrier to entry [for kink] really getting a whole lot lower anytime soon.”

The limitations of scale have a few rare exceptions. Herman struck gold when he mass-produced electrical stimulation wands, which went through a craze in the early 2000s. The toys weren’t new, existing in the hardcore BDSM realm since the ’70s, but Herman commercialized the product and lowered the price and the voltage, making a popular tickling instrument for the bored but not entirely masochistic. 

“For that, if you wanted to try it, you had to drop between $300 and $400 on the low side just for a basic kit…,” he says. His versions sold for $15. “That became one of the bestsellers that I ever launched for that very reason. It was the right product that vanilla people could get.”

As kink becomes normalized, major retail companies have found ways to streamline production, creating lower-quality knock-offs for the masses of a few select products. Herman says this has especially affected the electronic toy industry, which is now dominated almost entirely by China, from patent to production. 

“The big players seem to get less and less creative,” he says. “What you find in [the kink] market is the really unique cool stuff, a lot of it you find from these really tiny vendors or artisans working out of the garage. They couldn’t scale it from a manpower standpoint.” 

So the high prices remain, for better or for worse. 

“[The costs] prevent people from maybe experimenting,” Herman says. 

In his years in the industry, he found that freak does not fluctuate with the economy in predictable ways. During the Great Recession, no one was having hot sex nor adding to their collections. In 2020, the sex and kink industry was one of the few to thrive, quadrupling in sales and setting new revenue records industry-wide. In the current market, tariffs have mostly affected international imports, but much of the hyper-specific kink products are still domestically produced, so prices aren’t any higher or any lower. 

“Kink is probably one of the more well-insulated from [tariffs] for sure,” he says. “It might affect the beginner crowd, but as far as from a pricing standpoint, I don’t think it’s deterring as much as the bottom falling out of the economy. You see that everywhere.”

Curiosity kills the cat and the wallets of the novicely freaky. 

But regardless of type and function, suits are expensive; designer handbag-level expensive. Like most things in the kinkiverse, murrsuits are custom-made, and a commercialized version available from overnight shippers simply will not meet the needs of the fully initiated. 

Declan, (not his real name) has been a furry for 12 years, and there’s always been a kink component to his fursona. He wears a partial suit, which is just the head, legs and arms, leaving the torso uncovered for sex. He says there’s lots of overlap between the furry community and the fetish community, and some murrsuits are made with leather harnesses and latex as part of their design, though his is not. His murrsuit is a protogen, which is half-animal, half-robot,  and costs $3,500. He would wear a full suit if it weren’t so hot. But sex gets sweaty even when you aren’t thrusting in a fur-lined full-body suit.

“People who do things while in a suit are much smaller in numbers,” he says. “You’ve got to think about the fact that you’re effectively wrapped in a heated blanket.”

But some people do get down in the full murrsuit. There’s a monthly meetup at a local commercial dungeon, or swingers club. Declan says it averages 30-40 attendees in various levels of suits, equating to tens of thousands of dollars worth of foam and fur.

There are a few Texas-based artisans who make fully customizable suits. Generally, a murrsuit with human-like legs starts at $5,000, with additional upgrades for features like horns, multiple colors or other options. Digitgrade suits, those with padded legs to match the anatomy of four-legged creatures, run closer to $9,000 for a basic model. 

“If you’re going for a full suit, you definitely want to commission somebody so that they can get your body measurements perfect,” Declan says. “That’s part of the reason why they cost so much. They’re custom-tailored, and they’re all handmade.”

Given the costs, it’s safe to assume the vast majority of people who can spend several months’ rent on a murrsuit are well-off. A running joke in the furry scene says that if all furries perished, you’d wipe out the American IT workforce completely. But Declan says the notion that all furries are rich is incorrect. There are many who don’t have the means for a full suit, or even just a custom $500 head, but they’re no less real, and certainly no less kinky.

Declan says a cheaper alternative within primal play, or animalistic kinks, is pup-play; a kink where people exhibit dog-like behaviors, usually under the guidance of a dom. Furries and pups exist on a Venn diagram. Typical equipment for pup play includes leather hoods with a muzzle and pointed ears, or a chain collar. While cheaper, it still costs several hundred dollars for high-quality pup play items, and many furries are investing in all types of primal play accessories. 

To him, furries and pups are one of, if not the most, misrepresented kinksters. In part, social media has allowed for the sensationalization of the kinks, and the animal component lends itself to bestiality allegations. But Declan, a prominent figure in the Texas furry scene, says there is absolutely no tolerance for zoophiles, or another frequent harmful stereotype, pedophiles.

“We absolutely do not allow that and will excommunicate you for that,” he says, explaining that the furry community is quick to doxx and tip police. “I would like to add: consent. My biggest kink is consent.”

No community is immune to bad apples. But furries do their best to keep their kink kosher, after all, it’s not really about being an animal, so much as it is about being free.

“Primal play means letting go of your human inhibitions and just going back into a primal state and just going at it,” he says. “You let go of your inhibitions, and even outside of the furry community, in the fetish community, primal is very much a thing.”

Fatale is one of the top names at the annual Dallas Fetish Ball, the largest kink event in the city, and one of the largest in the country. She brings her infamous wheel of pain, similar in concept to the wheel of fortune, but instead of money, lucky spinners get a whipping, caning or some other form of pleasurable torture in front of a crowd.

The fetish ball brings kinksters, pups, fetishists, leatherworkers and all the in between into one room for a night of debauchery. Fatale says it’s a great place to get your start in the scene.

“One thing I really love about [the fetish ball] is that it gives average people – especially younger people who don’t have the money that our clients have – it gives them a chance to experience a little of the sadomasochistic lifestyle and experience with a pro dom.” 

The Dallas Fetish Ball is held in November each year. But Fatale hosts regular Sadistic Saturdays with her wheel of pain in collaboration with the ball throughout the year. The next iteration is on April 25 at the Kessler Theater. The price to be kinky for the night is only $25 — you may even have a few dollars left to throw in the Sunday tithe.