Talking About The Business of Professional Domination With Mistress Tara
“If I had to come into this business today and start from scratch the way the industry is now, yeah, absolutely, I would not be interested.”
The alluring, oh-so-smart and surely experienced Mistress Tara Indiana schooled me with the above (and really, who else would you rather be schooled by?) when I ask her about then then and now or Pro-Domming. Here is a lady who will mark her thirty-five years working as a pro dominatrix come this September, was the founder of the famous Den Of Iniquity Dungeon in New York, holds the distinction of being the only Pro Domme to own and run dungeons on both U.S. coasts at the same time, has appeared in films for such notables as Rick Savage, produced her own content, currently teaches mistresses and sessions, and has appeared on various major network programs.
Transitioning from almost only teaching to session-ing once again, post the pandemic—although she claims she has always loves sessions and had always kept at them with her regulars—Mistress Tara surely knows the difference between the then and now of her profession, something I was surely interested in exploring with someone with such ‘paddle cred.’
“To have a session today, that means that there has to be advertising, there has to be a response to advertising, that screening process and all that kind of stuff, right? I’ve told this story in my marketing class for years. Back in the day when there was really only the print industry, my advertising bill, just in New York, was seven thousand a month, just with one publication (see one of Tara’s classic pictures above this paragraph). My nut was twenty grand before I made a penny. And yes, while I know that was a lot of money, especially back in the eighties, but if I could go back to that seven grand a month for advertising and get the results that I got, instead of having to do social media, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Because right now my life is, I’m on social media and cutting and pasting, two or three hours a day, minimum, and it’s soul killing as far as I’m concerned. Especially with the censorship laws, it’s even worse because you can spend a lot of time working on a post and then it can easily be rejected.” As I have noted here, and with Chris on our show, I couldn’t agree more to how soul killing social media is.
“And we forget how creative print advertising was,” she continues. “Getting the pictures developed, writing ad copy; then I had to go into the magazines to submit and that’s where our community was built.”
Community, is surely something else I feel lacking in a very strong sense. Ironically, as we build a closer-knit global culture via the net I feel we have certainly lost lots more in the process. This sure sense of community is something I do indeed search for all the time.
Luckily, there are wonderful women like Mistress Tara Indiana out there who champion these values in her work and activism.
Mistress Tara is as much not resting on her laurels as she is not living in the past. She is a busy, hard-working domme, teacher, mentor, activist (as I just mentioned) and wildly creative person. And lastly, I found to her to have such a positive outlook on what she does, even these many years into her profession.
“While I enjoy traditional corporal punishment, domestic discipline, and mind-fuckery, overall, I’d say my specialty is slave training,” she offers as I squirm imaging this sexy woman at the helm of any of these kinks. “But generally, I always believe in leaving people in a better condition than you found them.”
And would else could we want?
You can find Mistress Tara Indiana at the socials below.
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