10 April 16 - 22, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents “Middle-aged, married white men, afflu- ent, 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 role- play 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, referenc- ing recently leaked images of the ousted Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi No- em’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 an- other 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 commu- nity 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 bro- ken. Knife play, a kink that involves deli- cately moving a blade across skin, occasionally making shallow cuts, takes a significant amount of research and care. Cock-stomping can easily cause irrepara- ble damage to the reproductive system. Even candle-wax play can cause unin- tended 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. The Cost of Cuffs Y ou can buy anything on Amazon, includ- ing nipple clamps and buttplugs. But they won’t be very good. For proper play, durability is one of the most coveted fea- tures, says Mike Herman. He worked in sex toy and gear development for two decades, heading one of the country’s largest online BDSM retailers in the 2000s, before settling in Dallas. A collector of kink regalia himself, Her- man 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 equip- ment, 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 see- ing whips that have to be done by a crafts- man. 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 particu- lar kink. In essence, this economic model means there are no best-sellers. “You can’t make 5,000 of [anything] re- ally 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 any- time 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, mak- ing 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 ver- sions 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 pro- duction, 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 arti- sans 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 econ- omy 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 cur- rent market, tariffs have mostly affected in- ternational imports, but much of the hyper-specific kink products are still do- mestically produced, so prices aren’t any higher or any lower. “Kink is probably one of the more well-in- sulated 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. Fortunate Furries F or most kinks, entry-level experimenta- tion is affordable. The exception to that rule is furries. Not all furries include a sexual component in their fursonas, or their fursuit identities. In fact, the percentage of the furry community that engages in sexual activity using their anthropomorphic suits is a small margin. There’s no word for the dis- tinction, but those with a furry kink wear murrsuits, usually worn only in the bedroom, and are slightly different from fursuits suit- able for conventions. And most conventions have rules about the suits that can be worn. But regardless of type and function, suits are expensive; designer handbag-level ex- pensive. Like most things in the kinkiverse, murrsuits are custom-made, and a commer- cialized 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 har- nesses 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. Culture from p8 Jessica Patrice Turner Fatale’s pricing starts at $600 for 90-minute sessions.
