When Margo Steines was a teenager in New York City, she started working as a dominatrix. She began spending long nights in a dungeon, being paid by men who wanted to be slapped, stomped on and punched.
Before long, Steines sometimes found herself on the other side of the blows — the recipient of violent contact she purposely sought out. It was a time in her life when, as she puts it, she was “using her body to experience and mediate the world.”
Steines’ work as a dominatrix is just one part of her new memoir, “Brutalities.” Eventually, she fell in love with a man who often struck her viciously — and consensually — as part of their intimacy. Their relationship was volatile, and when he finally left her, she was adrift, feeling a deep divide between her physical and emotional relationship with herself…