How a Dominatrix Does Her Taxes

Photo by Star Foreman

During tax season, Mistress Precious is subservient to her accountant husband.

Of all the painful activities a dominatrix can take part in, there is none quite so torturous as taxes. It is the first day of DomCon, the annual gathering of sadists and the masochists who worship them, and a handful of novice dominatrixes sit in one of the depressing, fluorescent-lit rooms in the nether regions of the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel. They are taking an hour away from the spankings and beatings to learn how to please the Internal Revenue Service.

"Is everyone here somewhat familiar with the 1040 Schedule C?" asks their teacher, Jack.

Jack, who declines to give his last name, is a corporate tax accountant and looks it: glasses, neat gray hair, round face with a bit of a chipmunk aspect.

"Here," he says to the woman beside him, a statuesque, incredibly fit blonde in a rubber bodysuit, glossy as an oil slick. He hands her a sheaf of photocopies. "Pass these out."

"Yes, master! Yes, sir!" she says, in a pretend-exaggerated way. Jack is a submissive, except in tax season. And the woman, a professional dominatrix known as Mistress Precious, is his wife.

"These are for taxes, honey," Mistress Precious says to a girl who has just walked in. "Welcome to America."

"The No. 1 weapon in the IRS arsenal, and it is what brought down Al Capone, is tax evasion. That's their fear factor," Jack says. "Not that you want to fear the IRS, but they're a powerful group. It's better to work with them than against them."

Dominatrix, however, is not a job listed with the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Psychodramatist," Jack says. "It's what you call what you do."

What if you are simply modeling in dominatrix outfits, a woman asks, and not necessarily punishing anyone just yet. "The lines blur," Jack admits. "The IRS tends to look at things in black-and-white."

Since the S&M community tends to regard things "with a lot of gray," setting up an LLC can be a lifesaver. The smart mistress buys all her assets -- clothing, instruments of torture -- through that limited-liability corporation.

Say you own a dungeon. Perhaps yours is not so elaborately appointed as Mistress Precious' dungeon, which is 4,000 square feet and boasts slave baths and medieval stocks and a dentist's chair from 1938 and overnight cage facilities.

With an LLC, if someone walks into it and gets hurt -- if a prop falls on his head, for example -- you aren't personally liable.

They can take your whips and they can take your chains. But they can't take your home.

If it seems improbable that anyone paying to be locked in a cage overnight would complain if they accidentally got bonked on the head, well, better safe than sorry.

A woman in the back raises her hand. "What are the stats for people being sued in this business?"

"People are sue-happy," Jack says. "Accidents happen. When and how often? Maybe not so often. But in this line of business ..." His voice trails off. He shrugs.

The solution: liability insurance. "Of course the insurance agents are gonna ask what you do," Precious says. "Good luck with that. It's like, 'I own a dungeon and my suspension's in there, and if it falls on someone, they're gonna get crushed.' That's when you get a million-dollar policy to protect the dungeon."

"Or you find somewhere to put the bodies," a woman mutters.

Also: Report some profits so you don't get audited. "The goal of business is to make a profit. To the IRS, if you don't make a profit in three out of five years, they declare that a hobby. Don't always have a loss," Jack says. "And if you always have a loss, maybe you're not charging enough?"

When he and Mistress Precious first started dating, she wasn't charging people enough for her dungeon. "When you factored in the different costs, I was paying them to come in!" Precious says, incredulous.

Now, every spring, at the start of tax season, Precious piles her receipts on the dining table and Jack becomes the master.

Speaking of role reversals, the IRS can make even sadists beg for mercy.

Mistresses who accept credit card payments, beware: The IRS now can check how much a slave paid you. They can talk to your bank to see what you're reporting versus what you're depositing. PayPal reports to the IRS as well.

"The IRS is wise," Jack says. "They will measure you against the standard of your industry. Don't get yourself into that situation."