Renee Young and I are in the basement of her ranch house in Rockland County, NY. Glitzy party photos from her publicist days are everywhere; a curio cabinet displays ceramic lady heads from the 1950s; a tuxedo cat eyes me suspiciously from a plastic-covered couch.
Young looks wistful. “You never know where your career might lead you when you’ve got a lot of bills to pay,” she says as she lays out a ball gag, cat o’ nine tails, leather mask, and nipple clamps on her Mah Jongg table.
This is a story of triumph over adversity. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s simply the story of an unusual career pivot, a resourceful entrepreneur recognizing an opportunity. And perhaps today, a source of inspiration for those of us challenged by the current economic chaos.
It was 2008, a year of unbridled optimism and record stock market highs. Then, around October, the global financial system began to unravel. The stock market tanked, and with it, jobs. Young, then 47, had been a vice president of communications at CBS for the past 15 years.
Now, she couldn’t get a job anywhere. Her life didn’t allow her to sit back and wait for just the right break. She was going through her second divorce, she had two daughters in college, and no financial support from the first husband, the father of her girls. “I couldn’t even get a job cleaning motel rooms, and believe me, I tried,” she says today. “My parents had owned a motel, so I knew I was good at it.”
A man she was seeing at the time was very into BDSM. The problem was, he was a dom, and Renee wasn’t remotely into it. “Submit? Please. The best I could do was acquiesce.” But he introduced her to the scene and suggested that being a dominatrix would be a good way for her to make a little money on the side.
Her love life was already a little complicated; unbeknownst to the (married) boyfriend, Renee was on the dating site Seeking Arrangements, and was getting help from a lovely guy from New Jersey who was, let’s just say, in the “sanitation business.” But she didn’t feel great about this entire situation.
A Yeshiva girl who was the child of a cold, withholding Holocaust survivor and a mother who suffered from depression, she’d had a childhood both physically and emotionally abusive. With a father who would first pay and then withdraw her college tuition, she learned the importance of self-reliance early on. Add to this the difficult time she’d been having recently, and she realized she had vast reservoirs of anger and frustration. She decided she could put them to good use. “At this point in my life, where so much was going wrong, the idea of screaming at people and getting paid for it was extremely appealing.”
At first, there is nothing about Renee Young that would lead you to believe she’d be good at this job. Gentle, attractive, curvaceous, with wavy amber hair and a comic’s snappy delivery, she is warm and welcoming, the first woman you’d run to hug at your high school reunion. And she hates hurting anything. “I’m the person who takes the two paper plates to trap the spider and put it outside.”
She knew she’d have to change her mindset to succeed. Since there was no BDSM for Dummies, she began attending Fetish Night at a downtown club in New York City. She rented a dungeon and asked the mistress who owned it to teach her the ropes, so to speak. She took a class in spanking. The attendees were not getting off during the class. Far from it: “They were as serious as a heart attack”. But in a way, she admired the body positivity. “I lived my entire life with thigh issues and ass issues. I never thought I’d be in a situation where having a big ass was a good thing.”
Reasoning that her “in” to the business might be with the kind of men she grew up with, she put this ad in Craigslist that began:
The Rebbetzin is Not Pleased.
You were late getting home for Shabbat.
You did not daven today.
You have made the Rebbetzin very, very angry, and now you need to be punished.
Finding customers took no time at all. At first, she charged a modest few hundred dollars for a two-and-a-half-hour session. But with the vast majority of her clients in finance, she quickly realized she had to charge a lot more for them to feel they were getting the quality they, as titans of industry, deserved. Several hundred became several thousand a session. “I had never been in so many $25 million apartments,” she says.
Young will not name names for publication, but she saw some of the top people in the C-suites of Citibank, Chase, and Goldman Sachs. Some are still there. The motivation for these people was almost a cliché; it was some version of “All I do all day long is make decisions. I don’t want to make any decisions. Just tell me what to do.”
Quickly, she found that her skills in PR translated well. “For years, I had to read the feelings of the people I was pitching. Was this a good time? How could I be of most use? And here, it was the same. Is the person here for physical pain? For humiliation? Or was there a specific fantasy they had in mind? I had to have ‘the Conversation’ without having a conversation.” It was body language, but it was also in the commands she’d give. “I remember early on I walked into this guy’s apartment and he said, ‘Please take off your shoes because of the carpet.’ And I threw the contents of my bag everywhere, and I stepped all over the place, and I was like, I’m a dominatrix, I’m not your mother-in-law. Don’t tell me to take off my fucking shoes. He got in line quickly. He was a bully. He needed to be bullied back.”
She would always arrive in clothing that wouldn’t draw attention—a business suit and high heels—and change at the premises. She’d bring clothing for them too—or at least the ever-popular diapers and women’s panties. She’d keep them busy scrubbing floors, painting her toenails, braiding her hair. (They’d be excited, and generally she wouldn’t let them do anything about it.) Or she’d sit in the chair with her legs crossed in very high heels, telling them whatever they did wrong. Observant Jews tended to want to be screamed at about failed tests and late library books; Catholics seemed to favor strict nuns and babysitters; and everyone, it seemed, wanted to be spanked by a hot cheerleader.
As the foreclosure crisis worsened, Young got busier and busier. Sometimes it seemed that the more powerful the men, the more extreme the requests. One man at the top of a major financial institution went for sticking pins in his testicles and then crushing them. “He had a relationship with a woman who took him to a dungeon in Czechoslovakia, where he was chained. She left him there for four days, took his credit card, and went shopping in Paris. They barely fed him. And that was apparently the most erotic experience he’d ever had in his life.”
Some days were dark. Renee would go to bed and feel horrible about what she was doing, the level of duplicity some people were living in —”that I was living in.” Other days were fun, and hilarious, “particularly when someone was just experimenting and you knew they weren’t going to do this again.” Doms do not have sex with their clients; at least Renee didn’t. And she had great fondness for many of them. “Mostly they wanted the librarian, the teacher, their friend’s mother—the older, sexually experienced woman—to humiliate them, but through filthy talk. I didn’t have to hurt them.” She never grew to enjoy administering pain.
She was always amazed there were men so reckless they’d just meet her with no preamble: “How did they know I wasn’t completely insane?” Others met first for drinks, wanting to talk and get to know her a bit before dipping into their fantasy world. Some, she swears, tried to help her find work in financial PR. (Try to imagine having your dom at the company Christmas party.)
After several years, she was forced to tell her (adult) children what she did for a living, since a former disgruntled boyfriend was trying to blackmail her. “But during that conversation, no one said, ’Oh my God, Mommy, that’s horrible. Let me give up my apartment and my tuition so you never have to do this again.’ They went from one afternoon of being upset to telling all their friends, ‘My mother is the biggest badass you ever met in your life and don’t fuck with her.’”
Finally, in 2015, Renee landed two things: a third husband and a job in her former area of expertise. She became the head of communications for Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. She left the prior few years off LinkedIn.
When Young started, web cams and online porn were in their nascence; OnlyFans was not even a creepy gleam in Tim Stokely’s eye. But Young believes we may be seeing a renaissance of in-person, old-timey dominatrixes. If you think about it, the circumstances are right. In 2007, the market was smooth sailing, but there was an iceberg looming in the Titanic’s path—subprime mortgages. Now we have tariffs. People became jittery. We were on the brink of a recession. Then, as now, we may all be high on our own supply.
While there are no longitudinal studies that directly correlate BDSM activity with recessions, well, ask a dom: anecdotally, financial stressors create increased demand for escape and control, the yin and yang of BDSM.
An avid swimmer and pickleball player, Young has written a television pilot and is still freelancing at both of her former careers. She’s still got a few old clients who like the occasional work-over. “If you think that I’m now too old to earn a living like this, you’d be very, very wrong,” she says. A lot of these men want an older authority figure in their lives.” Her husband is understanding. Besides, she says, “If you think about it, every relationship is about sex work. It’s just a matter of what kind of contract you negotiate for yourself.”
And even when she isn’t looking, somehow work finds her.
Recently, she was selling her friend’s shoes on Facebook Marketplace. She described them. They’d been worn three times. A man wrote to her: “Are they used?”
“Now, another person would respond, ‘They’re like new. You could barely tell I’ve only worn them.’ But I knew. I just knew. So I wrote back: ‘Yes. And they’re very smelly.’ He said, ‘Can I pay more for them?’” And Renee answered, “I demand more. My essence comes at a high price.”
For the past three months, the man has been Venmoing her weekly payments. She hasn’t sent the shoes. And he’ll never get them if he continues to be such a bad boy.
Judith Newman is a New York–based writer and the author of To Siri with Love
