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.
But while the partnership caused Steines an extreme amount of pain, both physical and emotional, she said in a lot of ways, it also helped her.
“Brutalities,” which she started writing about 10 years ago after relocating to Tucson, tells the story of Steines’ long journey to weave those parts of herself together, and the toll it’s taken on her body. As she acknowledges early in the book, it’s a difficult story.