From witch lineage to sex work, from patriarchy to sovereignty — why my womanhood and my work are bound in the fight for freedom.

This is a very personal post. It is a topic which matters to me greatly. There is an agenda here. I ask my subs to read my site before contacting me. It’s a form of screening. You want to know if we are mentally, energetically compatible as much as I do. It can’t all be whips and dildoes can it?

Learning the Discipline of Service

I was at an event not too long ago and there was a man who was tending to my feet, a self-confessed lifelong foot worshiper. He gave me the worst foot worship session I think I have ever encountered. And I was thinking, my gosh, you call yourself a foot fetishist? Have some pride. Learn some skills.

Some of you know that philosophically I do not believe in doing to others things which I have not also experienced.  I will not wield a tool until I have felt it myself.  Case in point: I was often asked to use a bullwhip on subs, but I did not until I had been whipped myself often enough to see how to use one, until I had felt it myself.

The same applies to all aspects of submission.  I am far more equipped as a domme thanks to the many incredible women with whom I have explored submission with.

When I think about a session I had with a domme several years ago, she had me kneel in front of her and tend to her feet. She said, “if you are going to be a sub, then this is a skill you should develop. It will always come in handy.” What did I do? I introduced myself to a reflexologist and had her teach me how to “take care of” a woman’s feet over lessons and sessions which lasted for 6 months.

I make this point to say, “be intentional”.  How can a man be so lazy, one who calls himself a foot lover, foot fetishist, and is a self-described sub, when he clearly has never paid even the slightest attention to what he is doing.

If that is the kind of sub you are, stay away.  But if you are committed, and prepared to truly lean in, then read on.

Entitlement, Submissives, and Feminist Anger

While I was having my awful foot massage, a domme friend of mine was being lectured by a sub about female entitlement. They had such a heated discussion about feminist topics that both of them came to me afterwards. She was livid. “I can’t believe this guy calls himself a. sub with those entitled ideas of his. So offensive.”

“I think I upset your friend there a bit,” he said a bit later when she was elsewhere. He gave me his version of events, and then added something along the lines of “she really shouldn’t take this stuff so seriously.”

You needn’t guess whose side I was on.

Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Women’s Labour

Not very far into a book I am reading, Caliban and the Witch, by Silvia Federici, the author wrote something which encapsulated a number of threads which have been coming together in my life.

Capitalism came to symbolise an assault on women’s reproductive rights…the ultimate mother lode of free labour.

Silvia Federici

The actual passage isn’t important, as the theme threads its way through the entire book. She is an economist and social theorist, and the book is about women’s evolving place in society. The book was written two decades ago, but with the US political landscape as it is, the assault on women is very much of the moment, and in the way she describes.

Her thesis is that Capitalism, as a system, requires labour exploitation. She begins with the shift from Feudal society to Capitalism, which was essentially marked by a shift towards money as the primary medium of exchange. Far from bringing freedom for those with less, this change allowed for greater exploitation, the extraction of rents, and the disconnection of the labourer from the fruits of their labour, literally, and the land on which they produced it.

This shift hit women especially hard, and Capitalism came to symbolise an assault on women’s reproductive rights…the ultimate mother lode of free labour. Puns intended.

Monogamy as a Patriarchal Social Unit

Another thread that I had been thinking about was that the patriarchal social unit is a monogamous marriage. Meaning that marriage is a system designed to enshrine male privilege. The narrative of “to protect and to look after” is actually about men and giving them a role, one which they might not otherwise have.

This line, coupled with the false narrative that men have a biological need to spread the seed, whereas women have a need to find someone who will care for their child, ensure its best chance of survival. Insofar as both exist within a capitalist-patriarchal system, there is a grain of. truth to this. But it is a perverse form of Stockholm Syndrome, finding love for your jailer.

The Absurdity of Biological Narratives

In The Selfish Gene, a seminal book on DNA by the Harvard geneticist Richard Dawkins, he takes aim at the central theory that men should spread their seed for good biological outcomes, but not in the way one might think. He argues that DNA is the most successful virus in the history of life. In us, in humans, it has found the ideal host. We have achieved “separation” from the food chain, upending the “survival” part of genetic evolution.

The idea that a man spreading his seed has anything to do with better biological outcomes is narcissistic and absurd.

What matters in what he says is that the individual is lost, totally meaningless. The idea that a man spreading his seed has anything to do with better biological outcomes is narcissistic and absurd.

The corollary of this is that marriage, monogamy, have nothing to do with better biological outcomes. They exist to enshrine a system of male dominance over female labour, and their reproductive rights more specifically.

Community, Caregiving, and Gene Pools

Many societies throughout the animal kingdom demonstrate this. Indeed, monogamy and pairing are the exception, not the rule. Several primate and rodent studies have shown that communal living produces better genetic outcomes: survival of offspring, and preservation of a family group of DNA. In other words, it isn’t that little Johnny survives to go on to reproduce, it is that all his cousins do too…as many as possible. It is a simple step from there to the conclusion that living in community produces a more stable and more successful gene pool.

Think about it. There are grandmothers, sisters, aunts, but also brothers, uncles, grandfathers, who can play roles in communal caregiving. What happens under these circumstances? A woman’s life is not utterly overtaken by the demands of her child. The burden of child-rearing is spread.

We do know that female labour force participation goes hand in hand with economic development. This has been a stated goal of many of the world’s development organisations as they work to help poor countries out of poverty. The perverse irony of this, however, is that World Bank and IMF development policy does the opposite, and breaks up communal structures, tribes, and imposes the dominant Capitalist system, Patriarchy.

Patriarchy’s Last Gasp

A look at the rhetoric in the US political sphere shows the truth of this. The stale, male, and pale white man is having his last entitled gasp at subjugating women. It is ugly. Time will tell how successful he is. And there are many women who have been seduced into the cause—and you know, the propaganda is powerful.

That the fight is exhausting is intolerable, but ever so necessary. As the diminutive US State of New Hampshire has as its slogan, “Live Free or Die,” so too am I committed to the fight. Indeed, owning female sovereignty is the core of my essence as a woman, is my purpose in life, is my reason for being. When I surrendered the keys to the patriarchy and placed my body in the hands of a gifted surgeon, I showed the depth of my commitment.

If you wish to be my client, you will not just fetishise me, you will share the meaning of this journey, respect it, honour it, and join us in the fight.

The Witch as Healer and Threat

It matters to me on many levels. For those of you who know me, you know I am a witch. The word conjures images of women in black, with pointy hats, riding on broomsticks, typically with pocked faces. The modern aesthetic of the witch seems to drift towards goth or the clothes of my current profession, the dominatrix.

But what was meant by ‘witch’? Who were they? What did they do? The truth of it is that ‘witches’ were typically healers, midwives. They were pillars of their community. Did you know that after the Caesarean cut was invented in the 13th century, that it was only women who performed this delicate surgical intervention during childbirth? Women were also the keepers of the herbarium, the garden of healing plants that many families had in feudal societies and before, acting as healers and as the repository of pharmacological knowledge.

Heresies, Genocides, and My Ancestry

It is interesting that the first “heresies” were not so much about religious doctrine, indeed the very first genocide was Christian on Christian, when the Pope and the King of France conspired to wipe out the Albigensians. Their crime was a belief that the church had become corrupt, and that no priest was necessary to channel God…that each of us could have a personal relationship with God. They allowed women to officiate ceremonies and rebelled against the tithe and other forms of feudal taxation and appropriation.

They were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands, their lands taken, their protectors excommunicated, their domains lost. My family was on the losing side. It is through the escape of one to which I owe my existence. The survival of a name.

Have you read The Crucible, by American playright and once husband of Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller? It is the story of Rebecca Nourse’s trial. She was the last woman to be executed for witchcraft in colonial America. She was my 12th great grandmother.

Her story is very much of this post. She represented, however, as a midwife, healer, and pillar of her community, a threat to the male-centred, puritanical social structure forming in the colonies. A society was forming, moving from one of a survival, shared property, communal support and living based society and economy, to one centred on property rights, chastity, marriage, and “Christian values.”

A relatively recent book, A Salem Witch by Daniel Gagnon, has capitalised on a modern lust for retellings of historic tales. I picked up the book on a recent trip to Salem and a visit to the witchcraft museum. I didn’t like the book. It is well-researched, but it interprets fact through the socio-patriarchal lens we live in. The thesis and focus of the book is on Rebecca’s innocence. It argues that she was not a ‘witch’. I resent that profoundly, as it whitewashes who she was, what she did. It erases that she was a woman, serving women, that she was a guardian of women’s reproductive power.

Witches, Capitalism, and Women as Casualties

Silvia Federicci’s book, Caliban and the Witch, makes the point that the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of women as witches in the Middle Ages was a direct consequence of the rise of Capitalism, a system which enshrines slave labour. Housework, child-rearing…these are women’s tasks. In virtually every shift from tribal society, from community, even those taking place in the modern era (Africa, Asia, and Latin America all offer current examples), we see women as the front line casualty of the shift.

Capitalism and patriarchy and religion are partners in crime.

The Taliban is an extreme and current example of social control exerted over women’s rights in the name of God. But the developed world is not immune, as the overturning of Roe v. Wade has shown. Capitalism and patriarchy and religion are partners in crime.

The Dominatrix as Warrior

The dominatrix is the warrior who rails against patriarchy.

It may not seem obvious, but the dominatrix is the warrior who rails against this. It is the dominatrix, and the Sex Worker, who stand as the front line against this hegemonic narrative. Is it any wonder that the aesthetic fits? And ask yourself this. How many male clients really just want a kink dispenser who makes them feel all right about this system of exploitation? Is it not the sexualisation of male guilt?

Are they not just paying us to pretend? Does playing submissive for a little while, and paying for it, not give them license to feel relieved at the profound social injustice which continues to define society?

Becoming Woman, Becoming Feminist

Was I a feminist when I was a boy? Can a man be a feminist? That question is beyond the scope of this post. Was I even a boy at all is also beyond the scope of this post. So too is a discussion about whether trans women are women, or whether Sex Workers can be feminists. All the answers to these questions lie in the patriarchal man lust to divide and conquer. I will just say this. Becoming a woman, physically, was as much about the philosophical underpinnings of this post.

I grew up with a burning desire to fight for women.

I grew up with a burning desire to fight for women. I cannot separate being a trans woman from this hunger to fight this issue. My legitimacy as a fighter on this topic was one of the reasons that I had to have a sex change. I made a choice to dedicate my life to women. I didn’t fetishize women, dominant women, and never had a sexual thrill from cross-dressing, or from being a sissy. No.

This for me was about my spiritual and moral essence. Learning as I did late in life of my genetic connection to a lineage of witches on both sides of my family served to explain. We do carry ancestral trauma genes do have memory. My purpose on this planet is to carry this message.

The Inevitability of Becoming Dominatrix

It is and has been inevitable that I became woman, that I became a dominatrix, that I became a Sex Worker. And it is very important that a client understands that.

I love to play. I love the erotic, love desire. But my clients are expected to expect more of themselves. I am looking for recruits. Foot soldiers, captains of industry, those who will spread the gospel of truth, who will be a part of a new world order, a new belief system, a new spiritual practice.

Sex Witchery as Transformation

You do not lay rotten fruit at the foot of a Goddess.

I choose to be a Sex Witch because I know that through your sexual hunger, you can be transformed.

My time is expensive because my clients need to value it, and to value themselves. Because changing the world is no task for wimps, sissies or losers. You do not lay rotten fruit at the foot of a Goddess. You become great, you change, you grow, you learn.

Do you live your life in line with your beliefs? I do. If you are my sub, that is what we will do together, help you become your full potential in line with your values, your desires, your beliefs, and getting there, the journey will get you off in little ways, every day, but on life, in a major way.

These truths shape not only my politics but also my joy, as you’ll see in my Behind the Scenes Dominatrix Diary

An Invitation

If you are here, something in you has already responded.

This is not casual booking, and it is not for everyone. I work with people who are curious, intelligent, and willing to take responsibility for what they want.

Those who wish to work with me do not request. They present themselves.

Begin here.

About Me

Mx Valentina is a feminist dominatrix, a trans and intersex woman, whose practice centres on ethical power exchange and the conditions under which lives reorganise themselves around purpose rather than shame. Her work is selective and relational, grounded in the belief that submission is not a role to be played but an orientation that must already be present. She works only with those who understand that access is conditional and authority is not negotiated.  You can find my scholarly feminist writing on Substack and lighter pieces on Medium.