Every March 8th the world remembers that women exist. Corporations hang banners. HR departments send emails featuring stock photographs of diverse women laughing at salads. Some brand releases a lipstick called Empowered Rouge for £32 and donates 40p to a charity whose name nobody can remember by April. And I, Mistress Eve, sit here in The Edge in full latex, reading these press releases like the comedy scripts they are. I do not need one day a year to feel powerful. I have men for that. I had several just this week, in fact, and they left in considerably less confident condition than they arrived.
The Women Who Made Me
Let me tell you about the women who shaped me into the goddess currently writing this. Remarkable creatures, all of them. Countess Hildegard Von Strapp was a 6-foot Austrian Domme who once reduced a Supreme Court judge to a sobbing, grateful wreck using only a riding crop and three words in German that I am not at liberty to repeat. She looked at me when I was 22, barely competent in heels, and said: “Eve. Stop apologising for existing. You are not too much. The world is simply not enough.” I had that needlepointed on a cushion. It sits next to my St Andrew’s Cross and I looked at it yesterday and felt nothing but agreement.
Then there was Mistress Valentina Nox, a breathtaking Italian Domme based out of Milan who trained me for three months in the psychological arts of submission. Valentina believed that breaking a man physically was the easy part. The interesting work, she told me, was in dismantling what he thought he was before he walked through the door. She could sit in silence for forty five minutes while a grown man unravelled completely at her feet without her having touched him once. I learned more from watching her work than from anything else in my career. She retired to the Amalfi coast and is, as far as I know, still making someone’s life exquisitely difficult.
And Big Sylvia from Wolverhampton, not a Domme, just a woman who once told a man who wolf-whistled at her from a van: “Love, I’ve seen more impressive things in my fridge.” A legend. An icon. A personal hero.
What This Week Actually Looked Like
I woke up yesterday looking mildly terrifying, which requires no effort on my part. I scrolled through the International Women’s Day posts on OnlyFans and noted the irony of men sending me heart reactions on content they paid to access while simultaneously, somewhere out there, arguing against equal pay. Then my first appointment arrived and the day improved considerably.
He is a regular. A very senior gentleman from the financial sector who manages something in the region of £4 billion and arrived, as always, in a car that costs more than most people’s houses. He was wearing a collar by 10:07. He called me Mistress with the kind of sincerity he has never once applied to a quarterly earnings report. He had been a little too confident this week, messaging me between sessions with the kind of bravado that tells me a man has forgotten his place, so I reminded him. Slowly. Thoroughly. With the bamboo cane he pretends to hate and the electrics he absolutely does not. By the time I was finished he was not making decisions. He was not managing anything. He was simply a very grateful and considerably humbled man on my floor thanking me in the kind of voice that his board of directors have never heard and would find deeply confusing.
Then there was Gerald. Gerald is a public figure of some note who books under the description of a strategy meeting and always checks his calendar nervously before he arrives in case someone has seen it. Gerald came in last week carrying what he no doubt considers confidence and left carrying considerably less of it. His particular weakness is humiliation, which I find delicious because in his professional life Gerald is treated with deference by everyone around him and the relief of abandoning that for a few hours is written all over his face the moment he steps through my door. I dressed him accordingly, instructed him accordingly, and he performed accordingly. Gerald went home to his wife in an unusually pleasant mood and I fully intend to take credit for that marriage surviving another week.
And then there was my newest addition, who I have decided to call Tadpole because he arrived at The Edge last Tuesday with exactly that energy: small, wriggling, uncertain of his direction, and destined to become something more interesting under the right conditions. Tadpole had requested an introductory session and arrived claiming he was open minded but not sure what he wanted. I find this charming because what it means is that he knew exactly what he wanted and lacked the vocabulary to say it. We established vocabulary. We established quite a lot, actually. By the end of the session Tadpole had discovered things about himself that no amount of therapy or corporate away days would have uncovered and he left looking quietly radiant in the way that only deeply satisfied men do. He has booked again for next week. Naturally.
The Unspoken Truth About Power
Here is what they do not put on the purple banners and the pastel Instagram squares. The most powerful room I have ever been in is not a boardroom. It is not a courtroom. It is not a cabinet meeting or a shareholder floor. It is The Edge. Red-lit. Quiet except for the precise sounds of control. And the men who visit it, successful, powerful, important men, come here and ask with enormous sincerity to relinquish every scrap of that power for a few hours. They come here to feel something real. To be held to account in a way that nobody in their professional life would dare attempt. To be stripped of the armour they spend their entire working week polishing. And here is the part that makes me smile every single International Women’s Day without fail: they pay me very well for the privilege.
Women have been managing male egos, absorbing male insecurities, navigating male fragility, and propping up male confidence since the beginning of recorded history. We have done it in boardrooms and bedrooms and kitchens and parliaments. We have done it quietly, gracefully, and almost entirely without acknowledgement. I am simply the only one who charges market rate and refuses to apologise for it.
My International Women’s Day Manifesto
Equal pay, immediately, or I start adding late fees with interest backdated to 1970. Stop calling women girlboss. We are simply boss. The girl prefix is condescending and the whole phrase belongs on a mug in a Primark next to a candle that smells of nothing. Acknowledge that women have been running civilisation quietly for centuries. We built the infrastructure, raised the leaders, smiled politely while being underestimated, and have been using it against you ever since. Respect what I do. I am a therapist, an actress, an athlete, a psychologist, and an entrepreneur. I work in an industry that makes people uncomfortable because it reflects things about themselves they would rather not examine in daylight. Stop shrinking, ladies. Take up space. Be loud. Be too much. Be exactly what they told you was unattractive and watch the right people find it completely irresistible while the wrong ones find it terrifying. Both outcomes are acceptable. Both outcomes are, frankly, useful.
To The Women Reading This..
You are magnificent. Whether you are a Mistress, a mother, a mathematician, a magnificent disaster, or all four simultaneously at half past two on a Tuesday, you are enough. You are considerably more than enough. Your softness is not weakness. Your power is not aggression. Your desires, whatever shape they take, are valid, are yours, and require no apology from anyone. And if somebody tells you otherwise, send them to me. I have equipment, I have availability, and I am very good at my job.
To The Men Reading This
I see you. Reading this with that particular expression you get when something is slightly uncomfortable and entirely fascinating at the same time. It is alright. You are safe here. And because it is International Women’s Day and I am feeling generous by my standards, which admittedly is not saying a great deal, I will let you grovel for free. Just today. Just this once. Get on your knees, darling. Happy International Women’s Day.
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