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FASTER THAN AN ERECTION
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Published January 1, 2021
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April 27, 2025
The Grandeur of Reba Maybury
Dominatrix Mistress Rebecca (otherwise known as internationally renowned artist Reba Maybury) wants more than money. She wants to feel tangible Power in her hands. A self-described socialist, the spectral glow of capital does not satisfy Her. This stands in opposition to much of today’s current femdom trends which seem to, in a fashion not unlike Marxian commodity fetishism, eroticise money, with “findom” or financial domination largely saturating the online Female domination market. Instead, Mistress Rebecca envisions a much larger, more pressing, and difficult, task: to make men useful.
In Faster Than An Erection (2021), part manifesto/part tell-all for the world of Female domination, Mistress Rebecca lays out Her programme for life. Inextricable from the real political world, the stated aim of such a project is: “a more thorough landscape of Female power that demands a build up and an education towards a more thorough experience for both men and Women.” Experience is the operative term here as, for Maybury, the impetus behind Her domination is a desire for crossing limits and frontiers, so as to make sexuality boundless for Women. There is precedent here within the sadomasochism community as Michel Foucault, the thinker whose enjoyment of the San Francisco BDSM scene is all too well-documented, took from Nietszche the idea of trying to live as close to unliveable experiences as physically possible. This is, explicitly, a sadomasochistic ethics, of expansion, experimentation, and surplus enjoyment. Maybury’s calculation is rather more interesting. There is a world to win, and that world is a sexual one. Sexual liberation — true sexual liberation, not the faux corporate kind — may benefit men and Women, but ultimately the goal is to give back to Women something which they have been denied: an authentic, expansive, limitless sexuality not bound up with men’s bullshit, economic or otherwise.
The desire to escape the dialectic is not unfamiliar. Maybury begins by defining the Dominatrix, a figure of equal scorn and paradoxical popular interest. (It is true that the very notion of independent, autonomous Female sexuality has attracted much anxiety for centuries.) A “brilliant Woman” who goes against the grain, She is rich in symbols that convey “matriarchal severity”, vis-à-vis the Victorian governess. Indeed, Freud theorised a fetish for fur covering the genitals as inseparable from his Oedipal complex, or the son’s shock at discovering his Mother’s missing phallus. While that may have been true of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (the reluctant source for Krafft-Ebing’s clinical term), Mistress Rebecca is much less interested in pensises. The title Faster Than An Erection underscores Mistress’ method, namely that She must work fast in order to feel that She has truly taken something from them, to transcend the fantasy. She must work faster than their erections. In order to do this, operating under the conditions in which we exist, Mistress Rebecca must first play into that same fantasy to attract submissives; one may liken Her description of the Dominatrix’s fashions (boots, leather, PVC, vintage Gaultier and Westwood) to Bellinda donning her social battle armour in Pope’s mock epic: these are Her weapons. At the same time, Mistress Rebecca’s game-playing will inevitably explode any preconceptions that this is all simply at the whims of the submissive man’s fantasy, or topping from the bottom. It is theatre, yes, of the cruel and the absurd, but also political theatre, which means it must be open-facing to the world. Any cursory readers of Venus in Furs should have picked up on the possibility that Wanda did not actually want to dominate Severin, and some may even know that this was true of Sascher-Masoch’s real-life partner, Aurora von Rümelin. For Mistress Rebecca, this is Her authentic life. She acknowledges the contradictions — that the Mistress must become therapist and manage men’s emotions much like any other Woman involved with a man — and moves past them through Her practice. Namely, the issue of emotional labour is resolved through Maybury’s radical weaponisation of empathy: the Mistress is cruel but she need never raise Her voice. She runs a smooth, well-oiled machine.
A Socialist, Maybury confesses some ambivalence about Her universe’s affinities with capitalism. Insofar as making men labour to produce artwork for Her, Maybury assumes the role of capitalist creative director. This does not, however, stop Her enjoying putting Her submissives to work: “I play with My desires by ordering him to do banal tasks for Me––the Female pervert.” Maybury’s tasks may include: completing pencil drawings, or paint-by-number portraits of famous artworks, or even the boring bureaucratic administrative side of the commercial art world. Subject not object, the world moves for Her. She is the interesting one, not her submissives. They do not exist. This is confirmed by her exhibitions ‘Used Men’ (2021) and ‘Ungainly Positions’ (2025), in which items of men’s clothing (donated by her submissives) are strewn across the floor for us to inspect. Decontextualised and out of view, the sub himself is but a spectre haunting the work: “man [...] erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”. In the economics of sex work, Maybury draws attention to the consumer, in his absence, and in so doing comments on how often he is permitted the freedom of his anonymity, his “holiday from capitalism”, which the sex worker can never have. Defining sex as the original act of creation, Maybury delineates sex work as a kind of production. Her world is a factory and men are the cogs in the machine. If ever one had tried to find a real life example of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines, perhaps this was it. What is being produced is not only the physical artwork, for which the submissives receive no credit, but also the potential of an erotic experience. This is a potential which, in the Lacanian sense, must go unfulfilled, constantly leaving the submissive wanting more and thus motivating him to work harder. Sex as nothing more than an idea, as foreplay. It is also because, as Maybury explains, the Dominatrix is infertile. And so pregnancy is anathema to the Dominatrix, though a dominant Woman can make use of a man for sex if She wishes. However, the submissive cannot expect to cum; he can only imagine what lies beneath, or Her nakedness does not even figure for him. The sex worker, then, fits into the mould of a Deleuzian definition of desire not simply as lack (for Deleuze was Lacan’s appointed successor) but as itself manufacturing that lack; rather, She creates Her own value.
Maybury’s praxis is accelerationist in robbing men of the world’s most vital resource, time. So too is the sex worker in Her pursuit of instant money, of avoiding the delays and indignities of wage labour. Meanwhile, men are made to work and, crucially, to unpick their “access to ease”. The only way to deal with the tragedy of white patriarchal capitalism is to turn it into comedy, although in this comedy of labours Sisyphus is actually happy. Choosing to meet Her clients in capitalism’s liminal spaces, hotel rooms, AirBnBs, even outside their offices, Mistress Rebecca unmakes these semiotic codes. As the first part of a poem by Cassandra Troyan interpolated into the text concludes, “We must destroy this world”. Being an artist, Maybury has thought about Her practice perhaps more than most. For example, dominating men outside their place of work contravenes common sense that kink is ‘shadow play/work’, with ‘shadow’ implying both a kind of therapeutic benefit and that it should be conducted in private. David Smail has critiqued therapy on the basis of its isolationism, of treating therapy as a sterile laboratory clean of outside problems. If both kink and therapy share this idea of a psychological ‘frame’ (both are called ‘sessions’ and often limited to an hour), then Mistress Rebecca shatters that frame. She writes, “Fantasy is fabulous but it is even better when it is lived on the streets when the session ends”. Perhaps the reason why Maybury strives to make men politicise their submission is because the World is already an inherently political experience for Women. This point owes to the fact that in discourses today the word ‘political’ so often signifies ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’, whereas Maybury wishes to cultivate a more thorough understanding of power relations. Hence, She has been called the ‘political dominatrix’, attracting the wrath of the right-wing press for daring to interrogate how many men with this fetish can be conservative antifeminists in their everyday life. Dominants remark that men are very often completely unaware of the power they have relative to others, of the ways in which they move through the world and the space they take up. Why should political re-education not fit within the kind of transformative experience that these men are already seeking? Simply, Mistress Rebecca’s submissives get what they put in and so “must be open to transforming their comforts because without that there is no progression”. This, She defines as the “difference between the erotic and the pornographic”. Perhaps a good example of this today is the chastity fetish. In a culture of abundant pornography and choice overload, denial becomes charged, eroticised. The idea of pleasure is better than the thing itself. In this way, Maybury offers ways of seeing and unseeing the world, of unlearning, of making and unmaking.
An understanding of both work and sexuality is fundamental to Her practice. Aware that Her job (artist, lecturer, model, and dominatrix) brings with it fetishisation, Maybury rejects not only the concept of ‘honest’ work but also the status work can give you. Augusta Webster in Her dramatic monologue ‘Castaway’, in which She performs the role of sex worker, similarly pointed the finger at lawyers and businessmen, the real liars of the world. Rejecting shame (“Once I chose to keep My legs open––nothing could harm Me”), Maybury both shields herself against a misogynistic culture and neutralises it by mobilising Her body for “power disruption”. In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre labels the Female sex organ a ‘“call for being”, an indefensible bit of misogyny in likening the yonic to a wound. Sartre is also wrong in his essentialist ‘lock-and-key’ suggestion of Woman as secondary to man. This is made most obvious by the fact that such men come to dominant Women seeking to extract from their experiential knowledge a transference which will lead to their own embodiment of “transcendence”:
She is wise and capable, and the submissives go to Her for this because they are too incompetent to handle the true force of sex.
As Maybury writes, “I think most clearly when fucking or domming”. Valerie Solanas on page 1 of Her SCUM Manifesto goes further in calling men a genetic defect, the “incomplete Female”. Maybury, instead, takes the view that there is nothing wrong with these men, because there is no such thing as normal sex. She understands sexuality as vital, as the essence of our lives. Indeed, Freud theorised one’s sexual conduct as a “prototype” for the rest of their behaviour in life. Could then the reverse not be true, that men being good capitalist worker bees might make them, more often than not, natural submissives? This would fit with Deleuze’s emphasis on the relationship between masochism and monotony/repetition, though Gayle Rubin chastises his ignorance of professional Mistresses. Maybury shrugs off the offensive victim narrative, stating as Her only trauma “how inextricably boring most masculine culture is”. The “gatekeepers of sexual anarchy”, Mistresses get to see men not as saviours but as weak; the penis, rendered endearing, disarmed, once an object of sexual threat now disempowered, flaccid. Mistress Rebecca’s cruel sense of humour is again reflected in Her choice of names for submissives, refusing to give them ones they might enjoy. Through such names as “(i’m a complete product of the 60s and 70s)”, She blurs the line between analyst and humiliatrix, offering incisive social commentary on the limits of masculinity. And in Her final analysis, the sexual revolution failed, leaving behind a social polyamory that serves the interests of men. A key influence for Maybury is Kristeva’s philosophy of abjection: the horror of a breakdown in the body’s borders or disruptions to the social order. When She challenges these norms the Dominatrix becomes an archetype of disgust, like Aurora Floyd and Her whip or Medea’s anti-reproductive violence. A monstrous Female sexuality unleashed. And perhaps that is why Maybury concludes that all fetishes are inherently dead.
Conceptions of power up to this point have either emphasized that it is top-down and largely dictated by economics (the Marxist) or that it is top-down but flows through all of us in ways we struggle to quantify and therefore must qualify (the Foucauldian). Both are difficult to change. The Dominatrix stands in opposition to these facts. Far from being wholly subject to a prism of circuits and flows, She subverts Her conditions and takes Power as something She can control. Mistress Rebecca’s provocation is a daring one: sex and sadomasochism are everywhere. Present human social relations simply revolve around a denial of this reality. Once we accept it, perhaps “tomorrow sex will be good again”. This is the world Maybury is building for Women. What undergirds Faster Than an Erection is, essentially, a fascination with ethics. Rather, Female domination is a way of living, of unmasking the world and remaking it. Dedicating her book to Sophie Gwen Williams and Lauren Berlant, and donating profits to sex worker charities, the politics of liberation are at the forefront of anything Reba Maybury/Mistress Rebecca does. Domination as performance art, text as autotheory; Her work is spread out across one massive, interlocking canvas, a palimpsest of creative labour, energetic and dynamic, constantly unfolding. In making men useful, Mistress Rebecca reverses the age-old equation, “All that is solid melts into air”. She lives Her life as art.
Dominatrix Mistress Rebecca (otherwise known as internationally renowned artist Reba Maybury) wants more than money. She wants to feel tangible Power in her hands. A self-described socialist, the spectral glow of capital does not satisfy Her. This stands in opposition to much of today’s current femdom trends which seem to, in a fashion not unlike Marxian commodity fetishism, eroticise money, with “findom” or financial domination largely saturating the online Female domination market. Instead, Mistress Rebecca envisions a much larger, more pressing, and difficult, task: to make men useful.
In Faster Than An Erection (2021), part manifesto/part tell-all for the world of Female domination, Mistress Rebecca lays out Her programme for life. Inextricable from the real political world, the stated aim of such a project is: “a more thorough landscape of Female power that demands a build up and an education towards a more thorough experience for both men and Women.” Experience is the operative term here as, for Maybury, the impetus behind Her domination is a desire for crossing limits and frontiers, so as to make sexuality boundless for Women. There is precedent here within the sadomasochism community as Michel Foucault, the thinker whose enjoyment of the San Francisco BDSM scene is all too well-documented, took from Nietszche the idea of trying to live as close to unliveable experiences as physically possible. This is, explicitly, a sadomasochistic ethics, of expansion, experimentation, and surplus enjoyment. Maybury’s calculation is rather more interesting. There is a world to win, and that world is a sexual one. Sexual liberation — true sexual liberation, not the faux corporate kind — may benefit men and Women, but ultimately the goal is to give back to Women something which they have been denied: an authentic, expansive, limitless sexuality not bound up with men’s bullshit, economic or otherwise.
The desire to escape the dialectic is not unfamiliar. Maybury begins by defining the Dominatrix, a figure of equal scorn and paradoxical popular interest. (It is true that the very notion of independent, autonomous Female sexuality has attracted much anxiety for centuries.) A “brilliant Woman” who goes against the grain, She is rich in symbols that convey “matriarchal severity”, vis-à-vis the Victorian governess. Indeed, Freud theorised a fetish for fur covering the genitals as inseparable from his Oedipal complex, or the son’s shock at discovering his Mother’s missing phallus. While that may have been true of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (the reluctant source for Krafft-Ebing’s clinical term), Mistress Rebecca is much less interested in pensises. The title Faster Than An Erection underscores Mistress’ method, namely that She must work fast in order to feel that She has truly taken something from them, to transcend the fantasy. She must work faster than their erections. In order to do this, operating under the conditions in which we exist, Mistress Rebecca must first play into that same fantasy to attract submissives; one may liken Her description of the Dominatrix’s fashions (boots, leather, PVC, vintage Gaultier and Westwood) to Bellinda donning her social battle armour in Pope’s mock epic: these are Her weapons. At the same time, Mistress Rebecca’s game-playing will inevitably explode any preconceptions that this is all simply at the whims of the submissive man’s fantasy, or topping from the bottom. It is theatre, yes, of the cruel and the absurd, but also political theatre, which means it must be open-facing to the world. Any cursory readers of Venus in Furs should have picked up on the possibility that Wanda did not actually want to dominate Severin, and some may even know that this was true of Sascher-Masoch’s real-life partner, Aurora von Rümelin. For Mistress Rebecca, this is Her authentic life. She acknowledges the contradictions — that the Mistress must become therapist and manage men’s emotions much like any other Woman involved with a man — and moves past them through Her practice. Namely, the issue of emotional labour is resolved through Maybury’s radical weaponisation of empathy: the Mistress is cruel but she need never raise Her voice. She runs a smooth, well-oiled machine.
A Socialist, Maybury confesses some ambivalence about Her universe’s affinities with capitalism. Insofar as making men labour to produce artwork for Her, Maybury assumes the role of capitalist creative director. This does not, however, stop Her enjoying putting Her submissives to work: “I play with My desires by ordering him to do banal tasks for Me––the Female pervert.” Maybury’s tasks may include: completing pencil drawings, or paint-by-number portraits of famous artworks, or even the boring bureaucratic administrative side of the commercial art world. Subject not object, the world moves for Her. She is the interesting one, not her submissives. They do not exist. This is confirmed by her exhibitions ‘Used Men’ (2021) and ‘Ungainly Positions’ (2025), in which items of men’s clothing (donated by her submissives) are strewn across the floor for us to inspect. Decontextualised and out of view, the sub himself is but a spectre haunting the work: “man [...] erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”. In the economics of sex work, Maybury draws attention to the consumer, in his absence, and in so doing comments on how often he is permitted the freedom of his anonymity, his “holiday from capitalism”, which the sex worker can never have. Defining sex as the original act of creation, Maybury delineates sex work as a kind of production. Her world is a factory and men are the cogs in the machine. If ever one had tried to find a real life example of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines, perhaps this was it. What is being produced is not only the physical artwork, for which the submissives receive no credit, but also the potential of an erotic experience. This is a potential which, in the Lacanian sense, must go unfulfilled, constantly leaving the submissive wanting more and thus motivating him to work harder. Sex as nothing more than an idea, as foreplay. It is also because, as Maybury explains, the Dominatrix is infertile. And so pregnancy is anathema to the Dominatrix, though a dominant Woman can make use of a man for sex if She wishes. However, the submissive cannot expect to cum; he can only imagine what lies beneath, or Her nakedness does not even figure for him. The sex worker, then, fits into the mould of a Deleuzian definition of desire not simply as lack (for Deleuze was Lacan’s appointed successor) but as itself manufacturing that lack; rather, She creates Her own value.
Maybury’s praxis is accelerationist in robbing men of the world’s most vital resource, time. So too is the sex worker in Her pursuit of instant money, of avoiding the delays and indignities of wage labour. Meanwhile, men are made to work and, crucially, to unpick their “access to ease”. The only way to deal with the tragedy of white patriarchal capitalism is to turn it into comedy, although in this comedy of labours Sisyphus is actually happy. Choosing to meet Her clients in capitalism’s liminal spaces, hotel rooms, AirBnBs, even outside their offices, Mistress Rebecca unmakes these semiotic codes. As the first part of a poem by Cassandra Troyan interpolated into the text concludes, “We must destroy this world”. Being an artist, Maybury has thought about Her practice perhaps more than most. For example, dominating men outside their place of work contravenes common sense that kink is ‘shadow play/work’, with ‘shadow’ implying both a kind of therapeutic benefit and that it should be conducted in private. David Smail has critiqued therapy on the basis of its isolationism, of treating therapy as a sterile laboratory clean of outside problems. If both kink and therapy share this idea of a psychological ‘frame’ (both are called ‘sessions’ and often limited to an hour), then Mistress Rebecca shatters that frame. She writes, “Fantasy is fabulous but it is even better when it is lived on the streets when the session ends”. Perhaps the reason why Maybury strives to make men politicise their submission is because the World is already an inherently political experience for Women. This point owes to the fact that in discourses today the word ‘political’ so often signifies ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’, whereas Maybury wishes to cultivate a more thorough understanding of power relations. Hence, She has been called the ‘political dominatrix’, attracting the wrath of the right-wing press for daring to interrogate how many men with this fetish can be conservative antifeminists in their everyday life. Dominants remark that men are very often completely unaware of the power they have relative to others, of the ways in which they move through the world and the space they take up. Why should political re-education not fit within the kind of transformative experience that these men are already seeking? Simply, Mistress Rebecca’s submissives get what they put in and so “must be open to transforming their comforts because without that there is no progression”. This, She defines as the “difference between the erotic and the pornographic”. Perhaps a good example of this today is the chastity fetish. In a culture of abundant pornography and choice overload, denial becomes charged, eroticised. The idea of pleasure is better than the thing itself. In this way, Maybury offers ways of seeing and unseeing the world, of unlearning, of making and unmaking.
An understanding of both work and sexuality is fundamental to Her practice. Aware that Her job (artist, lecturer, model, and dominatrix) brings with it fetishisation, Maybury rejects not only the concept of ‘honest’ work but also the status work can give you. Augusta Webster in Her dramatic monologue ‘Castaway’, in which She performs the role of sex worker, similarly pointed the finger at lawyers and businessmen, the real liars of the world. Rejecting shame (“Once I chose to keep My legs open––nothing could harm Me”), Maybury both shields herself against a misogynistic culture and neutralises it by mobilising Her body for “power disruption”. In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre labels the Female sex organ a ‘“call for being”, an indefensible bit of misogyny in likening the yonic to a wound. Sartre is also wrong in his essentialist ‘lock-and-key’ suggestion of Woman as secondary to man. This is made most obvious by the fact that such men come to dominant Women seeking to extract from their experiential knowledge a transference which will lead to their own embodiment of “transcendence”:
She is wise and capable, and the submissives go to Her for this because they are too incompetent to handle the true force of sex.
As Maybury writes, “I think most clearly when fucking or domming”. Valerie Solanas on page 1 of Her SCUM Manifesto goes further in calling men a genetic defect, the “incomplete Female”. Maybury, instead, takes the view that there is nothing wrong with these men, because there is no such thing as normal sex. She understands sexuality as vital, as the essence of our lives. Indeed, Freud theorised one’s sexual conduct as a “prototype” for the rest of their behaviour in life. Could then the reverse not be true, that men being good capitalist worker bees might make them, more often than not, natural submissives? This would fit with Deleuze’s emphasis on the relationship between masochism and monotony/repetition, though Gayle Rubin chastises his ignorance of professional Mistresses. Maybury shrugs off the offensive victim narrative, stating as Her only trauma “how inextricably boring most masculine culture is”. The “gatekeepers of sexual anarchy”, Mistresses get to see men not as saviours but as weak; the penis, rendered endearing, disarmed, once an object of sexual threat now disempowered, flaccid. Mistress Rebecca’s cruel sense of humour is again reflected in Her choice of names for submissives, refusing to give them ones they might enjoy. Through such names as “(i’m a complete product of the 60s and 70s)”, She blurs the line between analyst and humiliatrix, offering incisive social commentary on the limits of masculinity. And in Her final analysis, the sexual revolution failed, leaving behind a social polyamory that serves the interests of men. A key influence for Maybury is Kristeva’s philosophy of abjection: the horror of a breakdown in the body’s borders or disruptions to the social order. When She challenges these norms the Dominatrix becomes an archetype of disgust, like Aurora Floyd and Her whip or Medea’s anti-reproductive violence. A monstrous Female sexuality unleashed. And perhaps that is why Maybury concludes that all fetishes are inherently dead.
Conceptions of power up to this point have either emphasized that it is top-down and largely dictated by economics (the Marxist) or that it is top-down but flows through all of us in ways we struggle to quantify and therefore must qualify (the Foucauldian). Both are difficult to change. The Dominatrix stands in opposition to these facts. Far from being wholly subject to a prism of circuits and flows, She subverts Her conditions and takes Power as something She can control. Mistress Rebecca’s provocation is a daring one: sex and sadomasochism are everywhere. Present human social relations simply revolve around a denial of this reality. Once we accept it, perhaps “tomorrow sex will be good again”. This is the world Maybury is building for Women. What undergirds Faster Than an Erection is, essentially, a fascination with ethics. Rather, Female domination is a way of living, of unmasking the world and remaking it. Dedicating her book to Sophie Gwen Williams and Lauren Berlant, and donating profits to sex worker charities, the politics of liberation are at the forefront of anything Reba Maybury/Mistress Rebecca does. Domination as performance art, text as autotheory; Her work is spread out across one massive, interlocking canvas, a palimpsest of creative labour, energetic and dynamic, constantly unfolding. In making men useful, Mistress Rebecca reverses the age-old equation, “All that is solid melts into air”. She lives Her life as art.
February 6, 2025
This is a review for my second reading. If you are confused I should note that the first one was made when I was one of Reba Mayburys submissives, and she asked me to make a review for her. Naturally I was biased, but this time I telling my own thoughts.
Due to the fact that Reba transgressed my boundaries and bullied me about my struggle with my mental health, which I am still trying to cope with months later, I have a lot of resentment towards Maybury.
This was in mid October 2024 right before her exhibition in Copenhagen at Simian that I was a big part of. She tried to manipulate me into considering that maybe my needs were less important than hers, she was a mother and I was a student. She also tried to gaslight me into thinking that I was asking her to fix my depressive thoughts, when really I was just asking to be acknowledged, have a break from the dynamic and at least get an apology out of her after the conflict.
In this book review I will try to exploit the further damages it has done to me. Some points can be down right toxic to say the least.
1: All actions are transactional.
Like the sexworker we are all just doing what we do for capital and our own gain. We are all whores in the end. It’s a type of cynicism that you would expect coming from a sexworker, but only those that find no fulfillment in their work (no pun intended).
2: Making art as humiliation and punishment.
I can recall watching a video of Hayo Miasaki in a meeting with AI experts showing him the possibilities of making ai-generated animations. He reacted by saying that he wanted no part in it, and that AI might be an insult to life itself.
What he means is that the medium is lacy and soulless compared to human-crafted animation. The making of the art is an essential part of the art, the struggle to learn a craft and the mistakes made along the way, and how this process feeds our creativity.
Though Maybury takes the insult even further and makes the craft of art a punishment or humiliation. Imagine having art as a hobby even being without much talent or skill, Maybury thinks you are embarrassing yourself.
It’s an essential point in critiquing her art I think, because most of the art is only a demonstration of using submissive men as a medium, not the actual outcome, it’s this idea that is essential to her art, and not much else can be said about most of “her” work.
3: It’s supposed to be boring
This is perhaps the biggest misconception Maybury has as a dominatrix. She has failed to understand sadomasochism as a concept, mainly the masochistic part. The title of the book, faster than an erection, is a hint that the submissive isn’t supposed to enjoy himself, yet this goes against everything masochism is - enjoyment from one's pain or humiliation. It should be obvious to some why, for example boredom and humiliation don’t mix, especially if the person gets excitement from it. There is no transgression in boredom, no erotisism, no pleasure, excitement, or surplus enjoyment, it is a state of depression.
The masochistic aspect of sadomasochism is what distinguishes it from literal slavery and tyranny. Maybury is contradictory towards herself, in that she starts out by explaining that the task of a dominatrix is to weaponize empathy, which is a nice observation, but sad to see that she lacks this empathy.
She will argue that the lack of enjoyment on the submissive’s part is part of her rebellious agenda for female power, but this undercuts the transactional part of the arrangement.
The Paradox of pleasure in pain in masochism is not one that needs to be dissolved, since it is the foundation of the dialectical aspect of sadomasochism.
To Conclude
In summation the book argues that all work is painful and humiliating, which we all are transactioning in between ourselves in our capitalistic hellscape. If you seek pleasure either in art or the erotic, for escapism or to transgress you will feel sorry.
Kafkaesque or maybe just Nihilism? Maybe not even.
With so many contradictions in the book that don’t mix when put together it is perhaps better to conclude that Maybury is just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. She doesn’t know what she is doing, but she can mask this with her fancy vocabulary and not so subtle Nabokov references, to make you think she knows what she is talking about. In the end Maybury just wants some men to make some art for her that she can use for clout and profit, her ideas aren't original and she doesn't respect the boundaries of these men. On page 11 she writes:
"They can never give Me enough. These men’s submission to Me gives them a vulnerability which unfortunately has to be respected".
Paired with a quote from page 13: "Fantasy is fabulous but it is even better when it is lived on the streets when the session ends."
One might accuse me and others of knowing what we are getting ourselves into, but if I had to sit here and write that consent doesn't matter in sadomasochism I would sooner kill myself. Which I have attempted once almost twice since I met Reba Maybury.
With love one can live even without happiness.
And children aren’t obstacles, they are a goal in themselves, Reba.
I think you could do a lot better.
Due to the fact that Reba transgressed my boundaries and bullied me about my struggle with my mental health, which I am still trying to cope with months later, I have a lot of resentment towards Maybury.
This was in mid October 2024 right before her exhibition in Copenhagen at Simian that I was a big part of. She tried to manipulate me into considering that maybe my needs were less important than hers, she was a mother and I was a student. She also tried to gaslight me into thinking that I was asking her to fix my depressive thoughts, when really I was just asking to be acknowledged, have a break from the dynamic and at least get an apology out of her after the conflict.
In this book review I will try to exploit the further damages it has done to me. Some points can be down right toxic to say the least.
1: All actions are transactional.
Like the sexworker we are all just doing what we do for capital and our own gain. We are all whores in the end. It’s a type of cynicism that you would expect coming from a sexworker, but only those that find no fulfillment in their work (no pun intended).
2: Making art as humiliation and punishment.
I can recall watching a video of Hayo Miasaki in a meeting with AI experts showing him the possibilities of making ai-generated animations. He reacted by saying that he wanted no part in it, and that AI might be an insult to life itself.
What he means is that the medium is lacy and soulless compared to human-crafted animation. The making of the art is an essential part of the art, the struggle to learn a craft and the mistakes made along the way, and how this process feeds our creativity.
Though Maybury takes the insult even further and makes the craft of art a punishment or humiliation. Imagine having art as a hobby even being without much talent or skill, Maybury thinks you are embarrassing yourself.
It’s an essential point in critiquing her art I think, because most of the art is only a demonstration of using submissive men as a medium, not the actual outcome, it’s this idea that is essential to her art, and not much else can be said about most of “her” work.
3: It’s supposed to be boring
This is perhaps the biggest misconception Maybury has as a dominatrix. She has failed to understand sadomasochism as a concept, mainly the masochistic part. The title of the book, faster than an erection, is a hint that the submissive isn’t supposed to enjoy himself, yet this goes against everything masochism is - enjoyment from one's pain or humiliation. It should be obvious to some why, for example boredom and humiliation don’t mix, especially if the person gets excitement from it. There is no transgression in boredom, no erotisism, no pleasure, excitement, or surplus enjoyment, it is a state of depression.
The masochistic aspect of sadomasochism is what distinguishes it from literal slavery and tyranny. Maybury is contradictory towards herself, in that she starts out by explaining that the task of a dominatrix is to weaponize empathy, which is a nice observation, but sad to see that she lacks this empathy.
She will argue that the lack of enjoyment on the submissive’s part is part of her rebellious agenda for female power, but this undercuts the transactional part of the arrangement.
The Paradox of pleasure in pain in masochism is not one that needs to be dissolved, since it is the foundation of the dialectical aspect of sadomasochism.
To Conclude
In summation the book argues that all work is painful and humiliating, which we all are transactioning in between ourselves in our capitalistic hellscape. If you seek pleasure either in art or the erotic, for escapism or to transgress you will feel sorry.
Kafkaesque or maybe just Nihilism? Maybe not even.
With so many contradictions in the book that don’t mix when put together it is perhaps better to conclude that Maybury is just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. She doesn’t know what she is doing, but she can mask this with her fancy vocabulary and not so subtle Nabokov references, to make you think she knows what she is talking about. In the end Maybury just wants some men to make some art for her that she can use for clout and profit, her ideas aren't original and she doesn't respect the boundaries of these men. On page 11 she writes:
"They can never give Me enough. These men’s submission to Me gives them a vulnerability which unfortunately has to be respected".
Paired with a quote from page 13: "Fantasy is fabulous but it is even better when it is lived on the streets when the session ends."
One might accuse me and others of knowing what we are getting ourselves into, but if I had to sit here and write that consent doesn't matter in sadomasochism I would sooner kill myself. Which I have attempted once almost twice since I met Reba Maybury.
With love one can live even without happiness.
And children aren’t obstacles, they are a goal in themselves, Reba.
I think you could do a lot better.
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