She’ll kidnap you and read you The Communist Manifesto in her dungeon

Paula Dreidemie, a Barcelona-based dominatrix, runs a dungeon out of a storage unit, where men pay to be dominated, degraded, and assigned homework.

Last summer, I spent a humid day in a storage unit in Barcelona with Paula Dreidemie, a dominatrix whose clients pay her to be kidnapped.

We had the best day—eating at a local Catalan restaurant, then stepping down into her subterranean office, where a metal dog crate and a colorful assortment of dildos, gags, whips, and chastity cages decorated the otherwise bare room.

What drew me to Paula—this Argentine dom halfway across the world—wasn’t just the allure of a foreign dungeon. (I do love a dungeon.) It was that she used her sessions to read aloud books on feminism, Marxism, sexuality, communism, Critical Race Theory, and other anti-oppression lit to her unsuspecting clients. In her imperfect English, she explained that she would “read” her clients—locating their baggage, prejudices, preconceptions, and biases—and then choose a book she felt would benefit them most. She described her re-education attempts as “taking things off them”—a slow unlayering of learned beliefs and power structures.

I love discovering the bizarre and inspired ways artists and workers in the sex industry subvert traditional sex work—spice it up, weird it up, muck it up. The idea of reading The Communist Manifesto to a middle-aged man in a dog crate, really gets me. There’s no doubt in my mind Paula Dreidemie is making the world a better place.

This article originally appeared in Playgirl.com, 2024. Read the full version here.

“They come for the body, but stay because they’re chained,” Paula Dreidemie says with a smirk. She sips demurely on a dark red wine. It’s lunchtime, and Paula, a dominatrix who operates a dungeon out of a storage unit in Barcelona, has suggested a local eatery down the block from her underground office. She’s wearing a black mesh top and red lipstick. She looks like an old Hollywood villain as she removes her headscarf, releasing corkscrew brown curls and blunt bangs.

“You might not believe it,” Paula says. “But there’s a big market for being kidnapped.” Her thick Argentine accent curls around every word as we dig into decadent plates of lamb, octopus, and some kind of vegetable soup. The scrawling menu is in Catalan, which neither of us speaks; however, Paula’s Spanish has secured us each a glass of wine and a substantial three-course meal with unidentifiable meat.

Paula is a 33-year-old writer, filmmaker, and artist whose interest in studying and practicing theories of punishment, pain, and discipline has led her down an unconventional path into the psycho-sexual world of domination. Her practice of BDSM—a popular shorthand for bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadism—is more elaborate than a spank or blindfold. It’s a state of mind that enables Paula to dominate her clients completely: physically, mentally, and even intellectually.

I met Paula a year ago, when she was working in Paris. She had turned a basement that once stored charcoal in its dank stone cavern nearly two centuries ago into an office, where she stashed clients who had paid to be kidnapped. A year later, Paula’s operation has moved over 600 miles, away from longtime clients and her fiancé. Fortunately, the prospective clients are just as freaky in Barcelona, she assures me.

“Each city has their own fetishes, because it’s related to culture,” Paula explains. “What is forbidden here? What is a really nasty thing in this culture?” she says. “They’re obsessed with poop here. Probably something to do with the Catholic Church,” she shrugs. Paula’s most devoted clients never had to say goodbye — they make the trek to Barcelona for her niche services.

Known to her clients as Goddess Tisiphone—the fair but cruel namesake of the ancient Greek goddess of vengeance—Paula morphs into her dominatrix alter ego by channeling that vicious femininity into a political exercise of dominance and re-education. When you picture a dominatrix, what may come to mind is an imposing woman dressed in studded latex, paid to humiliate her clients for sexual pleasure. In the case of Goddess Tisiphone, clients pay to be kidnapped, humiliated, and ultimately educated by Paula.

In the quaint, working-class district of Barcelona’s Sants, Paula’s new office is a basement storage rental where she’s set up her dungeon alongside an extensive book collection. Slowly, she’s tackling the laborious—and expensive—task of rebuilding her library in her new country’s language. With these books, she re-educates her clients in matters of social justice, workers’ rights, feminism, queerness, gender ideology, colonialism, art, and more. “The literature [assigned] is changing because the world is changing, but we learn to find pleasure even when the world is falling apart,” Paula says.

A typical day’s work may include an “afternoon meeting” where she smokes hand-rolled joints as a wriggling prisoner hangs from the bolted metal chains she’s installed in the ceiling. Later, she’ll quiz him on the philosophies of Sacher-Masoch, whose introductory book she’s left for him to read. “I play a game of you’ve been a good boy, you’ve been a bad boy, and test them on the books that I leave.” Maybe she’ll leave him for a while and grab some dinner. Maybe she’ll lean back in her chair with a cool nonchalance and watch.

Most of her clients are older, rich, white men — but not because they’re the only ones who crave complete submission, she explains. “They’re the ones who have been taught to feel comfortable with the idea of paying for this type of pleasure.” Paula’s keen eye for understanding people’s relationship to pleasure and pain comes not just from studying philosophy texts or classic literature. Her relationship with BDSM is also personal, appearing in her own dynamics long before she had the language to describe domination.

While Paula’s first paid domming gig was at a dungeon in Brooklyn at the age of 28, her dominatrix practice may date back to grade school. “I think I’ve always been a dominatrix,” Paula tells me, strumming her fingers against her chin. “I remember I had this classmate who would carry my books and do my homework. I would use him as a horse during break time in front of everybody.” Paula starts laughing, adding, “But he was happy to do it!” There was also an after-school-hours subordinate. “I had a neighbor who would play games with me. He would leave crying every day, but the next day he would always come back.”

Decades later, Paula has successfully carved out a career built around both an interest and an encyclopedic understanding of domination. But more than just a skilled dominatrix, she’s an artist who genuinely enjoys practicing her craft. “[Being a dominatrix] is being an artist. It makes me grow as a person and brings me so much pleasure,” Paula says. “I would be doing this even if it wasn’t my job, so creating a space where I can do this in a very conscious and consensual way is very gratifying.” She throws a balled-up napkin into the saucy remnants of a large beef dish and looks at me with excitement: “Now want to see my dungeon?”