WHIPS AND KISSES

Readable memoir of ``Alice,'' by day a psychologist, by night ``Mistress Jacqueline'': a dominatrix, or ``fantasy engineer''- -although ``some people call me `Goddess.' '' Rimmer (The Harrad Experiment, etc.) and Tavel started out to interview 10 or 12 porno stars to find out how they abandoned parental sexual and religious conditioning, bared their bodies, and had sex in public. They landed Mistress Jacqueline, who wanted all their time for her own story. Jacqueline is, she says, the most sought-after, highly paid dominatrix on the West Coast, and has appeared on national talk shows with one of her slaves to discuss the sensitivities at the base of B&D (bondage and discipline). Much that she tells us is unspeakable indeed, but enlightening as well. Some forms of sexual abuse she thinks truly perverse, such as rape, in which there is no bond or mutual agreement. B&D is largely acting, but sometimes with gross activities that make even Jacqueline run out of the room and heave. What keeps her servile clients returning are their bonding to her, as well as her understanding that they truly need a bitch goddess—and her leather outfits say she's just that. Outside the dungeon, Alice/Jacqueline herself is more sexually responsive in the submissive role. Her opening chapters present her as an overachieving Marjorie Morningstar in the Bronx, rebelling painfully against a dominating mother and passive father. Her four-year marriage collapsed when her no-money husband chose to do stand-up comedy and let her work. Only at graduate school, undergoing therapy, did she learn that ``nothing is wrong or bad or ugly between consenting adults'' and that her obsession with spanking fantasies was okay. Sympathetic—but rough on the stomach.