Maggie Mayhem: Fetish Model and BDSM Maven 

Maggie Mayhem is overall unassuming and professional. She has on jeans and a plaid shirt on a Saturday afternoon, and only her three-inch black peep toe heels and handcuffs slung across the straps of her purse hint at any deviant extracurricular activities.

Almost immediately after she enters Day of the Dead Café, an aging photographer strikes up a conversation and asks to photograph her. Maggie sits at a circular table, poses coyly with her large iced coffee-and-chocolate-something, then stands up and shrugs her shoulders, looking as if the incident were the most natural in the world.

As she rises, the photographer suddenly remembers to ask for Maggie’s name.

“Maggie Mayhem,” she replies coolly. “Growing up, people always joked ‘Oh Maggie, like Maggie May.’ So I changed it a little.” With that, she grabs her coffee and walks out into the unusual winter sunshine.

One might assume that Maggie, twenty-four, is a debutant in the world of kink, slowly exploring different fetishes and activities and meeting new people. But one look at her resume proves something much different.

But we’ll get to that eventually. First, the realization.

Spanking is not Enough

Raised in southern California, Maggie had a budding interest in the colorful world of kink, though now she can’t articulate exactly what the catalyst was for her “deviance”.

“Being raised Catholic, I like to say that my own form of kink has something to do with Jesus suffering for our sins,” she says.

Maggie was banging down the doors of L.A.’s sex clubs shortly after she turned eighteen.

“I was always going to be a sexually open person,” she says in between taking puffs from her cigarette. “I was constantly curious and with an Internet connection, so I was able to explore at an earlier age than most people in the kink scene.”

Perhaps it was that ethernet cable that helped Maggie realize that she “didn't want to settle for the bondage club spanking equivalent of restaurant servers singing the house version of Happy Birthday.” The first public floggings she received at a goth club/dungeon in 2002 cemented her identity but left her wanting more.

“I don't feel that I was particularly changed by the event,” she wrote on her blog, Missmaggiemayhem.com. “I think I was actualized. It's the moment I can point to as the birth of Maggie Mayhem . . . It’s the first time that I came out into the world.”

Domination, Submission, and Fear

Leaving her all-girls Catholic school behind, Maggie ditched Los Angeles for UC Santa Cruz for a degree in modern literature and anthropology. There, in one of the most liberal cities in the state, Maggie spread her radical wings. “Sneaking into clubs underage gave me an idea of what sexuality was and how you could take a form of taboo sexuality and celebrate it.”

So Maggie, then blonde and still relatively green in the kink community, connected with a friend’s sister, a professional dominatrix, at a Los Angeles dungeon. Maggie started with overflow clients and eventually found her own clientele and a way to pay her bills.

Professional domme and submissive work allowed Maggie to view “the infinite diversity of human existence” and get close to doctors, lawyers, and other powerful men, people she normally would have been too skeptical to meet.

Soon Miss Maggie Mayhem began a pattern of pushing her limits. One of her most memorable clients: a man whose fantasy was to break into a girl’s apartment, put her in bondage, rape and kill her. He was “very polite” and didn’t hit any of her red flags so she agreed to partake. Still, she says, “It was a real test . . . It was almost like playing chicken with my own fear.”

Community Counselor and Kink Model

After graduating, Maggie moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.  While continuing to explore the fetish world, she also blogs on BDSM/Playpen.com and Carnalnation.com, posts on her own website Missmaggiemayhem.com, and works for San Francisco Sex Information's hotline, where she is an HIV test counselor for youth.

The self-proclaimed freaky chick no longer does professional domme and sub work but has found other ways to express her sexuality.
As a fetish model, she stood tied up with rope on the edge of a roof, naked except for red heels that bound her feet, and a gas mask that enveloped her entire head.

“Those shoes were so damn tight, I could barely walk. And they kept telling me to get closer and closer to the edge! It was crazy,” she says, laughing, and then adding, “I want to immortalize my youth because I won’t always be able to go to these physical extremes.”

Taking the physical to an even more extreme level, Maggie has delved deeper into play piercing. For a New Year’s Eve performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, she inserted rows of thin needles down her arms and belly, and tied a ribbon to each one. She let cast members pluck them from her skin. “It opened people’s eyes to this exotic thing,” she says. “I like being able to let people know that…it’s tangible.”

Sex Machine Performance and Hook Suspension Dreams

Although her badassness has been well established, Maggie played chicken with her fear yet again and appeared as an intermission act at Rope::Burn, a Valentine’s Day Japanese bondage performance in San Francisco. Scheduled to use a sex machine on stage, she worried about coming off as desperate and slutty. Despite initial nervousness, she received rave reviews.

For her next feat, she is interested in hook suspension. To my terrified look, she shrugs and explains, “It’s part of my character. I don’t say no often. I love meeting new people, seeing new things. Sex is just a part of that.”

Still, Maggie realizes that hook suspension is no simple task.

“Doing hook suspension would be celebrating my own strength. It makes life’s little challenges not seem as big.”

Jessica Lipsky is a journalism student at San Francisco State University and an intern at American Sexuality magazine. She is also a volunteer DJ at KUSF, 90.3 fm and flies by night under the name Terry Dactyl.