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I’ve been in a lot of dungeons, but never one quite like Salon d’Orleans. Located in a mysterious midtown Manhattan building, the studio of dominatrix Troy Orleans is ordered and calming. Like yoga centers or other sacred spaces, it’s one of those NYC locales that has been meticulously designed to make you feel like you’ve crossed a threshold into a place of different possibility. As I looked around, I got an inkling of why people who come here might feel they were contained by something that can help them dive within.
Some BDSM spaces are too over-designed for my taste, too obvious. In Troy’s dungeon, every single object has a deliberate purpose. From our seats in the corner where we sipped gin and tonics and ate popcorn, I could see man-sized wrought iron cages, rows of leather suspension cuffs, and wooden cabinets with glass doors revealing seemingly endless implements of torture. This might have been what Prince described when he sang of Darling Nikki’s castle, which “had so many devices, everything that money could buy.” Troy’s gear is obviously rare and customized — yes, it’s the result of years of investment in serious professional play — but it’s not flashy for the sake of surface flash or petty intimidation. Every object here has a meaning, a potential, and a history.
Actually, one object doesn’t have a history, not yet. The enormous rubber straitjacket that Troy just picked up from the post office. She lays it out for me like a successful musician showing me an exciting new fuzz pedal. I don’t know what kind of pitch modulation this toy can create, but I know that Troy knows, and that she can’t wait to play with it.
Orleans herself is not quite as severe as her gear. She is well-spoken and measured, although she often cracks wise. She has been working as a professional dominatrix in Manhattan for over a decade. As we discussed the appeal of bondage, something I have quite a lot of experience in, I felt like someone who has been to some yoga classes talking with someone who facilitates week-long meditation retreats. I have a sense of what the depths look like from the surface, but she’s been down there in it.
So why do people want Troy to put them in bondage? Troy and I discussed several possibilities. She spoke of the difference between constriction and restriction: Some people want to feel the pressure of something pressing into them, holding them, while others want something to prevent them from moving.
I told her that one thing I like about bondage is just having something to struggle against, something to hold me in place. I also confessed I was turned on by the abdication of responsibility. When I’m in bondage, I know I’m right where my partner wants me. All I have to do is accept their desire. I like being physically controlled because it makes me feel like I’m pleasing my partner.
“It doesn’t matter how much you want something; you can’t have it. You do what the bondage wants,” she says, with the rapturous tone of someone discussing their great passion.
Troy and I spoke for over an hour for episode 42 of Why Are People Into That?!. She told me about how she went from a relatively unkinky person to one of the best-known intense bondage dominatrixes in NYC, if not the world. She elaborated on the experience of being a woman of color who is professionally in control of men as well as her own agency and desire.
“My desire doesn’t even begin until the man is in the bodybag,” she smirks.
She describes the experience of putting clients in immobilizing bondage as a kind of conscious-altering experience. Her toys for sensory deprivation, from blindfolds to hoods to mitts, take you away from an overstimulated world and into one where you can just . . . float.
As I left Troy’s studio and descended into the subway, I looked around me at everyone who has their own struggle. I thought about how they would all react to being put in bondage, and realized bondage is something we can all relate to. Erotic bondage may be the best way for us to feel immersed in the experience of struggling against our restraints, and it may be the best way to recognize how to be truly free.
All photos courtesy of Troy Orleans.
