LOS ANGELES—“You’re lucky I’m such a sweetheart,” the dominatrix Goddess Nikki Kit says, “because I could really use My talents for evil if I chose to.”
Throughout a wide-ranging conversation prompted by Kit’s new Better Beta Bootcamp, an eight-hour (and counting) online training series for “potential pets” that is every bit as entrepreneurial as one would expect from an authentic pro domme, but also startlingly confessional, Goddess Nikki addresses a persistent question about entertainers on Her side of the sex industry: What’s with all the capitalization of pronouns?
“It’s a form of respect,” She says, “because dommes are a different animal, and We liberate people.”
Liberation is important to Kit because, not only is it a byproduct of submission and consent (“and I’m all the fuck about consent,” she says), but it also figures into a controversial (at least as far as payment processors go) aspect of sub training: mesmerism.
“We can’t even use the ‘H’ word,” Kit says of the practice of employing subconscious suggestion to get a client to part with his inhibitions or money, “because Mastercard would shut us down. So we use ‘mesmerism’ for now. But when you, as a man, have a hot girl in front of you—even on a screen—and she’s telling you how to breathe, and she’s granting or withholding permission to cum, then you are willingly giving control to me. I can’t ever ‘make’ someone do something that they don’t want to do already.”
We talk in the summer of 2020, around the time Major League Baseball’s All Star Break would be happening were it not for a global pandemic that has made everyone—sex workers included—reconsider their pitches.
“I needed to work on My website anyway,” Kit says of the hiatus that spawned the Bootcamp project, “but I found Myself writing a lot more than I expected to.”
And that writing, the 24-year-old former stripper says, became a lot more personal than She’d expected. From her home in Ohio, where she conducts her sessions online, Kit realized that, in instructing submissives how best to serve Her, She felt the need to explain Herself in a way that broke long transactional BDSM precedents of privacy and invulnerability.
“(I wrote about) My own abuse and trauma,” she says, “and how that helped me realize I would never be dependent on a man again.”
It is as tempting as it is reductive to speculate why a woman becomes a dominatrix, but Kit does allow that, in her stripping days, she saw “the worst of male behavior.” From the stage or in the VIP Room, she says, she witnessed “disgusting behavior every night.” But that wasn’t what began her transformation to Goddess Nikki.
“I always had submissives in my life,” she says. “I think I was born this way.” She became a stripper at age 18, learning the ropes quickly and seeking out better clubs. And her innate understanding of male needs, she says, allowed her to pick out submissive men from the D.J.’s perch in the club.
“I’d go from table to table,” she says, pointing. “I’d go: ’Sub, sub, sub.’ I’d just find the bitch in the group.” And that’s the person she’d single out to offer a dance to.
“Believe me” she says. “You know it’s like a drug. The guy is all like, ‘Pretty Girl! Cum? Can I cum?’
“And, as you know,” she says, quoting “Spiderman’s gentle Uncle Ben, “’With great power comes great responsibility.’”
Kit feels responsibility to both demystify the Domme/sub (D/s) relationship as well as to hold it to a higher stanbdard.
Kit’s program, available exclusively on DIYFemDom.com for now, reflects Kit’s own journey with yoga, with sobriety, and with being purposefully single for the first time in many years. “I’m asking My potential pets to journal, to meditate, and to meditate on Me,” she says. And she balances this with Her own transparency. “I go so deep into My own journey in Week 4 so (submissives) understand the battle within themselves.”
Kit describes the Better Beta Bootcamp as “thorough and nurturing” and emphasizes communication, correct terminology, and differentiates between fantasy and reality. Indeed, Kit really gets going on those people who have an oversized presence on social media but haven’t educated themselves about BDSM ethics and proper consent and give true dommes a bad name.
“I’m trying to restore a little balance here,” She says. “I get really fed up with these extreme fantasies, and where people work hard to overcomplicate D/s relationships.”
Does She think porn has played a role in that?
“Oh, of course,” She says, laughing ruefully. “There’s the sub who believes the D/s relationship is all about her kicking him, whipping him, sticking a 12-inch dildo up his butt, screaming obscenities…he thinks ‘this is what that world is like’ and might get scared off or not know the full potential of such a relationship.”
Even for people who don’t gravitate to the BDSM world, Kit’s Better Beta Bootcamp is educational, compelling, and provocative. It doesn’t pull punches and it isn’t the dress-up, playacting kind of content a consumer might expect from a producer who had a few PVC outfits lying around. Its honesty demands the viewer reckon with it.
By removing the mystery from the domme’s own story, does Kit think She might get in trouble?
“It will either make or break my career,” She says.
Photography courtesy of Goddess Nikki Kit
