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here were six naked men with collars on. Six women sitting in a circle. And somewhere in the middle of learning to tie a ball hitch, a former salon owner from Maine had what can only be described as an awakening.
The image Rachel Steele describes from her first workshop at the Temple of Qi is not what most people picture when they hear the word "dungeon." There is no gothic darkness, no mysterious stranger in a leather mask. There are folding chairs, a Signal group chat, and Zoom calls every Wednesday where women from Oklahoma talk about their marriages. The dungeon, it turns out, looks a lot like a very well-organized support group — one that occasionally involves ropes.
Steele is CEO of Red MILF Productions and a veteran performer and producer with twenty years in the adult industry. She enrolled in Mistress Damiana Chi's domination academy after years of playing the dominant figure in her own content without ever consciously recognizing it as such. "I've always been the one in charge," she says. "In all the videos I've made, I'm always the one that walks in the room and takes control. I just didn't have the language for it." The academy gave her the language, the framework, and something she hadn't expected: a community of women who had nothing to do with adult entertainment and everything in common with her anyway.
What a BDSM Domination Academy Actually Teaches
Mistress Damiana Chi holds a PhD in psychology, and that matters, because it reframes what her academy is doing before you even walk in the door. This is not a course in how to dress in shiny clothes and tell someone what to do. It is a structured study in power dynamics, human psychology, and the four archetypes that, according to Chi's framework, every dominant woman embodies: the mother, the queen, the seductress, and the authoritarian. The work is in learning how to move between those archetypes intentionally, deploying the right energy in the right moment, and understanding why the person kneeling across from you is there in the first place.
"It's way more than just kinky sex," Steele says flatly. "It's the psychology. That's what really pulled me in." She describes sitting in the workshop circle, watching six slaves enter the room with collars on, and feeling two things at once: the surreal dissonance of the situation and the complete normalcy of what was actually happening. The slaves were consenting adults. The women learning to command them were doing so in a structured, supervised environment, with a mentor who treats the work as a serious discipline.
The practical instruction includes spanking, crops, rope work, and the mechanics of a ball tie — but the more significant lessons are linguistic and energetic. Chi teaches her students that the tone of a command must end with the vocal pitch dropping, not rising. A question goes up. An order goes down. It sounds simple. It is, in fact, the difference between asking someone to kneel and telling them to. If you have ever tried to dominate someone who wasn't sure you meant it, you already know how much that distinction matters.
Who Is Actually Showing Up to These Workshops
The answer to that question is more interesting than the obvious one. Yes, some students come from within the adult industry or the professional BDSM world, already operating in adjacent spaces and looking to formalize their skills. But a significant portion of Chi's students are what Steele calls "vanilla housewives" — women from conservative states, conventional marriages, and lives where BDSM is not a professional category but a curiosity they have been carrying around quietly for years.
Steele describes sitting in her workshop circle with women who had traveled from places like Oklahoma specifically to attend. They were not performers. They were not planning to become professional dominatrices. They were women who had spent decades in traditional domestic arrangements, felt something pulling at them in a direction they couldn't entirely name, and finally decided to follow it. They told their stories in the circle. They practiced on the slaves. They went home.
This is not as unusual as it sounds. Interest in BDSM education among non-practitioners has grown steadily alongside the broader mainstreaming of kink discourse, and structured academies like Chi's fill a specific gap: they offer rigorous instruction in a community context, which differentiates them sharply from the scattered tutorials and community munches that have historically served as entry points. For women especially, the appeal of a formal, psychology-grounded curriculum taught by a credentialed mentor may be part of what makes it accessible in a way that wandering into a dungeon alone is not.
The Sisterhood Nobody Mentions
The thing that surprised Steele most about the academy had nothing to do with ropes or crops or the specific geometry of a ball tie. It was the group chat. "The sisterhood shocked me," she says. "I'm just so not used to women being so supportive and right there at your fingertips." The Signal thread for Chi's doms is active and immediate. Someone has a question, she posts it. Someone is traveling to a new city and wants to know if there are resources nearby, she asks. The Zoom calls every Wednesday are not disciplinary sessions or technique workshops. They are women checking in with each other about their lives.
This dynamic is worth pausing on, because it contradicts one of the more persistent cultural myths about BDSM spaces: that they are fundamentally isolated, secretive, and predatory. The reality Steele describes is a community structured around mentorship and mutual support, where a PhD-holding professional sets the tone and the students look out for each other. The dungeon, in this version of events, functions less like a site of transgression and more like a very specific kind of finishing school — one that teaches women to take up space, use their voices, and mean what they say.
"I feel like I've just made a new family," Steele says. "I'm in a new community that's welcoming and loving and nurturing." She delivers this assessment without a trace of irony, which is its own kind of endorsement. She has been in the adult industry for twenty years. She has seen communities that function and communities that don't. She knows the difference.
Why BDSM Is Healing (and Why That Shouldn't Be Surprising)
The therapeutic dimension of BDSM is not a new idea, but it remains one that mainstream coverage handles with awkward skepticism, as if the claim that consensual power exchange can be emotionally healing is somehow more far-fetched than the claim that talking to a stranger about your childhood for fifty minutes a week is. Within the BDSM community, the therapeutic function of the work has been understood for a long time. The surrender of control can be profoundly releasing for people who spend their lives managing everything. The experience of being held accountable to an external authority, even temporarily, can be grounding in ways that are difficult to replicate elsewhere. And for dominants, the practice of learning to lead with clarity and intention tends to produce effects that extend well beyond the dungeon.
Steele came to this understanding through direct experience rather than theory. "Before I started studying," she says, "I only knew what the media projected — that it's dark and dangerous and underground and you could get hurt." What she found instead was structure, consent, education, and community. The darkness the media projects onto BDSM spaces is largely a reflection of discomfort with the premise, not evidence of what actually happens in a well-run dungeon under a trained mentor.
That is not to say the risks are zero. Steele is clear that you have to do your research, that not every practitioner is operating with the same standards, and that the label "BDSM" covers everything from weekend workshops in Los Angeles to genuinely unsafe situations. But the same caveat applies to most human activities, and the solution in every case is the same: find knowledgeable people, ask questions, and don't let fear of the unfamiliar keep you from exploring something that might actually serve you.
What This Means for the Industry
For performers who have spent years doing domination content without a formal framework, Chi's academy offers something the industry has rarely provided: a real education in the work underlying the performance. Steele's observation that she had always been doing this without knowing the name for it is not unique to her. A significant portion of adult performers who specialize in femdom content arrived there intuitively, through fan requests or personal inclination, and have been operating on instinct without the vocabulary or the community that a structured training program provides.
There is an argument to be made that performers who understand the psychology of power dynamics are better at the work than those who don't, in the same way that a performer who understands lighting is better at the visual craft. The academy is not teaching women to perform domination. It is teaching them to understand what domination actually is, which turns out to be a considerably more interesting and useful thing to know.
Steele is still in training. She does not yet have her own dungeon or her own slaves, but she has the ropes, she has the group chat, and she has a new answer to the question of what she was doing all those years before she knew what to call it. She was the one in charge, and she still is. Now she just knows why it works.
Rachel Steele is CEO of Red MILF Productions and can be found at rachel-steele.com and on X.
You can watch Holly Randall's interview with Mistress Damiana Chi on Holly Randall Unfiltered here:
