«Ties It Together» Get It?

Robin Sham­burg’s Mis­tress Ruby Ties It Togeth­er: A Dom­i­na­trix Takes on Sex, Pow­er, and the Secret Lives of Upstand­ing Cit­i­zens is a mem­oir that tells more about Ms Sham­burg than it does about sex, BDSM, or soci­ety. While it offers up some tasty anec­dotes, large­ly at the expense of her for­mer clients, this read was sur­pris­ing­ly light on insight about the world she tried to expose to the reader.

At the very end we’re treat­ed to a bit of phi­los­o­phy of sex in Amer­i­can cul­ture, and Ms Sham­burg makes an earnest and well-con­sid­ered plea for con­scious­ness regard­ing the exer­cise of sex­u­al pow­er in any rela­tion­ship. What grabbed me, how­ev­er, was almost a side note pre­sent­ed in the final chap­ter where she described her expec­ta­tion that once her gig as Dom­i­na­trix was done that she would return to «straight» life. Instead she real­ized that no one has a straight life: her grand­moth­er climbed the wall of a con­vent and escaped to Amer­i­ca, and every­one she says she’s talked to has some­thing unex­pect­ed or risky in their life.

So there’s no real dis­tinc­tion to weird­ness. We’ve all got our real lives, rich with tex­ture that some will under­stand and oth­ers won’t. Hold­ing down a 9‑to‑5 job nei­ther exempts any of us from the stig­ma nor robs us of the adven­ture of what­ev­er kink we explore, sex­u­al or oth­er­wise. I like this idea. It high­lights the truth that we each have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to live our lives ful­ly and authen­ti­cal­ly, no mat­ter who we are or what we do.