Who Is Alexis Lass? Meet The Posh Girl Who Left Her Privileged Lifestyle To Become A Dominatrix [PHOTOS]

A woman from a privileged background traded in her posh existence to become a dominatrix. At the height of her two-year career, Alexis Lass, 36, charged clients up to $300 an hour for her services. Now she’s written a book, “The Posh Girl’s Guide To Play,” which is out now.

According to the New York Post, Lass attended the prestigious all-girl school Spence in New York City with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kerry Washington, but her family wasn’t rich. “My parents are artists and bohemians -- my mother is a copy editor for an advertising firm, and my father’s an abstract expressionist painter -- not exactly the norm for Spence parents, who were usually from New York’s 1 percent,” Lass told the Post. “I certainly wasn’t rich. I got partial scholarships to pay for the last few years. Until I was 9 years old, I thought that all normal people had doormen apartments and most people had drivers, and I thought I was weird.”

After bouncing around a few different schools in the Northeast, Lass wound up back in New York City, where she was introduced to the S&M scene at the age of 27 by her then-boyfriend. “We had been dating for a year when he was like, 'Why don’t you try domination work?' He had an ex-girlfriend who had done it, and he said that she loved it,” Lass told the Post.

Lass started working at a dungeon called the Nutcracker Suite in Manhattan. “I walked in, and it was fabulous,” she said. “It was like a movie set. One room was dressed up like Marquis de Sade’s quarters. Another was an elaborate Egyptian room, yet another was an Asian empress room. I saw girls walking guys on their knees in leashes. I saw men catwalking and prancing around in full-on lingerie and high heels with dominatrixes yelling at them. I saw them slapping their clients in their face and calling them 'a little worm' or worse. I was in shock.”

As she tells the Post, Lass wore a tuxedo jumpsuit with a black halter top, tights and high heels for her first day on the job. “They gave me a whip,” she said. “I didn’t really know what I was doing with it. But I thought, 'OK, I’m an actress. Let’s pretend I’m Cruella de Vil and Mommie in "Mommie Dearest" and just role-play.'”

After working at the Nutcracker Suite for two months, Lass started at another dungeon called Rapture. “I worked three days a week from 3 to 9 p.m. Sometimes, you’d have one client, and sometimes you’d have three,” she told the Post. “Sometimes it would be just one-hour sessions, sometimes six hours. A typical session costs from $250 to $300 an hour. When you work at a dungeon, you only keep $100 an hour. Later, I worked independently and kept the full fee.”

“My specialty was called ‘corporal,’ which is like physical punishment with single tail whips and canes and spanking,” she continued. “I loved throwing a whip. We use a singletail whip, it’s like what Indiana Jones uses, but it’s not that long. A long one actually can decapitate somebody … You whip the butt, or the back, or the legs.”

After two years as a dominatrix, Lass says she began to tire of the lifestyle. “It’s very psychologically intense,” she said. “Most of these men, they say they can’t tell their wives, they can’t tell the people they work with, they can’t tell their friends, they can’t even tell their psychiatrist. We’re the only ones, so that’s why they bond with us. It’s sort of sad.

“I guarantee everybody in New York City knows somebody who secretly sees a dominatrix.”

According to the Post, Lass doesn’t have any regrets about her past. “In a dominatrix session, men serve you,” she said. “And it just puts that in your head, and you don’t ever really go back to trying to please a man, or being something for a man, or being desperate for a man. For that reason, I say that every girl should be a dominatrix for a day.”