De-Kooi BDSM Media News.

BDSM MEDIA NEWS!!!!




March 04, 2015


Dominatrix afther a Traumatic Brain Injury
"It was like, here I am, outed as a supposedly sexually impulsive rich girl who's into kink."


Source: Cosmopolitan.com. - Cosmopolitan - USA


CANADA - At 17, Alissa Afonina was a bright, studious college student. But that year, on a drive with her mother and her mom's then-boyfriend, the car she was riding in sped around a curve and flipped three times; Afonina hit her head, suffering four lesions to the frontal lobe of her brain. The accident changed her life forever.


After the accident in 2009, Afonina battled exhaustion, depression and anxiety. She dropped out of college and struggled to find or keep a job. Her frontal lobe injury also caused her to become more sexually promiscuous - a common side effect of frontal lobe injuries - but in turn, her relationships became purely physical obsessions and she lost her social support system. To cope with her new personality and to make ends meet, Afonina became a professional dominatrix under the pseudonym Sasha Mizaree.

After years of medical testing and analysis, Afonina and her mother went to trial, seeking compensation for their injuries. In late 2014, a judge agreed the driver (her mom's then-boyfriend) had been going too fast and was thus negligent; he awarded Afonina nearly 1.5 million Canadian dollars. To her, the award was a vindication for people with invisible disabilities everywhere.

But when media outlets started picking up her story, Afonina was horrified: they claimed she was a sex-obsessed woman who only won her case because she was a sex worker, completely devaluing the struggles of brain injury sufferers everywhere. They also outed her; overnight, her real name had become immutably linked to her sex work identity.

Now, in her first major interview since the case, Cosmopolitan.com spoke to Afonina about her life after the crash, her work as a dominatrix, and how she's learning to deal with media, fame, and disability.

After the accident, when did you begin to realize that something was different?
I felt different right away, really fuzzy; [the doctors] had said I had a concussion at first. They said, "This is normal - you're going to feel fuzzy, you're going to feel out of it." My mom was definitely noticing more anger in me. I felt depression; I felt anxiety, including social anxiety. That was really new to me - I was completely a social butterfly before that, and then, all of a sudden, I just had no social life.

I didn't know that I actually had a brain injury until I did an MRI about a year after it happened. I found out from the doctors, like, "Hey, your symptoms happen to be not your fault! You're not lazy, you're not fucked up, but in fact, these are very consistent with a frontal lobe brain injury." That was kind of big news at the time.

Were you interested in kink and BDSM before your accident?
No, it wasn't something I practiced or knew anything about. I was kind of goth, but I wasn't kinky or sexual before the accident. I didn't really have sex in high school, and I wasn't somebody that dated much.

During your trial, it was mentioned that you experienced an increased interest in sex and sexuality after the accident, and the media has made a big deal of that detail. What was your sexuality actually like?
I remember being completely into this guy that I was dating, just completely obsessed with him; this was a new feeling all of a sudden - an addictive kind of need for this guy's attention and touching him. I began to notice that my whole self-presentation and my personality had become sexualized, to the point where I didn't feel like there was anything else to me. And if I didn't have a partner to be obsessed with, I felt empty. Everything felt dull and boring, and the only thing that made me alive was flirting with men. When you're not experiencing pleasure in things, that's like dying on the inside.

Whenever I did get into any relationship - and that's a generous word for the kind of interactions I've had with men - I wasn't able to form any loving relationship. And what I want, at my core, is not casual sex. I want to be loved.  

It's not a lot of fun and games like they say in the media. The guy had all the power; he was my happiness. I couldn't look away, and so a lot of the time, I would get into "relationships" with emotionally abusive men, and I would be stuck going back to them because I felt that if I didn't have them in my life, my life would be horrible. And that's a very helpless feeling.  

So you were having a lot of sex, but you were kind of going through hell.
It's a lonely, isolated feeling. It's like, similar to what I've read about sex addiction, people think it's such an exciting disease cause it sounds all, "Sex addiction!" but those people have an emptiness inside them - that's how I felt.

How else did your injury affect you?
One of the biggest symptoms, which led to me flunking out of school, was that my anxiety levels got really high. It's impossible for me to function in the university environment. It's hard enough for a regular healthy student, but I couldn't even handle a load of a few courses. I had problems concentrating, remembering anything, being able to both listen and write notes. Twice over the past six years, I have had to use Rogaine because my hair was falling out due to stress.  

School was getting harder and harder as I progressed into higher levels of classes, and it was becoming clear to me that I couldn't handle it. I would take a break for a term, and then go back.

How did you decide to become a professional dominatrix?
Between terms [after the accident], I had done a few different types of sex work, a little bit of stripping, a little bit of web-camming, so I was aware of sex work as a thing and had built a bit of a comfort level with it. The dominatrix thing was on my mind as an option, but I had just thought that there was no way I could pull it off, with all my difficulties.

The second or third time I withdrew from my studies, I thought, This is getting ridiculous. I'm not going to get that Ph.D. in psychology that I thought I was going to get. If I can't even handle two classes, it's time for a new reality. Even so, I am an ambitious person, and I wanted to be good at something. I wanted to succeed. On top of that, of course, there was the very obvious money situation. If I wasn't going to get student loans, I was fucked.

I started going on this thing called What's Your Price. Basically, you go on dates with guys and they pay you for it. I did a bunch of those, but that's obviously not a career. When I looked into the idea of being a dominatrix, I liked the idea of being in control and being the one initiating everything, and people coming to me for a session was better for my health, so I didn't have to travel. I liked the fact that I didn't have to have sex with anybody.

BDSM was a very abstract concept to me. I was interested, but I can't say I was very aware at all. There was a BDSM dating website called CollarMe, and about two years ago, an older guy on there was chatting me. I met up with him first. I was scared, but eager to learn. We had some sushi and he showed me some pro domme videos from his collection. I watched a bunch of them, but one stuck out to me - this domme had a guy in a cage, and she peed in a bowl and was like, "Drink it, but don't touch it with your hands - you're a dog, you don't have hands! Stop clinking it with your collar." And I realized that, in my head, I had imagined that sessions were a bit more complicated; I had overthought it.

I thought to myself, It's now or never. I have to make something work; I don't have money, I feel like a failure, I don't have any career aspirations. I wanted to do something with my life, anything. I was actually in the process of moving out of my old apartment, which I was at the time sharing with my roommate, and so I used that as an opportunity to make my new apartment into a dungeon. I only had a flogger and a chain from, like, Canadian Tire, but I'm good at presentation so I had beautiful photos. I knew how to make a website so I did that right away. Even though I was a total newbie, I made myself look like I know what the fuck I'm doing.

As a new domme in town, this always happens, people flock to you. So I initially earned some money and bought more equipment. Later on I found out that even the successful dommes don't actually have nearly as much stuff as I have now. But I had my stereotypical movie idea of what a dungeon is, and it has to have a lot of stuff.

So it sounds like you were doing OK. What made you decide to go to court last year?
The process actually started right after the accident. After something like this happens, lawyers reach out to you. We found Scott, and I got tons of testing - three or four hour assessments by neuropsychologists - for evidence.

It's upsetting that some media are making light of my disability, when there has been so much testing, and so much evidence of my injury presented in court, including the actual brain scan that shows four lesions in my left frontal lobe. Eventually, we took our evidence and went to trial in 2014, which took 28 days, and six months later the judge came back with his decision.

The trial was very weird and very stressful, because the nature of my injury is in the brain, so everything about me is considered evidence - I had no privacy. Every medical record that exists on me, from before and after, was printed out and put in this giant folder. There's printouts of everything I ever said online before or after the accident, so they have all my 13-, 15-year-old self's comments from kids' sites, all my online chats are considered evidence. My current Twitter is too, so during the trial I was basically feeling like I was constantly under surveillance. For instance, if I were to post on Facebook, "I had such a great day today," on a day when I was on trial and taking the stand, [the defense] would go to me, point to the quote that they had printed out, and say,

"Well, how do you claim you have depression, when you said on this day that you had a great day?" They could reach far back and make me explain a joke that I had made when I was 15. They might say, "How could you say you were conservative before the accident? Look here, you made a sexual joke." It was that ridiculous.

Media reports have sometimes said that in your court case, the fact that you became a professional dominatrix was taken as evidence of impaired judgment.
The work itself is actually evidence of the change in my character, because the old me would never have been remotely comfortable with sex work. My lawyers told me that it's one thing when someone decides to take up sex work if they're uninjured, in a healthy way, but this is a different circumstance. The judgment mentioned unnecessary risk-taking on my part, but it viewed sex work itself as just more evidence of my changing personality. I don't think my award should carry a negative connotation against sex work - in court, it's not their job to judge that. Their job was to consider how I have changed.

It's similar to the way they looked at my personal life. If someone wants to have a lot of sexual partners, that can be perfectly fine, and physically healthy, for someone who likes it and gets satisfaction from it. In my case, it didn't come from a healthy place, but was a result of my injury.

Going into trial, did you expect such a spectacular win, of $1.5 million Canadian dollars?
It definitely exceeded my expectations. A judge can't just write a number down and say "Here you go," they have to write a report explaining every amount and why. They can't say, "I don't like sex workers, so I'm going to take some money off this judgment." When I heard that I won, I felt relieved, but I didn't feel fully safe until the money actually came to my lawyer's trust.

When did the media onslaught begin?
After the judgment, I was chilling out with my mom one night watching TV, and chatting with a pro-domme friend over email, and she said, "So, how are you feeling about the article about you in The Province?" I started panicking because my first thought was that there was some sort of challenge to our win by the insurance company. I rushed to the computer and found only a few reports, so I calmed down and went to bed.  The next morning, I woke up to a bunch of text messages - I had made the cover of The Province.

Everyone was acting like I should be happy about the fact that my real name had been outed as a sex worker who won money. I read all these comments, people were like, "Haha, she beat the system," and, "She's a scammer." That was like a slap on the face after everything I've been through. I eventually resolved that I would use the media as an avenue to talk about brain injuries. But then the next day, I Googled myself again and the story was in 10 more places, and over the course of the week, it was reprinted in multiple languages and appeared on Fox News. I was like, "Yo, I didn't consent to this, this is putting me in a dangerous situation." It was like, here I am, outed as a supposedly sexually impulsive rich girl who's into kink.

So why did you decide to face the media head-on?
I was brain injured and I've still found a way to be successful, to earn money and make the best out of my situation. I've kind of done the same thing with the media around the case - I've taken a shitty situation, and I said, "OK, it's out there, let's fucking go." It's my rule not to let things victimize me; it's a matter of principle. Even before this broke out, I was thinking about writing a book. So, I will use this to further my goals and to send a big "fuck you" to everyone who's got the wrong end of the stick. They can suck my fucking strap-on.

Do you plan to keep doing sex work?
I definitely won't resume doing sessions full-time. I'm continuing to do videos because I've built a fan base, and it's something I can do safely in my own time. People might think I'm rich, but I still have to make an income, and this is what I'm good at. I love feeling good at something! I'm not ready to give it up, but now I have more freedom to decide, which is great.

Out of curiosity, what are your videos like?
When I tell people about them, they're like, "Are you kidding me? People buy your videos and you don't ever get naked?" But, yes, they do. My specialty, because of my age and the way I look, is being a bratty dominatrix - a humiliatrix, as they call it. That's why they call me Goddess, or Princess Sasha, instead of Mistress, which can sometimes be for older dommes. I do a lot of verbal humiliation - in a humiliation fetish, me not getting naked is a part of it. I will tell a client that he will never get to see me naked - he doesn't deserve that! I'm a goddess, and he doesn't deserve to see my feminine curves.

How has your mom been throughout all of this? What does she think of your job?
In some ways, to her, it's better than me getting naked on camera or dancing naked. She always was, and still is, actively worried about my safety. She's glad I'm doing video now, because it's safer. When we won the case, she didn't want people to know that she had a bunch of money, and she didn't want her daughter's face everywhere.

Everyone will want to know, so I have to ask: What are your plans for the award money?
It's for my safety, and my medical expenses. I'll save it, and maybe I could buy a property somewhere, so I don't need to pay rent anymore. I'm not going to buy a diamond ring; that's not who I am. The fact that I am brain injured means my health could take a turn for the worse. After a brain injury, your state isn't necessarily stable. Who I am this year isn't who I was the first year after the accident. I'm still piecing myself back together, and the money is there to make sure that if I need a huge break, and I can't even do the videos, I have something to fall back on.

As someone living with a brain injury, what do you think people should know?
The biggest thing is that it's a real disability, as valid as a broken leg. A lot of people invalidated me and my injury, and that made it worse, because it led me to blame myself. I want people to understand that the brain is a very important organ, and it can sometimes malfunction. It is not shameful to take medication if you need it - nobody is going to tell you not to take heart medication or to somehow think your way out of your heart problems. But everybody tells you that you can think your way out of depression, anxiety, memory problems - anything mental, that they can't easily see. I just want to tell people that mental problems are real, you're not crazy if you have them, and it's OK to get help.

See more larger photo's & video on: www.cosmopolitan.com.

Links:
Sashamizaree.com.
Twitter.com/sashamizaree.