The Price of Submission is a personal, candid, and sometimes irreverent journey through nearly three decades in the kink scene, told from the perspective of a leather fetishist, masochist, and submissive.

Hi. I'm Leather Captive.

From my earliest fascination with the fetish illustrations of John Willie to my experiences with professional dominatrices, I tell the stories of the sessions that were incredible, the sessions that went spectacularly wrong, and the strange, funny, uncomfortable, and occasionally profound moments in between.

But this isn’t BDSM 101, and I’m not here to teach anyone how to be kinky.

This is one person’s story of fetish, fantasy, pain, power, money, desire, and what it means to be submissive in a capitalist society where even surrender can come with a price tag.

I’ll also look at how the kink scene I’ve known since the late 1990s has changed in the 21st century. I’ll offer my observations and criticisms of what I call the “Neo Kinksters”: a newer kink culture that, from my perspective, has increasingly transformed a once overtly sexual and transgressive underground into something safer, more standardized, and increasingly homogenized and desexualized.

Is that progress? Did something important get lost along the way? Or am I simply an old-school kinkster watching the culture change around me?

I’m not promising answers.

I’m telling you what I saw.