“When you meet me, I don’t really seem like the kind of person who would engage in cannibal role play, you know?” Mistress Couple giggles.

Equal parts Betty Grable and ‘90s Ani DiFranco, Mistress Couple is petite and bubbly with winged eye makeup and blonde hair painted with rainbow streaks. She arrives in a shiny black SUV driven by her submissive, Nine, who wears a black chauffeur’s uniform. She greets me with a smile spread across her face before she wraps me in a giant hug as if we’re longtime friends.

Together we drive up to La Domaine Esemar, nestled at the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains in an unassuming, conservative little country town. Founded in 1993, it is the world’s oldest BDSM Training Chateau and the only supervised bed and dungeon in the world. Couple, as she is known, has been the Head Mistress for six years, since she was just 26.

While pop culture has long painted dominatrices as cold and brutal, and BDSM as a pastime of the disturbed, such descriptions ignore the nuances of the profession and the practice, reducing them to a false concoction based on fear, misconceptions and stereotypes. However, if you’re of open mind, Mistress Couple and La Domaine offer a glimpse into the reality of BDSM. “How BDSM is portrayed in the media is as if it’s a very harsh violent thing all the time,” Couple says. “I would say at least 75 percent of dominatrixes I know love to joke around and have fun in their sessions, because otherwise what’s the point?”

The type of experience you have at La Domaine is based on personal preference. Some want a hard-hearted domme, for sure, but others require warmth with their whippings. There are as many kinds of dominatrices as there are people, as there are desires. Couple herself has a fondness for marshmallows as well as masochism, ballroom dance as well as balloon fetishism, Phish as well as puppy play, and snuggly slipper socks as well as Schwanendreher—the act of being roasted on a spit over hot coals.

Couple is not shy about her eccentric tastes. She is the person who shared footage on Instagram of herself sticking an icicle into a client’s urethra at their request, but she is also the person who, with another dominatrix, made a man seeking humiliation dress up like a chicken and dance to the Chicken Dance song for two hours until he dissolved into a puddle of tears on the floor and begged for mercy. “It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life,” she laughs. “This is totally not what people would picture when they say, ‘Oh, are you doing a dominatrix scene?’”

To get to the quaint white house nestled at the top of the hills, we take a long, dirt road that curls by a stream of rushing waters. Nine opens the car doors for us and carries our luggage inside. The walls are a soft grey accented with beige and dusty pink, accented by a black wood-burning vintage fireplace. Cozy knit blankets line the furniture and a small bookshelf holds texts about erotic art and sexuality. Nude paintings in muted tones hang on the walls.

Couple removes her snowboots with a sigh. New York City was Couple’s final stop on her tour promoting her new book, The Ultimate Guide to Bondage: Creating Intimacy Through the Art of Restraint, and she’s relieved to be home. Her book is one of the few to address the privilege of entering consensual bondage in the face of a country still dealing with effects of non-consensual bondage. It also uses gender-neutral language for genitalia and features a multitude of ethnicities, bodies, and ages engaging in the various forms of bondage she highlights in the book.

But no book can quite replicate the service visitors to La Domaine recieve. The dining room table offers pink macaroons and chocolates wrapped in red foil. A china hutch nearby displays a beige platter, decorated by an illustration of a a woman being triple-penetrated alongside an enthusiastic “All you can eat!” Speaking of which, dinner will be at 6 pm: mousse truffee (liver) alongside braised duck with wild rice, black mushrooms, and bok choy, followed by a root beer sorbet for dessert. Couple jokes that people come to La Domaine for the BDSM and stay for the food.

Nine places my bags in the guest bedroom brushed with gold paint. A library of S&M-related texts and a concise array of flogs, restraints, condoms, and lubricants sit beside the oversized bed. The plush bed sheets are scattered with vintage vintage S&M drawings. The erotic accents throughout the chateau aren’t as blatant, however, as the 1,250 square foot dungeon below the main floor. Walls black with blood red carpeting, it’s practically a funhouse of BDSM devices—from the ridiculous (rubber chickens and Trump masks) to the decidedly more niche (church pew kneelers, a large animal cage and surgical chairs). All manner of chains, weights, ropes, canes and flogs hang from the ceiling, only broken up by a St. Andrew’s Cross.

Thirteen years after arriving to La Domaine (following a chance visit that included a woman being consensually lashed to orgasm and then embraced by her dominants), Couple now runs both the business and pleasure sides of La Domaine. She oversees hospitality, parties, educational and training programs and BDSM sessions. She recruits other dommes through La Domaine’s Dominants in Training program, in which people can become involved over a weekend intensive or a long-term apprenticeship (six months to a over a year), but also periodically hosts other, established dommes of international repute. House submissives act as valets to La Domaine guests as well as housekeepers. Dommes in Training and house submissives all apply through the La Domaine website, and if approved, Couple makes sure their personalities all positively blend together for a cohesive household.

The bulk of La Domaine’s income comes from education, from people who seek to learn from Couple and other expert BDSM practitioners who offer workshops and seminars at the chateau. Past topics include dominance development, erotic humiliation, whip techniques, and erotic asphyxiation, and there’s a lecture in October by latex designer and domme The Baroness on the history of BDSM. But people also come through La Domaine to experience the space as party guests and overnight guests–while other venues on sites like KinkBNB offer dungeons, La Domaine is still the only one in the world that offers actual instruction with a professional domme alongside a place to play and a place to sleep. As of this August, over 300 couples have come through La Domaine this year alone.

In order to book a session or overnight couples stay at La Domaine, the first step is an introductory phone call with Couple. Potential clients share what they’re looking for at La Domaine, details about their relationship, like what they’re looking to learn or improve upon, and what they hope to get out of an experience there. Couple will make a recommendation for activities, and if approved for a visit, clients will schedule a time to come through. And if they don’t know what they want or what their interests are, that’s welcome, too: clients can share what activities they have and have not encountered so Couple can understand their experience level. All BDSM levels are welcome, from the merely curious to the veteran practitioner.

While it’s impossible to know the number of BDSM practitioners in the world—many people don’t report their practice, and some people don’t even see their actions as BDSM because of the violent way the practice is normally portrayed—a good place to start is by looking at the number of users on BDSM, kink, and fetish social network FetLife, Couple says. There are currently nearly eight million users on the site overall (including over 168K in New York City, over 81K in Los Angeles, and over 75K in Chicago).

If interested in joining the community, the best place to start is with research. “It’s called power play for a reason and you need to understand how power is wielded before you start playing with it. Otherwise you’re going to get hurt or hurt somebody else,” Couple says. And that pain could be physical, mental, or both. So a party is not a good first step–“you’re probably going to feel like you’re in over your head,” Couple says. Educators and instructors like Couple are great resources, however, as are BDSM classes. “I love working with people who are brand new,” Couple says. “When I first started at La Domaine, all I knew is that I liked being slapped and then I wanted to try being spanked, but I didn’t know what else existed. It’s so exciting for me to get to share all these things and spread perversion around the world in any way that I can [laughs] and help open people’s minds.”

In a social and media landscape where we’re regularly told BDSM is a minefield of violence, minds do often need opening. Much of this has to do with misconceptions and fears of what BDSM is and how it’s used. “It’s written off as causing someone else pain, forgetting the underlying possibilities that though physical pain may be happening, this is actually a very nurturing experience and this is what this person wants,” Couple says.

Consent and communication are primary forces at work. “I would never take a whip to somebody or hit somebody who didn’t beg me for that in the first place,” she continues. Couple says we forget, too, that there’s great strength in showing vulnerability, in submitting, when in reality it can be a way to the relinquish control and responsibility so many people regularly chain themselves to, by choice or not. “If done healthily and with good intent, BDSM can be incredibly and empowering for people and an incredibly healthy tool in relationships” because while every relationship has power dynamics, in BDSM they’re intentional. “I think whether or not you’re into the whips and chains aspect, the skills that you learn like empathy and communication and control and power, those are really important skills for anybody to have,” Couple continues as I watch her lace up in a leather harness and bustier, fishnet stockings, and thigh-high black Christian Louboutin stiletto boots.

She ties a man up in rope, chains, and a giant nylon bodystocking, whipping and caning him in the testicles, much to his delight. “I appreciate that people are interested and admire what I do for a living,” Couple says. “It’s a pretty sweet life, so I don’t blame them.”