This week, Candyland's Gendy Alimurung reports from a how-to tax session for dominatrixes. Can you deduct your home dungeon? Do you have to report the panties a client bought you as a tip? And you thought your taxes were tricky.

Of all the painful activities a dominatrix can take part in, there is none quite so torturous as taxes. It is the first day of DomCon, the annual gathering of sadists and the masochists who worship them, and a handful of novice dominatrixes sit in one of the depressing, fluorescent-lit rooms in the nether regions of the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel. They are taking an hour away from the spankings and beatings to learn how to please the Internal Revenue Service.

“Is everyone here somewhat familiar with the 1040 Schedule C?” asks their teacher, Jack.

Jack, who declines to give his last name, is a corporate tax accountant and looks it: glasses, neat gray hair, round face with a bit of a chipmunk aspect.

“Here,” he says to the woman beside him, a statuesque, incredibly fit blonde in a rubber bodysuit, glossy as an oil slick. He hands her a sheaf of photocopies. “Pass these out.”

“Yes, master! Yes, sir!” she says, in a pretend-exaggerated way. Jack is a submissive, except in tax season. And the woman, a professional dominatrix known as Mistress Precious, is his wife.

“These are for taxes, honey,” Mistress Precious says to a girl who has just walked in. “Welcome to America.”

“The No. 1 weapon in the IRS arsenal, and it is what brought down Al Capone, is tax evasion. That's their fear factor,” Jack says. “Not that you want to fear the IRS, but they're a powerful group. It's better to work with them than against them.”

Dominatrix, however, is not a job listed with the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Psychodramatist,” Jack says. “It's what you call what you do.”

What if you are simply modeling in dominatrix outfits, a woman asks, and not necessarily punishing anyone just yet. “The lines blur,” Jack admits. “The IRS tends to look at things in black-and-white.”

Since the S&M community tends to regard things “with a lot of gray,” setting up an LLC can be a lifesaver. The smart mistress buys all her assets — clothing, instruments of torture — through that limited-liability corporation.

Say you own a dungeon. Perhaps yours is not so elaborately appointed as Mistress Precious' dungeon, which is 4,000 square feet and boasts slave baths and medieval stocks and a dentist's chair from 1938 and overnight cage facilities.

Continue reading on LA Weekly's arts blog, Public Spectacle …

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