SECRETS OF A PROUD 'SLUT'
Dominatrix Vogue writer humiliated and ‘kidnapped’ men for rent
IN 2012, Karley Sciortino broke her personal record by having sex with five different people in less than 24 hours.
Before breakfast, there was a threesome with a prostitute and a “real estate guy” at the St. Regis Hotel. She later met up with a friend — with benefits — for an afternoon tryst. And then there was the bathroom quickie with a pal’s brother-in-law at a Park Slope house party.
Capping it all off, she had a lesbian romp with her regular lover that night.
At the time, Sciortino was getting over a broken relationship, and refers to her wild behavior as a “rebound rampage.” But it wasn’t exactly out of the norm for the now-32-year-old.
“I’ve been slutting around for decades,” Sciortino, who lives in the West Village, told The Post. “It’s a mindset, a decision, and there’s a huge amount to be learned by having casual sex and multiple partners.”
Now, she is sharing her wildest tales in her raunchy new memoir, “Slutever: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World” (Grand Central Publishing) out Tuesday.
In it, she sets out to reclaim the word “slut” from its pejorative confines. The Dictionary.com definition: “A sexually promiscuous female, or a woman who behaves or dresses in an overtly sexual way.”
“Like the word ‘bitch,’ ‘slut’ is intended to harm women,” Sciortino said. “[Reclaiming it] gives it less power.
“There is something dark, mischievous and powerful about being a slut. It isn’t a slur — it’s a force to be reckoned with. There’s something transgressive about a woman saying: ‘I have sex with who I want.’ It’s positive.”
SCIORTINO revels in describing her many encounters with both men and women, from her “awakening” as a Catholic schoolgirl raised in the Hudson Valley by “office workers” to her current life as a sex columnist for Vogue.
Since her mom was religious, Sciortino made a formal pledge at the age of 13 that she would wait
for sex until she got hitched. “Both my mother and grandmother had made it very clear to me that if a woman chooses to have sex before marriage, she will spiral out of control and become a homeless crack addict spinster who no man would ever dream of marrying,” she wrote.
She broke her abstinence vow at 16 by losing her virginity to a classmate behind the football field.
“It didn’t even hurt like everybody said it would — probably because I’d been casually sticking shampoo bottles up there for multiple years at this point,” she remembered in the book. “But it didn’t feel good, either. It just kind of . . . was.”
At the age of 19, she moved to London to study acting. But she dropped out of college after six months and lived for three years in a squat with a crew of artists, anarchists, addicts and drifters.
It was there that Sciortino started blogging on her own site — and later for Vice.com — about her love life, which involved orgies and hallucinogenic drugs.
When one of her roommates suggested Sciortino hire a “slave” to clean their house, she jumped at the chance.
“[He] was an Asian guy in his 30s, who worked as a lawyer when he wasn’t cleaning strangers’ toilet bowls for sexual pleasure,” she wrote. “He’d just cheerfully scrub the floors while we [lay] around watching reruns of ‘America’s [Next] Top Model,’ and every once in a while one of us would get up and whip him with a phone charger.”
That experience sparked Sciortino’s fascination with bondage, domination, sadism and masochism (BDSM). So, when her visa ran out in 2010, she returned to New York City and found a socalled “cash pig,” also known as a “human ATM,” she could dominate. He initially begged her to let him buy her books in exchange for being humiliated online.
“He was a financial submissive, a man who gets off on being exploited for their dollars,” Sciortino told The Post. “He wound up paying my rent in return for me insulting him on Skype, telling him he had a small d--k.”
When the man lost his job and couldn’t afford to subsidize her any longer, he blamed his firing on Sciortino for not having mocked him effectively enough.
To make ends meet, she took a job as an assistant to an established Manhattan dominatrix, Mistress Dee, who taught the young woman to step up her game.
“I didn’t have a job, a college degree, any qualifications of any kind,” she recalled. “Working for Dee became fodder for my writing career but also it was my income. I would do things like hand her dildos and wash the ropes in her dungeon. She had clients who liked golden showers, so I’d pee on them with her.”
This became an art form: “If you can’t go when it’s time to go, it’s a job fail — a very low Yelp review.”
It was around this time “when my interest in sex expanded beyond ‘I want to f--k strangers’ and I became a bit more exploratory on a deeper level,” she said.
DIVING deep into her new world, she nearly got arrested while helping stage a “kidnapping” in the Financial District, four blocks from the World Trade Center.
One of Dee’s clients (the “Hostage”) harbored a fantasy about abduction. He paid for the privilege of being accosted on the sidewalk at gunpoint, forced down an alley and stuffed into the trunk of a car.
“The plan was to intercept the Hostage on his way home from work,” writes Sciortino. “[We] would approach him with a subway map, pretending to be tourists in need of directions.
“As soon as we got his attention, my accomplice would pull out the gun ‘discreetly,’ concealing it from passersby with her coat, and press it into the Hostage’s side.
“‘No one is going to see the gun,’ Dee assured me. ‘ And if anyone gives you any trouble, just say you’re shooting a student film,’ ” she writes.
Everything went like clockwork — until the “kidnappers” pulled the Hostage out of the trunk and were “immediately ambushed by undercover police.”
According to Sciortino, she was tackled to the ground by an officer while the Hostage screamed into the pillowcase she’d placed over his head. “I then, as instructed, began shouting: ‘We’re making a student film!’ over and over again.”
“Somehow, despite our lack of cameras and the fact that my accomplice was like, 45, this instantly calmed the officers down a bit.”
The Hostage insisted the story was true and the cops backed off, leaving them with a stern warning.
“On the train ride home, I decided it was officially time to look for a new job,” Sciortino writes.
Over the following two years, she became “financially comfortable” dating men on the sugar daddy Web site Seeking Arrangement. One benefactor paid her $4,000 a month.
“It’s important to know this falls within a legal gray state, being compensated for your time,” she told The Post. “You’re essentially saying: ‘I’m going to enjoy it, too, and you’ll help support me. If we choose to, this relationship will become sexual.’
“I was never providing sexual services for dollars, which is illegal.”
In her book, she credits her experiences for helping her afford a good hair-colorist and nice clothes — “which I’m pretty sure are both factors in why Vogue decided to hire me to write a column.”
She started at the magazine’s Web site in 2013, writing about sex and relationships. To her surprise, her editors didn’t ask her to tone down her writing which often focuses on her own experiences. In fact, they encouraged her to push the envelope. “They have given me so much free rein,” she said.
“I’ve been like: ‘I’m not sure I should be writing about that’ and they’re like: ‘You should.’ ”
For the past six months, Sciortino has been “experimenting with having an adult relationship” in a monogamous arrangement with her boyfriend, who lives in LA.
“Yeah, that’s exotic for me,” she said. “I really like it. It’s about doing what feels right for you in that moment.
“Doing all the things I have done, there’s a lot to be learned from exploring a relationship by committing and investing in someone. I feel like I would be losing something, denying myself an experience, if I never tried this, either.”
So, what does her partner think of her “Slutever” confessional? “He likes it,” said Sciortino. “There are men on Earth that aren’t entirely intimidated by female sexual needs.”
As for her parents, Sciortino explained, “It’s complicated.” In her memoir, she recounts their reaction to her blog and concern about the long-term effects that writing about sex might have on her professional and personal life.
“But, these days, we have a really great relationship,” she added. “A lot of that comes down to the fact that we’ve agreed to disagree.”