Lorelei: My main sexual interests are bondage and roleplaying forced-sex scenarios -- what the romance novels call "ravishment".

I made a little cluster of websites focused on my fetishes. To run them, I model, "rig" (tie), photograph, webmaster, and do customer service. I have two life partners who have been incredibly helpful; Eric helped me get my company structured, and Jon does the tying and photographing for the sets where I'm the model.

I wouldn't have guessed that I was going to wind up with this career. It just happened step by step. I was into bondage from the get-go. In college I was talking women at parties into letting me tie them up and take pictures. I sent some pictures to Harmony's bondage magazines. Harmony hired me. For years I edited magazines, did photo and video shoots, dealt with customers, etc. After I discovered the internet my computer addiction increased, and I really wanted to have a site and put my bondage diary online. Before long the site became a paysite, the paysite took over my life... So on and so forth.

Now that I'm 42 and getting milf-y, I'm not the only model on my sites. I mix in lots of other models, along with occasional photosets of myself. I still get tied up a lot in the bedroom; we just don't take pictures of it as frequently.

TDV: There is a phenomenal amount of personal information about you on your site in the free access area, what prompted you to make so much of your life available?

Lorelei: The first year I was on the 'net, I was fascinated by personal sites and spent a lot of time reading about other fetish people. For instance, Tammad (the "gentleman barbarian") had a site where you could learn a lot about him, and I loved that. So I did the same thing with my own site, volunteering as much personal information as I could.

TDV: Your site and your journal indicate your love of bondage and force fantasies (FANTASIES, Folks!). Is there an element of dominance and submission in your relationship with your boyfriend?

Lorelei: Jon's very dominant, but I'm not submissive. I'm primarily a Captive instead of a Bottom or Sub. I prefer to resist and struggle. Submitting, being passive, giving in or serving holds no personal interest for me. So our DS isn't so much Dominance & Submission as Dominance & Struggling.

TDV: Do you practice S&M as well?

Lorelei: Only occasionally. Discipline, percussion activities, thud and sting and pinch aren't all that important to me. Restraint is my hot button.

TDV: Assuming you get mail from your Forcefantasies.com site, do you ever get mail that is disturbing? To clarify, do you get mail from people who don’t separate fantasy from reality?

Lorelei: You would think I'd get a lot of that, but for some reason I don't. Maybe statistically there aren't many mentally ill people visiting fantasy/roleplay sites on the net. Or maybe my focus on cooperative partner roleplay would make the site completely uninteresting to actual psychopaths.

TDV: How do you feel knowing strangers see you and are getting off on you while you are in various stages of undress, bound, gagged and enacting some of your deepest fantasies?

Lorelei: It makes me happy. I'm a voyeur and enjoy looking at everybody else's pictures, too.

TDV: What does it feel like for you when you receive mail from folks who tell you they always thought they were alone or weird until they found your sites?

Lorelei: That's the best thing to hear in the world, to hear from someone who's glad to have found me. It always reminds me of how isolated I felt when I was younger, and what a relief it was when I found out there were so many other people who were just like me. That changed my life. So it's thrilling to hear from other people whose lives have been changed by my sites.

TDV: I noticed you have quite a bit of information for what I would consider a new player. Is that because of the mail you get, or because you feel some kind of responsibility to ensure your visitors have correct information about safe bondage and role play?

Lorelei: Both. Plus I'm a compulsive writer, so when I first put up my sites, I wrote about anything and everything I could think of.

TDV: It was through your newsletter that I first learned of the impact that federal law 18 USC 2257 -- the "model i.d. law" -- was going to have on The Dominant’s View and on other adult websites. On a personal level, do you believe that 2257 is an effective way to stop child pornography?

Lorelei: Well, for anyone who hasn't heard about the law, let me try to sum it up: Any time a person is about to perform sexual or fetish acts for photo or video, they show their i.d. to prove they're an adult. The photographer then keeps a database that tracks and cross-references the i.d.'s, performer names, videos, and every image on their website. Then the government is supposed to send inspectors to check these databases. Any error in the records, no matter how small -- even a typo -- is a failure to comply and technically a felony.

The stated purpose of the law is a great cause: the government says the model i.d. law is to prevent and protect minors from performing or modeling for sexual content. But the law as written doesn't do that at all. It doesn't help minors, which is a travesty. Think of all the man-hours being wasted on this law when everyone should be using those hours to actually rescue minors from sexual performance and sexual abuse.

All the legit photographers are diligently complying with this law, checking driver's licenses and keeping records. But child pornographers aren't legit businesses anyway, so of course they're not asking their victims for i.d.'s -- so those who photograph minors are completely unaffected by the law; they completely ignore it. And government reps who spend their time compiling lists of adult companies to inspect, and then visiting the companies to check the databases, are losing hours they could have spent tracking down child pornographers on the internet.

There have only been a half-dozen cases of teenagers sneaking their way into the U.S. adult porn industry, and those cases mostly involved teens who wanted to make money, using stolen or fake driver's licenses. The way the law operates right now, we photographers don't even have a way of knowing when someone hands us a fake i.d.! So the law won't even prevent more cases like that.

TDV: You’ve become somewhat of an expert on this legislation; what has it been like behind the scenes from your point of view?

Lorelei: I've read as much as I can, but I don't think of myself as an expert, since I'm not an attorney. On the other hand, everyone's attorneys out there can't agree on what the 2257 details mean, so maybe that's not as important as being well-informed and reading as much about it as possible.

Regarding "behind the scenes". The amount of work involved in keeping these databases going is extreme. Small business owners work every hour of every day anyway; fitting in all this database work is very hard. Large companies have mountains of records they have to try to keep up with. For everybody, it's scary knowing any mistake or omission will be a felony. Because of this, many companies, websites and photographers have simply given up. Closed up shop.

Another problem is that the law requires the website owner to display the address of their office -- or home office -- on the website, so that inspectors can visit anytime. Many small companies are run by one person who is webmaster, photographer and office manager. Some sites have a few fans who are essentially internet stalkers. The last thing they need is to be required to provide a physical address and set-in-stone office hours so that the mentally ill can track them down.

So, for many people, that was a reason in itself to abandon their careers and stop producing.

There are a lot of other negative effects of this law but I don't want to bore you to death.

TDV: How are models feeling about having their personal information doled out to website owners?

Lorelei: Most models are already accustomed to having to provide their i.d. and tax information to the photographers. They know that photographer is legit when they're working with them. But this law requires these records to also be copied and passed around to a lot of perimeter people -- people the model doesn't know, hasn't met, can't trust.

And again, there are some intense fans out there. Mainstream movie actors have the right to privacy and protection; the law doesn't require their i.d.s to be accessible to every Tom, Dick and Harry -- it's not fair that adult stars are required to make themselves easy targets for stalking or worse.

TDV: As an adult website owner, how much has the legislation cost you in time and money?

Lorelei: Oh, god. Well, the government didn't even give us a nice simple standardized form to use or anything, so everyone had to figure this out from the ground up. There are about a dozen database programs out there that have been developed. But I didn't feel any of them properly addressed human error, so I had to pay someone to write me a better program. That was a few thousand dollars, and hours of dialogue with the coder. Then to get started, we had about 200 records to manually type into the database and upload the i.d. files. So I had to pay some people by the hour to do that...

I don't even feel like working with new models any more, because every time that happens, I have to hand-enter a new record and upload the i.d. and set the tracking parameters and all that... man!

TDV: What about the recent announcement of the ‘War on Porn”? As a bondage enthusiast, what impact does this have on your own life?

Lorelei: If I were just a private bondage enthusiast it wouldn't be having much impact yet, but since I share my fantasies online with a lot of people, I'm a target. They've announced certain types of porn that they consider "obscene". They included BDSM and force fantasies/force roleplay on their list. So the foundations of my sexual identity are apparently "obscene" to them, and that makes me feel vulnerable. I'd hate to be arrested for being who I am.

TDV: What impact do you see it having on the BDSM community at large?

Lorelei: So far, some websites that have closed were ones that had been helpful to the community. Not just entertainment sites but informational sites and advice... I could just cry. Who knows what the future effects will be. The government recently closed an all-text story site for "obscenity". Those were just words, clearly there were no real-world physical "victims" in any way, but they shut it down. Thought policing.

TDV: There are a few well known sites that have closed rather than risk an FBI raid, is that a consideration for you?

Lorelei: For many reasons, I simply can't shut down my sites.

My little self-run company supports not just myself but my sister's family, plus I'm helping my mother and brother make ends meet. So I have responsibilities that this income meets. (Barely meets.) If I tried to go back to one of my prior careers now (bookkeeper, secretary, rental agent), I could not support my family.

My sexuality is a very large chunk of my identity. For some people sex isn't important, but for me, this is a major part of who I am. My photography, my modeling, my website work is how I self-actualize. If a person doesn't self-actualize, they become depressed, and then they're of no use to themselves or society. So it would be harmful and personally destructive for me to stop expressing my fetishes in these ways.

My sexuality is also important to my peers. Before I found the bondage community, I was alone and I felt like a pariah. I felt separate from society and felt disconnected from my world, my friends, my loved ones. There are many other people who start out with those same feelings. Finding out that other people like bondage, and have happy consent-based bondage relationships, is very important! So I feel like I need to be "out there", so that others who are finding their way can see that a bondage life is workable. Then they can self-actualize too.

I admit I would be very scared if the FBI visited me. Heck, when Max Hardcore got raided, they shot a hole in his floor. But I have all my model i.d.'s and my spiffy database, so I'm doing what I can. All I can hope is that they understand that I'm not a scofflaw, and my fantasies and play are not "obscene". We're just here to have fun and be happy.

TDV: Thanks Lorelei for agreeing to do this interview. I’d just like to mention that your sites are a wonderful contribution to people who have an interest in BDSM and you are doing a great job allowing folks to feel comfortable with their fantasies.

To learn more about Lorelei and her fantasies you can visit her sites:
Bedroom Bondage ForceFantasies Bondage University The Fetish Scene	Lorelei's Links Gag Talk Damsel Theater Bondage for Free