Jezebel has a fairly silly article on the increase in young tech workers visiting pro-dommes. Like a lot of similar articles it suffers from the problem of observational bias.
Pro-dommes are often the face of kink, as they’re easy to find and (in some cases) happy to advertise. Unfortunately they’re also expensive to visit. On the West coast that means $200 to $300 per hour, which is a lot for the average household. That means the clientele skews to the well off. And since well off men tend to be older, we end up with the cliche of the middle aged banker or lawyer who needs to blow off steam between doing million dollar deals. Now the booming tech economy in some parts of the US has landed a bunch of cash on a small number of software developers, and we get stories about them visiting pro-dommes. The key issue here isn’t kink or sexuality, it’s opportunity. I’m pretty certain if all pro-dommes universally reduced prices to $10 per hour, we’d be seeing articles on the incredibly variety of different people who visit them.
On the plus side, the article does give me an excuse to feature a photograph of one of the dommes interviewed – the lovely Mistress Morgana of San Francisco.
I fully agree with you observations and like all statistics this is meaningless without context. However I would say that the situation appears to be slightly different in the U.K.. In my completely unscientific observations the majority of men I have observed either at fem dom parties or visiting my Mistress do not appear to be professionals, They are however predominantly either the same age or older than me. My conclusions ( as mentioned completely unscientific) are that here it is older gents who have the time and the spare cash to visit professional dominatrices.
I suspect the type of men visiting pro-dommes depend very much on the local economy. In NYC it probably skews to financial and legal types. On the West coast it’s doubtless more tech biased. Different bits of the UK have probably similar slants. I’d guess the mix in Brighton is different to London is different to Edinburgh. But I think as you say, the dominating (ahem) factor is the availability of spare cash and spare time. I think that tends to mean older men in general as they’ve had the time to acquire the money and have moved passed the stage of raising a family.
Of course all these are generalizations based on our observational bias :). It’d be interesting to do a more unbiased study. But my personal belief is that kinky interests are spread evenly across the population and pro-dommes just tend to natural filter for (as you say) means and opportunity.
-paltego