Your boss didn’t buy it when you said you were late because of a “pet emergency.” Your parents didn’t believe you when you told them you had no idea where that scratch on the car came from. Your friends know you’re full of shit every time you tell them your “work thing” is forcing you to miss their band’s show.
Maybe that’s because you are a bad liar. Not that there’s such a thing as a goodliar, exactly, but there is definitely such a thing as a competent one—and also moments when a lie, or at least a half-truth, can spare someone a lot of pain, like when a dominatrix hides her work from her family. There are other times when lying can be said to be in service of the greater good, like when an undercover cop assumes a fake identity to catch a pedophile. Regardless of morality, lying is something pretty much everyone does, though some are more experienced in the art of deceit than others.
To learn how to lie, we spoke to a real-life dominatrix and undercover cop, along with a host of other people who lie like it’s their job—and in some cases, it actually is their job. Here’s what they told us about lying well and getting away with it.
Dominatrix
As told by “Paige”
Interview by Zach Sokol
I’ve been a sex worker for three years now. I’m a full-service dominatrix, meaning I do offer sexual contact. I work with a lot of people that have, let’s call it, “special issues,” and full-service domme work can be therapeutic to some of them. Most of the time I’d rather not work, so I guess my job always involves lying, in a way [because I have to pretend to be into it for my clients]. But there’s more to it than that, obviously. You have to hide a lot.
For example, I will tell people about being a dominatrix if I think they’ll understand—like my dad knows and has even been to my dungeon. But my grandparents are conservative and I tell them I teach yoga—because I do that professionally too. That being said, I lie and tell most people besides close friends that the domme work I do isn’t full-service—e.g. that my practice is non-sexual. And that’s not the case in reality. I usually tell people that I roleplay with people to engage their fantasies, and that sometimes it involves their fetishes. And this is true—all sex has a power dynamic which is role-playing. This isn’t a full lie, but it definitely isn’t the full truth. If you present the truth slightly differently, people stay a little more open to the idea before they judge. People stigmatize sex work and often think it involves damaged, punished, or oppressed women. If I don’t offer the white-lie buffer, then new people don’t even get to know me. I lie so they won’t judge me.
I have to lie a lot out of practicality, too. To keep my business in operation, I run my dungeon all under my yoga license, which states I teach private lessons in my apartment. And again, I actually do that. But I say each client I see for domme work is a yoga client. Yoga is in this beautiful gray area—it’s not technically a sport, and not fully considered a health or medical thing. It doesn’t require equipment and is considered a recreation. You don’t need a health inspector to approve your private yoga practice. If having a dungeon was legal, I would pay my taxes like everyone else. But it’s not, so I have to do my own thing, which is the “wrong” thing in the eyes of the government. So I do have to lie, which sucks because it’s scary as fuck—these big, shadowy government agencies like the IRS could one day get you and say, “Oh hey, we’re bringing you to jail.”
I also put down on my taxes that I travel a lot because I go to a lot of hotel rooms for my sex work—I meet most of my clients in hotels. It’s funny when you start going to the same hotel a lot, and they recognize you and the big bag of dom equipment you’re carrying! I always have a big case and an outfit underneath my clothes, and my clothes are ill-fitting because they have to be—I’m likely wearing leather underneath it.
This relates to how I’ll take certain measures to actually prevent myself from needing to lie. Say I’m meeting a client at a new hotel: I’ll try to google the lobby first and learn where I’m going, so I can go straight to the elevator and avoid interacting with the staff when it’s time to meet the client. Otherwise, hotel receptionists can tell I’m coming to meet someone, and the first thing they think is, “Are you an escort? Are you a sex worker?” You don’t have to lie directly but you have to say to your body language, I know where I’m going; I have the right to be here.
But shit happens. Things have fallen out of my bag. I’ve lost service and forgotten which room I was going to. You have to be quick on your feet to lie, and you just have to be confident and play the role. One time a hotel employee came up to me and said, “What business do you have being here?” I turned and immediately said, “I’m here to fuck my dad’s business partner,” and just turned around and walked away from her. If you say stuff that bold and confident, what are they going to do? You never hesitate, you never say “um.” You look them straight in the eye and just say it.
Think about lying like this: With your parents you’re one version of yourself, when you’re at a bar you’re another version, and so on. You have to learn how to pull these various personas out of your identity, learn to use them as tools, and then use them to your advantage. You have to learn how to adapt. It’s not just how you look, it’s your attitude. It took me a while to learn how to roleplay. I would look in the mirror and see how my eyes twitch, how my hands move, to make sure I wasn’t slipping out of character. I practiced.
To become a good liar, you have to, in some ways, believe the intent of what you’re saying. You have to be fully, 100-percent in on what you’re trying to get or trying to do. The second you start to waver or have thoughts about it not working out, that’s when the cracks start to come in.
When you start to like lying, that’s an issue. I lie out of practicality, but when people start abusing it, it can become addicting, like drinking.
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