As she rises, the photographer suddenly remembers to ask for Maggie’s name.

“Maggie Mayhem,” she says coolly. “Growing up, people always joked ‘Oh Maggie, like Maggie May.’ So I changed it a little.” With that, she grabs her coffee and walks out into the unusual winter sunshine.

At 24, one might assume that Maggie is a debutante in the world of kink, slowly exploring different fetishes and activities and meeting new people. However, one look at her resume would prove something much different.

But we’ll get to that eventually. First, The Realizing:

Raised in southern California, Maggie had a budding interest in the colorful world of exotic sexual experimentation, though she couldn’t articulate exactly what desires, motivations, or activities would fit her “deviant” inclinations.

“Being raised Catholic, I like to say that [my own form of kink] has something to do with Jesus suffering for our sins.”

For Maggie, who was banging down the doors of L.A.’s sex clubs shortly after she turned 18, not exploring wasn’t an option.

“I was always going to be a sexually open person,” Maggie said, casually smoking, her mocha-choca-whatever waiting patiently by her side. “[I was] constantly curious and with an internet connection, so I was able to explore at an earlier age than most people in the kink scene.”

Perhaps it was that Ethernet cable that helped Maggie realize that she “didn’t want to settle for the bondage-club spanking equivalent of restaurant servers singing the house version of ‘Happy Birthday’.” When she arrived at a goth club/dungeon in 2002, she received a delicious array of public floggings.

“I don’t feel that I was particularly changed by the event,” she wrote on her blog, Missmaggiemayhem.com. “I think I was actualized. It’s the moment I can point to as the birth of Maggie Mayhem … it’s the first time that I came out into the world.”

Onward and Outward

Leaving her all-girls Catholic school behind in Los Angeles, Maggie headed for UC Santa Cruz to get a degree in modern literature and anthropology. It was here, in one of the most liberal cities in the state, that Maggie spread her proverbial pervy wings.

“Sneaking in [to clubs] underage gave me an idea of what sexuality was and how you could take a form of taboo sexuality and celebrate it.”

So Maggie, then blond and still relatively green in the kink community, connected with a friend’s sister—a professional dominatrix at a Los Angeles dungeon. Maggie started with overflow clients, eventually developing a clientele and a way to pay her bills.

Professional domme and sub work allowed Maggie to view “the infinite diversity of human existence,” and to meet a number of interesting people with whom she otherwise would have never interacted.

“I met doctors, lawyers, all these really powerful men who needed a girl to balance it,” she said. “And I did make a lot of money. I only had to work a few times a month and rent would be covered.”

Beyond all of her trinkets and toys, it just so turned out that the relatively petite freshman Miss Maggie Mayhem sported one hell of a pair of brass balls. She soon began a pattern of pushing her limits.

“I liked to pick people that [didn’t] intimidate me,” she says, recalling a particularly memorable experience as a sub. Her client, who was “very polite” and “didn’t hit any of [her] red flags,” wanted to break into a girl’s apartment, put her in bondage, rape and kill her.

“It was a real test,” Maggie tells me, apparently unscathed from the event. “It was almost like playing chicken with my own fear.”

In Northern California Where the Girls Are…Kinkier?

Once she graduated, Maggie moved north and become a very, very busy lady.

Upon moving to the East Bay, Maggie started working for San Francisco’s Sex Information Hotline, blogging on BDSM/Playpen.com, Carnalnation.com, and on her own website, Missmaggiemayhem.com. Currently, among her various other activities, Maggie holds a day job as a youth HIV test counselor.

“Sex positivity, to me, means that every human body regardless of age, physical ability, relative attractiveness, gender, or orientation was designed for sexual expression,” she writes on her blog.

And while the self-proclaimed freaky chick no longer does professional domme and sub work, Maggie has found other ways to express her sexual appetite.

Among her other kinky pursuits, Maggie does fetish modeling. Recently, clad in two-sizes-too-small red heels and a gas mask, a naked Miss Mayhem stood bound, on the edge of Mr. S Leather’s roof in San Francisco.

“Those shoes were so damn tight, I could barely walk,” she said, laughing. “And they kept telling me to get closer and closer to the edge! It was crazy.”

Despite tight shoes and near-death experience on the roof of a sex shop, Maggie has come a long way from what she called a “geeky, kind of chubby” high-schooler.

“This is kind of like reclaiming myself. I want to have the coolest room at the nursing home,” Maggie explains. “I want to immortalize my youth because I won’t always be able to go to these physical extremes.”

Taking the physical to an even more extreme level, Maggie has delved deeper into play piercing. While she play pierced for the first time during her sophomore year of college, Maggie recently brought it to public light at a New Year’s Eve performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

“I was supposed to play Trixie, but realized I didn’t have a routine or anything prepared, so I put a bunch of thin needles down my arms and in my belly.”

Maggie then tied ribbons to the needles and asked cast members to pluck them out of her skin. Apparently there was only one person who was too squeamish to do it.

“It opened people’s eyes to this exotic thing. I like being able to let people know that… it’s tangible.”

Bigger, Badder, And More Mechanical

Although her badassness has been well established, Maggie played chicken with her fear yet again and appeared as an intermission act at Rope::Burn, a Valentine’s Day Japanese Bondage performance in San Francisco.

Scheduled to use a sex machine on stage, Maggie worried about coming off as desperate and slutty. Despite initial nervousness, Maggie Mayhem enjoyed herself and received rave reviews.

“I celebrate sexuality in all of its forms because of how profoundly happy it makes me whether I’m by myself, with a partner, or with several partners at the same time,” she wrote on her blog.

“I wanted to be playful and sexy. But I didn’t really know how I was going to do that while I was being fucked by a machine onstage.” Still, Maggie “had a fantastic orgasm in front of a crowd of people [as] the act was coming to a close.”

For her next feat, a duel with modern machinery, Maggie Mayhem is interested in hook suspension. To my terrified look, Maggie shrugged and said “it’s part of my character. I don’t say no often, I love meeting new people, seeing new things. Sex is just a part of that.”

Still, Maggie realizes that hook suspension is no simple task. “[Doing hook suspension] would be celebrating my own strength… It makes life’s little challenges not seem as big.”

Regardless of the impressions, the inhibitions, or the ignorance of others, Maggie Mayhem remains cool and collected. “Deep down,” she writes, “I still see our sexuality in all of its forms as a reason to celebrate. Sometimes I run into things that even I find a little strange, but I am thankful that they exist because nothing that is human can ever be foreign to me.”