Fetish Icon Gets Busy

Camera flashes reflect off of her skin-tight red and black rubber corset. Shiny electrical tape covers her nipples. Wearing sleek fishnet stockings and gigantic, lethal high heels, she produces a two-and-a-half-foot black metal strap-on dildo. She buckles it across the latex on her flat stomach. Then the lean, busty 27-year-old turns to the crowd gathered in front of the stage and purses her glossy red lips, giving a make-all-your-dreams-come-true grin.

The Miami Beach audience is aghast. Awestruck. Riveted. Two minutes into her five-minute show, Rubber Doll has already spanked her luscious friend, Lexi Lapetina (who is wearing a matching rubber corset), removed a string of large beads from her own vagina, swung said beads around in time with the music (Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up"), and then tasted them.

Now, as the crowd is transforming into a sea of cell phone cameras, nobody is sure what to think about the giant metal member hanging from her. But Rubber Doll does what comes naturally. She bends over and lifts up a power tool — it's an angle grinder, and it's plugged in.

But wait. Before we get to the grinder's fate, let's start at the beginning. The story of Rubber Doll, who headlines the world's largest fetish parties, began eight years ago. This only-in-Florida entertainer (who asked that we not publish her real name because not everyone in her family knows about her line of work) was a quiet secretary in Miami. She was 19 years old, fresh out of high school, and could barely tolerate her job. She wondered what she wanted to do with her life. But she never doubted what she loved doing at night: donning tight Goth gear and touring the clubs in Miami Beach and South Broward.

Soon it wasn't just any kind of Goth clothing, but a very specific style. "I basically just fell in love with latex," she says, looking back on the early days. "The way it looks. The way it feels. There's nothing like it." Her rubber wardrobe began growing.

Around the same time, she and her boyfriend saw a TV show about couples running lucrative amateur adult websites. This was the dawn of the age of amateurs on the Internet. What young man could resist the temptation of seeing this sweet young thing and her beau live on a webcam? The couple decided they could bring in a little extra cash by taking pictures of something they already loved: hard-core, rubber-infused fetish play.

From the beginning, she says, she wanted to stay true to the rubber theme. A new kind of star was born. "I had no idea what I was doing when we started," she says. "I look at those early days, at the outfits and the sets, and they're so, like, basic and amateur. I cringe they're so bad. But the idea was there."

The site wasn't profitable immediately, but soon Rubber Doll's beautiful face and latex-clad body had spread far and wide. Within six months of launching RubberDoll.net, she quit her secretary job to work full-time on conceiving the elaborate sets and costumes for each shoot.

As the number of fans grew, she felt pressure to make each rubber-themed posting more incredible than the last. There was "Rubber School Girl," "Rubber Nurse," and "Rubber Flight Attendant" (with a whip, in case you don't get back to your seat when the captain puts the seatbelt sign on). From the beginning, she built most of the sets herself, sometimes hammering and screwing through the night.

This work made sense to her. "From when I was very young, I was always attracted to my brother's tools," she says. "I was always taking things apart and trying to put them back together. I would rather build something than play with dolls. So I can spend hours building something [such as a giant wooden cross with chains for 'Rubber Nun'] and it doesn't feel like I'm working at all."

Within a few years, Rubber Doll began receiving invitations to perform in public. "I had never performed anywhere at that point. But I wanted to take this fantasy that existed on the Internet and make her real." So this cross between a comic book hero and a female videogame character (from what would be the hottest videogame ever) stepped out of cyberspace and into places such as Purgatory in Fort Lauderdale, one of the dungeon fetish clubs where she started.

She built 3-D, stage-friendly variations of her sets. She wore the same costumes her fans had seen online. She re-created live versions of some of her most popular shoots. When she performed as Rubber Nurse, for example, she did a medical-themed show that included giving herself a "shot."