Brutalities : a love story

Quarantined in a southwestern desert city in the midst of her high-risk pregnancy, Margo Steines felt her life narrow around her growing body, compelling her to reckon with the violence entangled in its history.

She was a professional dominatrix in New York City, a homestead farmer in a brutal relationship, a welder on a high-rise building crew and a Mixed Martial Arts enthusiast; each of her many lives brought a new vantage point from which to see how power and masculinity coalesce—and how her body paid the price.

With unflinching candour, Steines searches for the roots of her erstwhile attraction to pain while charting the complicated triumph of tenderness and care.