Brutalities : a love story / Margo Steines.

Everything is contagious -- Brutalities (I) -- What to expect when you're expecting to possibly die -- Sick gainz (I) -- Your body is a bull's eye -- A very brutal game -- The fast slowdown -- Working -- Deprecations -- Scales of hardness -- Waddle like a cage fighter -- In the clinch (I) -- Skin hunger -- Brutalities (II) -- Can I shelter you? -- In the clinch (II) -- A clean, well-lighted place -- Sick gainz (II) -- A body that's been troubled -- Epilogue.

"A searing, vivid memoir that investigates the dynamics of violence, power, desire, and a body pushed to the brink. 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 candor, Steines searches for the roots of her erstwhile attraction to pain while charting the complicated triumph of tenderness and care"-- Provided by publisher.