Valentine’s Day — that emotional ogre of a day — has arrived, caused a scene and stormed out, slamming the door behind it. In the wake of this dreaded holiday, there are surely those among us who feel jackhammered, bulldozed and otherwise squished by that crazy little thing called love. But the lovelorn can take comfort in the knowledge that there’s one woman out there — in Michigan, to be exact — who isn’t letting herself get smacked around by love.

She won’t reveal her legal name, but she’s known to her devoted following simply as Mistress Persephone, perhaps the most legendary professional dominatrix working today. Speaking to Persephone on the phone at her home in Flint, Michigan, I make the incredible mistake of asking whether domination involves...well...sex. Persephone responds with understandable brusqueness. “I do not offer sexual services. That,” she says, “is a prostitute.” But she seems to forgive me with merciful quickness, because she muses on: “Sex is just such a simple, boring thing, and these men are looking for something different.”

The 35-year-old diva has spent the past 15 years modeling, performing, seeing clients and cultivating her notorious (and profitable) public persona. She is the focus of cult followings and ardent admirers, but the kicker is she’s single. Persephone identifies as bisexual, but all her serious relationships — including her marriage to British rocker Tim Worman — have been with men. I ask, tentatively, if she misses dating. “Honestly? No,” she says. “It’s so distracting, and your head gets all screwed up. I think my work has been my most gratifying lover.”

A glance through Persephone’s interminable resume confirms that this maven has done staggering amounts of work, mainly in the area of “BDSM” — bondage, domination and sadomasochism. She has worked with Dita Von Teese (ex-wife of Marilyn Manson), starred in what she cheerfully calls “some of the worst horror movies ever made” and appeared in a proliferation of magazines including Leg Show, Leg Sex, Leg World, Leg Action, Bondage Parade, Buxom Bondagettes, Black and Blue, Whips and Chains, Ties that Bind, Shiny, Nugget, Get Kinky, Kinks, Dirty Kinks and Bizarre (both the UK and US editions).

A diminutive five-foot-three, Persephone is famous for her long, flamingly red hair (she says it’s natural), and her staggering 36-27-37 figure (by her own admission, not natural). She tells me about her implants, which over time have mysteriously expanded into a triple-D cup. “I had the implants put in, because when I was a little kid I wanted to look like Elvira,” she says sheepishly. “But it just never happened.”

Photographs of the now-buxom Persephone feature a shocking variety of horror/glamour makeup and suitably leather-ish wardrobe items. Her piercings (nipples, ears and tongue) and tattoos, including the trademark black widow on her stomach, lend Persephone a fierce sort of look, although she emphasizes that her personal aesthetic is a “glamorous” one.

When Persephone first picks up the phone, she sighs with exasperation about computer problems. Her Web site, mspersephone.com (you can also find it at sickchixxx.com), features everything from Persephone’s biography to pricey pre-recorded fetish “messages.” The site is campy and flashy, an unabashed mix of neon fonts and sinister black backgrounds, all centered around the Mistress Persephone character.

“I created an Internet persona in 1996,” she says. “When I was young, I wanted to do something that would make me immortal, and by creating this myth of Persephone, I feel that I am creating an immortal self. And now with the Internet, my pictures will be out there forever.”

Although the Web site is lucrative, managing it isn’t always easy. Persephone has warded off Internet stalkers and repelled opposition from Christian groups who, accusing her of being a Satanist, attempted to shut down her site. But Persephone maintains a flourishing business, which, she hints, has left her bank account in very good shape.

She has also launched a production company specializing in fetish DVDs, and this company, the Web site and other ventures are what Persephone plans to fall back on, should she ever decide to stop seeing clients.

This practicality about her finances characterizes Persephone’s approach to almost everything: her family, her ex-husband, her clients, her yoga schedule. She speaks about her life with a measured calm that makes it clear that she no longer sees of any of it as particularly strange. While she chats blithely about “submissives” who offer to mow her lawn and plow her driveway, I gape silently into the phone. There’s not a single question she refuses to answer. I begin to suspect that, for Persephone at least, there’s not much new under the sun.

Persephone is a cheerful, occasionally giggly conversant who sounds much younger than 35. And although she is occasionally deadly serious, Persephone generally speaks of her work with matter-of-fact detachment. She even goes so far as to compare domination to dentistry: “These men come to me as a professional who is going to offer them a service,” she says, “much like you would go to a dentist to get your teeth cleaned.”

There is, however, no doubt that Persephone is passionately in love with her work. “I’m not stuck in an office somewhere wishing I was dead,” she says. “I wish everyone could have as fulfilling a career as I have.”

Persephone says she has always taken pleasure in the act of domination, although her romantic relationships don’t always involve BDSM. She has, ever since she can remember, been a dominating sort of woman. As a child, Persephone remembers reading a story about a fairy who rode a donkey around, beating him with a spoon. Inspired, she immediately began riding her little brother around the house, whacking him with a teaspoon.

Persephone tells me that she grew up in a Catholic Mexican family in Irvine, California, where both her parents worked on an orange grove. Persephone is, however, currently out of contact with most of her family.

“I’ve been estranged from my mother for almost a decade now, but my father is totally fine with it,” she says. “My sisters and brothers don’t really like what I do, but they live in Mexico, so I just don’t seek them out. My mother is hoping that someday God will shine a light on me, but...you know...I’m 35. By now, I’m pretty numb about it. I have friends who are more like family.”

Persephone has just purchased a new house in Michigan, where she moved after her divorce to be with friends. She travels and parties extensively in London, New York and L.A., but she keeps a low profile in Michigan, where she’s establishing herself as inconspicuously as possible.

Gushing about her sprawling new home, Persephone says she plans to convert the basement into her “dream dungeon.” Her current dungeon is, she specifies, not medieval-themed. The room sounds more like an interrogation-room-meets-Hugh-Hefner’s-rec-room kind of place. The domination equipment includes, “a St. Andrew’s cross, bondage table, spanking bench, leather sling, mummy sleep sack, hoods, cuffs, canes, crops, electrical units, rope, bungee cords,” etc. The surrounding environment, however, sounds almost girly. The walls, Persephone says, are lined in black and pink velvet, and the furniture is a glossy black and red. She sets the mood with candles and “amber lamps” and plays “‘60s exotica lounge music” during sessions.

Persephone charges between $200 and $300 per hour, depending on the city she’s in. When in London, for instance, she doubles her rate (which seems like a criminally lucrative strategy, given the current state of the dollar). Most sessions, she says, involve “riding crops, caning, flogging, cross-dressing, cock and ball torture, strap-on play or being dressed up and treated like a slut.” She has an extensive wardrobe for sessions, which includes “over 200 pairs of shoes and at least 300 corsets.”

Persephone emphasizes that her profession is as much a mental as a physical one. “You’re a therapist also,” she says. “You have to console them when they’re feeling depressed. You have to be their advisor.” She speaks tenderly about the attachment she has with certain clients — she even dated one briefly. “Sometimes there’s just this exchange of energy that’s really hard to explain.”

When she began college, Persephone hoped to obtain a psychology degree, but financial difficulties forced her drop out in 1992. Persephone later heard about a female psych student who wrote her thesis on abnormal male sexuality and did phone sex work for a year as part of her research. Intrigued, Persephone briefly became a phone sex worker. “They liked really weird things like having me pop balloons on the phone.”

After transitioning from phone sex to exotic dancing, Persephone began her career as a dominatrix by taking an ad out in the local paper. Now, after 15 years of domination, Persephone has a thorough understanding of the submissive male personality. Although she takes clients of both genders, female submissives are rare. Persephone tells me that about 80 percent of her clients are white-collar married men whose wives are either unaware of their sexual desires or unwilling to indulge them. She hints cryptically that her clients have included celebrities, Wall Street execs, judges and other public figures. But, as Persephone emphasizes, privacy is an essential part of her profession.

I ask Persephone about why she thinks certain men are submissives. She tells me first about a client who broke down and experienced what Persephone called “a regression to infancy,” during which he recalled having been abused during childhood. Persephone spent the rest of the session “talking him out of it.”

While Persephone views this particular man’s submission as being trauma-related, she says that she thinks most submissives are just naturally that way.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I think that some people are just born with weird, kinky fetishes. I truly think that some men are born to serve. They just have it so ingrained in them that they could never be happy unless a woman is completely controlling their lives.”

But she also chalks up some male submissive tendencies to social pressures.

“In our society, men tend to be in control,” she says. “They’re not happy with their wives putting them in charge, so they seek someone out who is bossy and more aggressive and in control, not just physically, but mentally and even financially.”

Persephone regales me with stories of “blackmail fantasists” who want to be blackmailed for protracted periods of time. She also describes submissives who enjoy “slut treatment.”

“They love it when I’m really dressed up and I dress them up like me,” she says. “They want to know what it’s like to dress sexily and be manhandled by a strong woman. They want to have that power exchange. They have such stressful jobs and lives, and they just want to be something different from what they are.”

Bowled over by this pithy insight into male sexuality, I am again stunned into silence. To be honest, I’ve always dismissed BDSM types as being just weird — the grown-up version of those kids in middle school who practiced Wicca and wore purple spandex and smeared their eyes with kohl and knew how jousting was actually done. But suddenly domination seems like a frighteningly sane attempt at upending oppressive gender roles.

It’s clear, however, that Persephone has no problem with exploiting her own buxom femininity — she reflects that she gets “all the right attention that way.” But at times she betrays feminist leanings. At one point she snaps sternly, “I’m of the opinion that if you’re a woman and you can’t support yourself, there’s something wrong with you.”

Realizing that I’ve kept her on the phone for almost two hours, I blurt out a final question. What exactly will happen when Persephone...you know...sags?

“Looks don’t last forever,” she says with Mary Poppins-style matter-of-fact-ness. “But I know mistresses in their 60’s who are still doing well. At that point, you get clients who are paying for experience.”

As I muse on visions of Persephone dominating into old age, it’s clear to me that this is one woman who — when faced with such atrocities as Valentine’s Day — will come out on top.