Growing up, I didn’t want to be a doctor, a firefighter, or a ballerina. I wanted to marry rich, and divorce well, and I would tell anyone who would listen.
I could imagine nothing I wanted more than access to wealth and security. I knew that proximity to men might bring me proximity to wealth, but that as long as it remained “his” capital, I was not secure. I didn’t grow up to be a wealthy divorcee… yet. I found an alternative path to a life of luxury and financial abundance: financial domination.
(Interested in listening to me read this to you in my seductive voice? You can listen to the 30-minute recording here. Welcome to my Findom TED-Talk.)
My interest in financial domination (also known as findom) stems from my life-long preoccupation with money and power. Specifically: having my partners surrender their power to me. I am a woman who knows what she wants and exactly how to get it. And what I want is for you to surrender your control through its most tangible form, your wallet.
When you surrender to my desires and submit yourself to my complete control, you might be surprised how things you’ve never fantasized about before can become core to your sexuality. Perhaps you’ve never thought about money as a way to explore power dynamics or maybe you’re a seasoned findom slut. Either way, you may be surprised by the erotic ecstasy that flows when you are surrendering everything to me.
I am a professional and lifestyle financial dominatrix who has been working, playing, and studying BDSM for the last 15 years.
Financial domination (or findom) is the eroticization of money as a catalyst for power play. For me, findom distills the fetish into its purest form–capital (thanks Marx.) Findom can range from an erotically charged wallet drain (similar to the high of gambling), to reducing a submissive’s earrings down to a meager allowance and directing the rest to my account, to completely (and consensually) controlling a submissive’s finances. I like to use all tools at my disposal and enjoy engaging in online financial domination where I virtually seduce submissives into financial submission as well as in person trips to the ATM and cash drops where I get to take what’s mine and be handed cash into my perfectly manicured hands.
I started doing sex work and working as a professional dominatrix while I was studying photography and psychology in undergrad. When my first financial submissive approached me and begged me to drain him, it was exhilarating. I spent a few hours seducing him into financial surrender, demanding that he send money again and again until he had nothing left to give me. He came, thanked me, and I never heard from him again. It was enlightening. I never really had much of a use for men until this point.
It was like visiting my own personal human ATM that I could use, moving on to the next when their worth had been fully extracted and they were no longer of use to me.
I left the exchange thousands of dollars richer and with very, very wet panties. Since then, I have actively sought out more findom clients and even pursued financial domination in some of my personal relationships. BDSM stands for bondage, discipline, (dominance), sadism (submission), and masochism. BDSM is the consensual and negotiated practice of the eroticization of control and surrender, tease and denial, and pleasure and pain. Playing with financial power exchange enables me to engage with all aspects of my sexuality, my intellect, and my body and play with power dynamics in a way that is so often not negotiated or discussed outside of BDSM relationships.
Over the years, I have encountered two main types of people who are interested in findom.
The first type is The Pay Pig: This is the person who gets off specifically on the act of sending the money. They are often a fetishist eroticizing the moment of clicking “send” or handing a woman a stack of cash. The adrenaline rush that comes with it is akin to what someone might feel while gambling, running, or skydiving, or a heavy corporal scene that can bring about an altered state of consciousness, such as flow state (or subspace). It is the psychosexual process of objectifying someone, reducing them down to a wallet, where you’re extracting the only thing you want from them, the only thing they have to give you, the only way they could possibly bring you pleasure or catch your attention.
Each transaction brings them deeper into a delicious flow state, an out of body experience where time does not exist, where the only thing that does is the tether between me and my submissive. Often the pay pig will send cash rapidly in spurts, craving a thorough wallet draining… to be left with nothing but debt in the name of my pleasure. Pay pigs are often seen between the hours of 1AM and 3AM. They often orbit, disappearing when they’ve reached the state they are seeking, when they’ve had an orgasm or when they’ve spent enough. They then come back around when they are ready to play again.
The second type is The Submissive. This is the person who understands that to truly surrender their power in a capitalist society, they must surrender the control of their finances. This is where financial domination can be an extension of a pre-existing TPE (total power exchange) D/s relationship. This is a person who is interested in having me take complete control of their life and finances and truly surrendering their power in all it’s forms. They know that they work for my pleasure, that their purpose is to serve… to bring ease to my life. And that knowledge, that acceptance of their place provides a deep sense of ease and comfort…to both of us.
While they may find the act of sending cash to me erotic and exciting, it is more the continual decision to prioritize my pleasure, stability, and success that they find sexy. Every action, every decision in their life is a form of bondage that draws us closer together, yokes them to my will. With the submissive, financial domination is just one avenue of control that I exert in the relationship.
Whether you want a rough wallet draining or to more fully surrender power to me in an on-going and meaningful way (or my favorite, some combination of the two), there is an erotic exchange in financial domination that is undeniable. Personally, I like when financial domination is a part of an on-going D/s dynamic. I like when I have one hand wrapped around your throat and one hand wrapped around your credit card, pushing you to the edge of what you can bear. I like listening to you begging for breath, maybe mercy, maybe more debt—only one way to find out.
One of my submissives and I even have a legally binding financial domination contract. We negotiated it with a kink-friendly lawyer, which was incredibly sexy. Who knew contract law was so hot? Their paycheck is deposited into my account, and I give them the amount they need to cover their essential expenses each month. Everything else—every dollar they get—is an allowance, which must be earned at my sole discretion, and is typically used only to spoil me. I am so generous!
There is the third type of “Finsub” I forgot to mention: The Asshole. This is the person who thinks paying a sex worker for their time and labor is in and of itself financial domination instead of payment for the rendering of a service or their time. There is a difference between being compensated for your time as a sex worker and the specific libidinal charge of sending a hot woman your money and seeking financial control and surrender. It is important for me that my clients know that professional domination is work, even if I find BDSM to be pleasurable and something I pursue in my personal life. Just as all sex work is work even when the worker may sometimes find it pleasurable.
Much of BDSM play and fetishes involve the eroticization of fully enacting or subverting a dynamic or action that you’ve been taught to be vigilant against or that is taboo. Examples of this are people seeking out pain or control in relationships, or men who have been told to be “wary of gold diggers” seeking out findoms to objectify them for what they have to offer and control their finances. Allowing yourself to surrender to desires that society deems taboo creates an extremely fertile space for translating shame and social constraint into sexually charged encounters, a space rife for transformation and self knowledge.
As a sex worker and academic researcher, I explore power dynamics in many shapes and sizes. I am a Findomme who studies financial discrimination against sex workers, and it is my professional opinion that the act of giving a woman money is an underappreciated art form.
In a society where women are paid less than men, were not able to open bank accounts alone until the 60s, were not able to take out a line of credit without their husbands’ approval until 48 years ago, and where feminized and sexual labor is consistently invisibilized and devalued, taking control of a man’s finances is both cathartic and a highly subversive form of restitution.
*Here, the author breaks the third wall.* I would be remiss not to mention that much of professional domination is often the performance of power exchange within a set time frame. At the end of the day, a client is still paying for a service and the sex worker still has to pay their rent working in a largely criminalized economy. Much of the power dynamics in an hourly professional BDSM relationships rely on the suspension of disbelief that a sex worker has more power than a client. However, performance is a powerful and cathartic art form. It can lead to transformative experiences that challenge what you think to be true and how you move through the world. This does not make the embodied experience of submission and dominance in a professional D/s relationship any less real. In fact, there is ample space to explore desire and power that further unpacks some of these complexities. BDSM is capable of creating, limiting, and replicating possibilities as well as providing a space for us to step outside of the roles dictated by patriarchal structures and provide cathartic release.
With financial domination in particular, there is also the performance of class drag, the performance of not working, and the performance of “just being hot and mean”—as if social media, branding, content production, and talking to clients is not multiple full-time jobs on its own. It is not until after you have reached a place of financial security and can begin saying no to some work that you have more power, that you can begin to actually do less work while making more money and be more selective with clients. In a patriarchal society, Femdom can give an embodied experience of the subversion of power dynamics that is incredibly cathartic. But true, transformative, tangible power lives in the positions your body occupies in the world, which can only be changed with greater resources, access, and structural change.
Where appropriate and safe in my professional domination practices, I like to highlight these power dynamics so that my clients are forced to acknowledge the underlying power dynamics present in a client/sex worker relationship.
In a society where money is power, many sex workers are limited in the ways they can receive money. I’ve been kicked off of platform after platform not because I’ve used them to receive money for criminalized work (financial domination is not, by itself, illegal) but because they’ve profiled me as a sex worker and the only payment processors available to me as a sex worker still take 10-40% more than the civilian (non-sex working) payment processors you’re familiar with (e.g. Stripe)… what greater way to surrender to me than through the direct transfer of your cash? And while there will never be a feeling comparable to a neat, fat stack of crisp, new $100 bills surrendered at my feet, I accept all forms of payment available to me.
Despite money playing a major role in many heteronormative relationships, the power dynamics that come up around money are rarely overtly talked about. Couples move in together to save money, couples stay together due to financial codependency, an abusive partner may use the non-consensual control of a partner’s finances to enact financial abuse, or a myriad of other ways money can meditate our relationships. Both Femdom and financial domination allow me to play with subverting deeply patriarchal, capitalistic notions that are embedded in the structure of our society. Through findom I am able to directly reconcile the undervaluation of feminized labor, attention and my sensuality.
I’ve always been very comfortable taking control in relationships, and my partners have always thanked me for it. When I formally found BDSM, it provided a structure for navigating my relationships that appealed to me and put me at ease. Financial domination and femdom are sexy, yes, but they can also create an explicit container for on-going relationships that can transform life in every way. Today, all of my romantic relationships involve some level of D/s (dominance and submission).
I specialize in psychological domination, which for me means I enjoy using my intellect as my primary tool to facilitate surrender. I prefer when someone I am playing with does what I say because I told them to and they wanted to please me, rather than them needing to be in bondage or forced in order to obey me. If you close your eyes and think about me whispering into your ear the words, “Stand still.” What happens to your body? Do you unconsciously comply without hesitation and find yourself reducing your movement? Does it make you uncomfortable? Does it make you angry? It only works if you want it to, if you crave it.
Of course bondage, negotiated coercion and force are hot, but compliance and obedience is what really gets me off. I like when submissives beg me to use my arsenal of expertise, including cognitive-behavioral techniques, high-protocol D/s training, mantra-work, yoga, knowledge of psychology, altered states, and playing with neuroplasticity, to mold them to my will.
Why money, though? It’s simple. My submissives are interested in surrendering power and control to me, and financial domination is a very tangible and transformative way to feel someone exert that power and control. There still remain many submissives that think the exchange of money somehow distills the erotic charge and makes D/s encounters less genuine or meaningful. Everyone is entitled to their beliefs and boundaries, yet I argue the opposite. To me, that is just about ego. I think that by foreclosing the realm of the financial from power play, you might actually be depriving yourself from an intense and fulfilling way to explore power dynamics and surrender.
When I have negotiated taking control of a submissive’s finances, taking whatever I please and putting them on a strict budget, everything that they do (or don’t do) becomes about serving me. Every time they don’t order takeout so they can send me more money, it’s transformed into an act of devotion. Every time they prioritize my pleasure over theirs, it tethers them to my will. Money is erotic, and I love to eroticize it in my professional and personal relationships.
As part of long-term D/s relationships I also enjoy directing my submissives’ charitable giving to sex worker-led organizations and have leveraged client donations to fund Hacking//Hustling, a sex worker-led collective working at the intersection of tech and social justice, that I co-founded. I like to mold individuals into vessels of service that work for my greatest good, whatever form that takes.
When I was kicked off of Venmo and PayPal for being a sex worker, I had one of my tech submissives max out payments to my other payment apps every day until I was able to get new accounts, for my mental health. Then, when I finally got new payment app accounts up and running, he got to max out all of them as a reward. Such a lucky boy! I wanted him to realize how difficult it was and how many barriers there were to restoring my access to payment apps. I wanted him to understand how much additional labor it is just to make money as a sex worker, so I taught him how to set up a new burner phone and made him go through the process with me as part of his service to me. Now he has more payment apps to max out for me and a new skill.
Access to resources reduces harm and increases your options, which is why the deplatforming of and financial discrimination against sex workers is so violent. It pushes us into increasingly vulnerable situations and exposes us to further harm. Despite lack of access to many types of labor, people still love to police the ways that women make money, especially if they are capitalizing on historically undervalued and unpaid labor; such as sex work, gestational labor via surrogacy, financial domination, caregiving, being a homemaker, care giver, or just being hot and mean 😉
As a queer professional dominatrix, I generally have a pretty queer clientele, but it was largely cishet men who were approaching me for financial domination. While it is true that a lot of clients and financial submissives are part of this demographic, as they are generally the people with access to the most capital, not all of my finsubs are men. One of my most devoted financial submissives is a young woman who works in tech. My woman finsub was struck by how I spoke about power, my sensually-sadistic style of domination and how I use financial domination as an extension of an on-going power dynamic. When I shared an interview I did with my woman financial submissive, a lot more women began reaching out to me about lesbian findom.
I’m increasingly selective about which submissives I welcome into my stable, and it’s important to me that they consistently grow as humans so that they can better serve me. Early in our D/s relationship, I sent my woman finsub to a kink-friendly financial advisor to ensure she understood the ins and outs of investing, had a long-term savings strategy, had a “fuck-off” fund, and knew effective budgeting (turns out I was her biggest line item). I also sent her to a career coach to gain the confidence to begin public speaking and more aggressively negotiating her salary. Her income has gone up 45% since we met, most of which is mine for the taking.
With financial domination, my submissives and I always share a common goal: them making and sending me more money. When my submissives do well, whether that means a raise or a promotion at work, I do well. I want to empower them in other areas of their lives, and push them to grow so that they can earn and sacrifice even more for me.
I also encourage all of my submissives that I see in an ongoing capacity to see kink-friendly therapists and find local kink community outside of our dynamic if that makes sense for their lifestyle. It’s important to me that the people that I play with long-term have resources and social support outside of our dynamic.
Each relationship is distinct, and many of my financial submissives serve me in unique ways. For example, one of my financial submissives upgrades my cameras, microphones, and all of the technology I use to produce video clips. They pay for the hotels I shoot in, my beauty treatments, massages after I do in-person sessions, and even for me to take time off.
While I normally think submissives look better working in their cubicles for me, another of my submissives takes paid vacation from work every quarter to do work for me. They clean and organize my house and does administrative work for me for days at a time. Occasionally, I reward them by letting them massage my feet. Of course, they pay me what they make each day of their paid vacation.
Sometimes we even go on vacation together. By that I mean they take time off to serve me, and I use their credit card to pay for a solo vacation or a trip with a lover. So romantic! They know that their pleasure is through facilitating my pleasure, success, and abundance.
As a successful Findomme, I have credit cards from multiple finsubs (my favorite method of payment), which I use to fund my luxurious lifestyle: drinks with my friends, dates with my lovers at boutique hotels, lavish vacations around the world, maxing out my SEP-IRA. I should never have to spend my own money, right?
I have finsubs who drop $10K like it’s nothing, but I also have working class finsubs who save up for months before coming to me to be drained, or to shower me in cash and gifts. I tell them that I want it to hurt—whatever that means for them—that I want them to really feel it, and to beg me for more. I want them to leave every interaction knowing they could always do better, always send more, to keep working harder for Mommy. (Remember: when they say “hit ‘em where it hurts”, they mean the balls or the wallet, personally, I am a fan of a dual-method approach.)
Once, during quarantine, a man drove 3-hours each way just to lay thousands of dollars at my feet while my friends watched, laughing from the car. He made the pilgrimage to lay a stack of crisp $100 bills at my feet. Knowing all day that he was driving just to see me and silently present me with 4-figures was very hot, and we were both incredibly turned on by this erotically charged connection. I gave him strict instructions that he was not to touch himself until the next time he saw me. I knew exactly what I was doing and exactly what that did to him… the urgency in his mind and body to give me money, to do what I say. That psychological play turned a 6-hour car ride and a 2-minute interaction with me into an all-day sexual experience for us. He was willing to sacrifice his whole day in an effort to bring me pleasure.
Much like in my childhood dream to be a wealthy divorcee, I am interested in submissives who are interested in my success and not my dependence on them. Men love to brag about and flaunt their wealth to women, but that does nothing for me unless they’re transferring it directly into my account. Countless men have made life-changing promises to me and then not had the courage to follow through, or even use those promises as a manipulation tactic. I always take note when someone promises me a gift and doesn’t follow through. I am interested in power exchange, and for me, unless they are interested in some aspect of financial control or tangible and monetarily enhancing my life, the ‘power exchange’ does not interest me. That is why I enjoy cultivating D/s relationships that involve financial domination—it promotes my financial freedom and actually increases my power and security in the world, not just in a scene.
When I am developing a long term D/s dynamic with someone who has more financial privilege than I do, even if they are not explicitly interested in financial domination, I look for individuals interested in elements of eroticized financial control as an extension of the power exchange. At the very least, they must be generous and find contributing to my life and buying me gifts to be thrilling. There is something so sexy about someone who gets off on giving me everything I want.
That said, I have a panache for giving people new fetishes, including financial domination. If you read this and felt aroused or a little twinge anywhere, why don’t you send me a tribute? See how it feels. My stable is quite full, but I’m still searching for a special someone (to buy me a house for a femdom retreat or seduce into financial ruin). What’s the worst that could happen?