Fifteen years ago, comedian and sex worker Lane Kwederis was with a client who casually mentioned that after the session, they should stop by the ATM. At first, she didn’t know what he meant, and then he explained, “I will put in my card, enter my PIN, and then step aside and let you take over.” As soon as he was that explicit, she understood the power dynamic. “It was a new level of vulnerability, and it was very exciting for me,” she tells me over Zoom.
Given that this was her first experience with financial domination (commonly referred to as findom) she wasn’t sure how much money to take. She remembered that her daily limit was $500 so she decided to take just under that. “I entered $480 and it came out. I was like, ‘Yeah, baby!’ I kissed the receipt and gave it to him and said, ‘You’re welcome,’ and walked away.”
As she walked away, she was hit with a rush of excitement, one so strong that it redirected her career. “I remember saying to myself, ‘I do this now. This is my niche, my kink.’” Since then, Kwederis describes financial domination as her day job, the one that supports all of her other projects, including her one-woman comedy show about sex work and financial domination, Sex Job, which recently ran at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York City, among other venues.
In an email, New York City-based dominatrix Mistress Danielle Blunt describes financial domination as “the eroticization of money as a catalyst for power play within a BDSM dynamic.” For those unfamiliar, BDSM is a form of erotic powerplay that is characterized by bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism. Like other forms of BDSM power exchange, the submissive hands power over to their Dominant, but in findom, rather than submitting physically (as one does in impact play or shibari) there is an acknowledgment that, within a capitalist society, money is power. “Playing with money is a very powerful way to make power explicit,” Blunt says.
Part of the appeal of financial domination, for Blunt, is that it does more to enhance her life outside of the session than other forms of power exchange. “Financial domination is particularly enjoyable to me because it is the only kink activity that actually leaves me with more power after the interaction has ended,” she explains. “Sure, someone worshiping my boots is hot and gets me off, but that interaction does nothing to give me more power as I move through the world.” Instead, she says, financial security is power and a submissive’s sacrifice is a true act of devotion “that extends beyond the scene.”
It is clear why a Findomme (a dominatrix who engages in financial domination) would enjoy taking her submissive’s money; while money may also be a personal kink for any given Findomme, sex work is business, and like all business owners, sex workers want to make money. But what about the submissive? What is in it for them?
To explain the motivation of her subs, Blunt says, “Living in a capitalist society we are intimately aware of the ways that money is power. If someone is interested in truly surrendering their power to a Domme, playing with financial domination is an incredible way to make that feeling of surrender, that feeling of sacrifice manifest.” This feeling of surrender, Blunt says, can “permeate every action of a submissive's life and create a consistent embodied feeling of submission as they move throughout their daily life.” While the sting of impact or the marks of rope will fade, for example, the hit to their wallet has a more lasting impact. It is hard to forget that act of submission when it comes at the literal expense of other things.
Justin* (name has been changed to protect his privacy), who is a submissive with a history of engaging in some financial domination — both in person and online — relates to Blunt’s characterization. Part of this ultimate submission for him, though, is knowing that it goes against his own interest. “It really doesn't make any sense, so obeying a mistress by doing something out of the norm feels like a true act of submission,” he writes in an email. “I’m really giving up control by doing something that hinders me but makes her really happy. It makes me feel like I really belong to her, that there is a connection.”
Justin knows that, for those who haven’t ever considered the power in these exchanges, it may not make sense. “I think this kink is the most puzzling to people,” he admits. When asked why you would just give your money away without the promise of anything in return he says, “You wouldn’t, that’s the whole point. That is what makes it a kink.”
Mike* has also engaged in findom, albeit only online. Unlike Justin, he has never met any of the Dommes he’s given money to in real life. This makes the whole thing more puzzling, even to himself. In a Twitter DM he tells me, “It’s fucking stupid. You’re giving money to someone you don’t even know. How does that make any sense? When I step back, I’m horrified by the whole thing.” And yet, for him, not meeting them in person heightens the experience. “The appeal is the dynamic. I don’t know why it is, but there’s something very erotic about being controlled,” he says. “Since you’re never gonna be face-to-face, with these people, financial control feels somewhat tangible. It’s direct, and it has a very real impact on you, and also symbolizes a transition of power. You are giving, the other person is taking.”
Kwederis points out that this dynamic works, in part, because people have very complicated relationships with money. Some, she says, have a fear of losing the money they make or being irresponsible with it. Handing that responsibility over to someone else, in this case, can feel like a relief. They don’t shoulder the responsibility alone. “They’re like, ‘Well, this person made me do it.’”
Often too, she says, findom clients “have trouble spending money on themselves.” In this way, her pleasure serves as a proxy for their own. “They can spend money on their own enjoyment through my enjoyment,” she says. “It's this interesting, roundabout way for them to kind of be able to let go of the guilt.”
But being able to let go of it points to the fact that guilt is an integral part of the kink itself. Mike says that you can’t understand what drives a financial submissive without understanding that the excitement and the guilt go together. “The euphoria runs very high. But so does the guilt,” he says. “It’s actually weird, because I’m not sure you can have one without the other in this genre. Like, the guilt is a big part of the buzz. You’re doing something you feel like you shouldn’t do. That’s erotic.”
Kink practitioners have argued that kink is often a way to eroticize trauma; to play with it, reshape it, and move it out of the body. The erotic can change us; it can heal us, but it can also destroy us. As with anything, there are more and less healthy versions. Because many people have complex feelings about money, this is obviously true for this kind of play.
In Kwederis’ experience, instead of seeing a Findomme as someone who is engaged in a fun, erotic exchange with them, people who are engaging in an unhealthy way start to blame the Domme. “I would say people with less healthy relationships [to money] have a lot of shame and stigma around all this stuff and want you to be the villain so that it absolves them of any responsibility.”
To believe that financial domination is only a practice of women draining men’s wallets in an exploitative way, though, is to miss some of the possibilities within the practice. “I enjoy a fast and rough wallet fucking as much as the next Domme,” Blunt says. But there is so much more that is possible between Findomme and her sub. “Financial domination looks like working with my submissives to make budgets, get raises, and earn more money so they have more to sacrifice to me. It looks like teaching them how to prioritize my pleasure at all costs. What I enjoy most about Findom is the mix of erotically charged drains coupled with ongoing devotion and sacrifice at every moment of their day.” In other words, these are and can be ongoing relationships that better the lives of both Domme and sub.
We all know that sex is powerful and that money is powerful. It is largely because of the power of both that there’s been an endless effort to abolish sex work of all kinds. What the existence of financial domination shows us, though, is that sex work isn’t just sex for money. The money itself carries its own erotic charge for both buyer and seller. What is valuable here isn’t just the sex, it is the exchange of power in the form of money. Findommes, in this sense, can tell us as much about the psychological impact of capitalism as any psychologist or economist could.
You can read Mistress Blunt’s take on Findom in her own words here.
You can see a preview of Lane Kwederis’s show here.
You can find Jessie on Twitter @sapiotextual & Instagram @curvaceous_sage. You can follow her new podcast on Twitter & Instagram @NotHustlingPod. You can also visit her website jessiesage.com.
