u/Abbie_Kaufman

(Copy-pasted from r/ paypig support group, the cross post feature didn’t work for me)

There are people out there who have established, long term dynamics, where they are “collared” subs in a traditional BDSM sense, and both parties have an equal amount of investment in that relationship. If that’s you, I’m genuinely happy for you, this isn’t about the beautiful thing that y’all have going on.

But my goodness, there is a proliferation of people (mostly from the dom side, but non-zero from the needy sub end which baffles me) who seem to think that the first send makes someone “owned”, who get mad at other dommes for “stealing” subs, or get mad at subs for “cheating” on them. And let’s take a step back and ask: what are we actually doing here. If you’ve never had a conversation about the concept of “ownership”, what that means and what that looks like in real life, you are not owned. “Ownership” in a BDSM dynamic (to the extent that it’s even real but I’ll use the common lingo) is much closer to a dating relationship than a findom-paypig one. If your mental answer to what “ownership” means and how it’s different from your current dynamic is “it would look pretty much the same but maybe they send more money”, stop right there. You as a sub do in fact have some inherent value as a human; there was no auction, you were never claimed as property.

On exclusivity/“sub poaching” (rolling my eyes so hard here), I have been exclusive with a domme in the past. There comes a point where you have enough chemistry and have been talking for long enough that it makes sense to do that. That point is not the first date. An expectation of exclusivity as a starting point, as the default, is baffling to me. We need to stop normalizing that as an expectation. I, as a sub, am fully aware that the dom I’m hitting up in a DM is currently involved in one way or another with various other subs (I hope all subs are aware of this? If you’re not, good morning, welcome to reality). I don’t understand why so many would consider it shocking that I, as a sub, might be involved with various doms. Chatting people up is fun! It’s going to take forever to figure out who I have chemistry with if I talk to one person at a time! No, it is not “cheating” on anyone to be involved with multiple doms if you, the dom, are involved with multiple subs. Either you have a serious, long term, well discussed, intimate relationship, or this is fundamentally a worker-client relationship with some emotion involved (if you have to think about this for longer than a millisecond, the thing you have is the second one).

I don’t claim to have all the answers for WHY acting like any sub who sends a dom more than $10 is owned by that dom and has signed a life contract to worship that person is so common, but I have a couple theories, both of which seem really flawed when you break them down. Theory A: a dom thinks that pretending any sub they talk to for more than a day is owned is like, necessary to establish dominance. If you think that, it kind of sounds like you’re bad at your job and are relying on cliches as crutches in place of actual dominance. Theory B: people are jealous that there’s a theoretical amount of sub money that’s not going to them. I personally think this is a pretty cynical way to look at things, but some cynicism in this space is probably necessary for survival. There is no such thing as a real life dominatrix who gets violently jealous or considers it an act of emotional cheating if someone books a session with a different dominatrix once in a while. There is no such thing as a doctor who complains on Facebook that a patient saw a specialist instead of paying them $300 to take care of the problem. See previous paragraph about how for the overwhelming majority of people, this is fundamentally a worker-client relationship. I suppose there’s a secret third thing: a dom has internally learned that this is the way a BDSM relationship is “supposed” to look, and it never occurred to them that it can not look like that and still be fun and profitable. If you’re in that group, hopefully I‘ve done an ok job of challenging that assumption!

So this is provoked by a comment I saw somewhere else. That many finsubs are actually looking for paid femdom, and that’s not what findom really is. I think that’s probably true, not in an enlightening way, but in a “yeah, no shit” way.

There’s a frequent catchphrase in this community that “sending *is* the kink” which I find frankly laughable. I fully believe that, on the domme end, RECEIVING can be the kink. There’s surely a good number of people who don’t get genuinely kinky pleasure out of receiving money and it’s more of a side hustle but that’s a tangent for another day. The point is, you, the domme saying that sending is the kink, are not sending! You’re receiving. The person sending, the sub, almost certainly is not getting kinky pleasure from that act in itself. Someone somewhere is into that, sure. I’ve been in this space for years and I’m telling you, you’re delusional if you think it’s any higher of a rate than 10% of the finsubs at absolute most. The overwhelming majority of people in your DMs have learned that findom pages are an effective way to find paid online femdom. That doesn’t make them time wasters, that doesn’t make them bad subs, many of those people are genuinely into submission and are good for the money. But the money on its own cannot be the submission. Again, the concept that there’s more people out there into receiving money than sending it should be put into the “fucking duh” basket.

And THEN, let’s address this from the domme side. I would estimate that roughly a third of the dommes posting in findom spaces are publicly, openly, advertising paid femdom. That’s not bad! I am not dissing anyone who does that! I have done paid femdom sessions with several of these people! But you cannot have a pinned post on your profile with a menu of content to buy and then turn around and act like treating this as paid femdom as opposed to findom is some oddity or betrayal. Paid femdom is explicitly the service you are offering. If any of the “true findommes” out there are wondering where all the “good subs” are, there’s a pretty good chance that they’re in the DMs of a paid femdom content seller, because you reliably know what you’re going to get and subs who get burned by dommes appreciate that reliability. X dollars gets me Y feet pics, great, love it, no notes.

The reality at the end of the day is that this is a marketplace, an exchange. If every findom took a moral stance that they only take money from finsubs who expect no additional element of femdom on top of that, the doms will outnumber the subs 70:1 and no one will ever make money or get into a dynamic. Rolling with paid femdom is an essential part of this economy, which I think everyone who’s been doing this for longer than 2 weeks knows? There’s no reason to shame anyone on either end of that or act like you’re superior for treating money as the kink in itself.

As a sub I find it super helpful that you developed a code word for “I am not going to put any work or effort into this. I saw a TikTok about findom and uncritically believed the marketing that it’s LITERALLY being paid to exist. I expect things to just happen to me without me doing anything.” Please keep manifesting, it makes it much easier to sort through the people actually worth talking to.

As a sub I find it super helpful that you developed a code word for “I am not going to put any work or effort into this. I saw a TikTok about findom and uncritically believed the marketing that it’s LITERALLY being paid to exist. I expect things to just happen to me without me doing anything.” Please keep manifesting, it makes it much easier to sort through the people actually worth talking to.