u/Abbie_Kaufman

Has anyone here seen Gregg Araki’s new “domme-com”? Curious what the thoughts are within the kink community. As a stylist, Araki has done it again. Very funny, if you’ve seen The Doom Generation or Nowhere, you have an idea of what to expect, transgressive and blunt sex comedies that push boundaries and really dig into how sex makes people feel. But it’s easy to see how it kind of “misinterprets” the vibe, once again a Hollywood production about BDSM has a central relationship that’s clearly not safe or consensual (Olivia Wilde is Cooper Hoffman’s employer, picks him out as a submissive almost immediately, and is secretly playing a background long game to boost the value of her art gallery that Hoffman doesn’t even realize is happening until the very end of the film). On some level the movie is clearly aware that the central relationship is not healthy or good, but the ending note is he liked it and he’s better for the experience, so, shrug.

(Originally posted on PPSG with a silly title. People do not seem to care much for it.)

How can so many subs afford these eye-watering tribute amounts? How are so many people out there needing money for bills so badly that they try on the dominatrix costume to see how it feels? It all comes down to one of the world’s greatest cash masters, up there with the IRS: our friend the K-Shaped Economy!

The core principle of Master K is the premise that at some level of wealth, there’s a split: the rich get richer while the poor get poorer (the charts of inflation-adjusted relative wealth follow a K shape, hence the name). Does Master K even exist? Well that depends on who you ask. The US Treasury Secretary, who is pretty biased and personally invested in making people believe the economy good, said no this past week! If you look purely at household earnings and spending, this is technically true, in the sense that the wealth gap in those things has narrowed in 2026 relative to 2023, which of course was a record year for the wealth gap being the largest in modern history.

If you look at total net worth, however, the K wave is as strong as ever. The top 1% of Americans have increased net worth by 30% since 2019, relative to the rest of the top 20% of Americans, who saw wealth growth of just 21%. That 9% gap is significant when you break it down to scale of the starting point being several million dollars, and of course the poorer the demographic, the less wealth growth you’re seeing. The middle 40% of the US economy has seen wealth growth of just 10% in that time frame.

“That’s cool economy theory, how does this affect me!?” I hear you asking. To oversimplify things, if you have enough money that you can put it away and use it to make more money (whether that’s in stocks, bonds, high-interest bank accounts, whatever), the economy is really good. The people saying the economy is bad because the job market is bad and everything costs more nowadays, that’s straight up not correct for you. You’re making more money than you would have at any other point for history, and you’ll make even more money not from having a job, but just by existing as a person who has money. Correct me if I’m wrong: This is the goal of most findoms, to be paid for existing and not working? If you, as a domme, are making $100 in tributes and spending $100 on now purchases and putting 0 away into investments that will bear more money later, you’re going about the concept of being paid for existing entirely wrong.

If you’re a “paypig”, first of all take realistic assessment of where you are. A good rule of thumb that I’ve tried to follow, mostly successfully, is never send money that decreases my net worth. Excess investment income can be fun money to spend on whatever. Spending it on frivolous fun stuff will not decrease your quality of life. And tell your domme that you’re sending for her to have a diversified investment portfolio, not an Ulta run. If your response to this whole spiel is “investment money?!?! I’m barely making rent”, then I’ll be super blunt and say I’m not sure what you’re doing in this community. Please, for the love of god, spend your money on foundational building blocks for your future. I feel like the overwhelming majority of guys doing the simping and sending are under 30. You have so much life ahead of you! Take your usual findom spending money and park it in a CD, so you can’t touch it, and then when you get it back with interest, you’ll feel good about yourself for making a smart investment (this is not financial advice, there are probably better options out there, but getting a CD at a bank is simple and anyone can do it). There is a way to be safe about this and have fun! It just requires you to have money… which in itself in 2026 requires you to have money.

Really just want to open the floor for discussions, and provoke society if possible. I could yap someone’s ear off about economics, but let’s start with a simple building block concept: Supply and Demand. In any economic market (of which this is one, duh) there is a finite supply and a finite demand. So many people selling the thing, so many people buying the thing. The general logic that price is an equilibrium where both sides are satisfied kind of gets thrown out the window in this space, which it maybe shouldn’t, but on some core level I understand the WHY. If the price is too high, there won’t be demand. You look at someone with a $50 initial tribute and you might say, there’s probably someone offering an equal service with no initial tribute that I can feel out and discuss stuff with before money gets involved. If the price is too low, no one would be willing to sell the thing at that rate (this end of the chart is really not a problem that comes up in findom IMO). Of course, when you start thinking in those terms it feels a lot less sexy. Fair enough. But it’s worth keeping in the back of your mind, as a paypig, that a service is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. The overwhelming majority of people posting as findoms are on some level aware of this and are happy to take what you’re willing to offer. There will be some people with seemingly impossible financial demands; in the aggregate, they’re not any prettier than people who will be satisfied with like, $75 once a week.

Now, let’s build on the block and talk about supply surge! The equilibrium will get thrown off when there’s a significant change in supply or demand. The demand end of this, I’m guessing without much evidence, had a single big surge in the 2010s when online fetish content became widely available worldwide. Since then, it stays relatively consistent, ebbing and flowing with the economy (the US is the largest demand region and right now the economy is, uh, less than stellar, so demand is a bit lower than it was this time last year). When demand goes up, the price will go up to match. When there’s less demand, prices generally go down because you’d rather make some money than no money. Supply seems to have hit a big surge in the last few years, whether that’s because of TikTok or Euphoria or an exponential rise in the cost of going to college, who can say. In a normal economy, when supply goes up, price goes down to correspond. If there’s 1000 other people offering what you’re offering, you can’t get away with charging more.

But aye, there’s the rub! It’s kind of antithetical to this entire space to presume that a domme should lower her prices in a reactive way. And findom isn’t shelter (it’s not a need), nor is it food (it doesn’t spoil if you don’t sell it). So the real life effect, for most people on the supply side, is keeping prices static and getting a lot less customers than they did 3 years ago. Follow this thought process to the logical conclusion, and the consumer has a lot of power in this dynamic. A lot more power than either side gives them credit for. Arguably too much power, because the product being bought is a power dynamic or fantasy where you take the role of someone who’s completely powerless. The idea that subs should “shop around” for a domme will be treated with hostility by some dommes, I imagine. They will tell you to do your research and due diligence before sending money to someone, which you should do, but when you put it in economic terms it feels dehumanizing. How exactly do we square the circle of an unregulated micro-economy where the consumer has a disproportionate amount of power because there’s literally thousands of pretty girls offering roughly the same service? For the dommes reading this far, DIFFERENTIATE YOUR SERVICE. That’s what any normal business does. But that’s business advice, not a power dynamic solution. It doesn’t address the core issue of the act of subbing being inherently powerful. I’m not sure I’m capable of that. But would love to discuss with others!

(Reposted from PPSG because The Classy One wanted me to bring intelligent discussion to this subreddit. I told her that people only use it for marketing and the “intelligent” is a misnomer. Prove me wrong guys and gals!)

(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.