She Gets Paid Just to Humiliate Her Fans

Unexpected-Pringle77 · 2021-04-14T23:28:23+00:00

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To celebrate her 27th birthday, Mistress Marley, a professional dominatrix from Harlem, flew to Tulum, Mexico, where she rented a modern four-bedroom villa with a limestone pool, private beach and personal chef.

For four days, she and six friends swam in the warm Caribbean waters, went zip-lining in the Mayan jungle and dined on fresh lobsters and tequila at boho-chic restaurants.

Whenever she wanted money, she said, she would set up her iPhone on the coconut-filled beach and command her online suitors to chip in.

“Tulum has been amazing thus far. Keep funding my trip!” she posted to her Twitter followers in late January, along with her CashApp handle and a 15-second video showing off her curvaceous bikini body, bright red fingernails and flowing dark tresses.

Soon, she said, money began flowing into her account. “Please take all of my money for your trip, I don’t deserve it,” wrote Betaboy10, who gave $500, according to screen shots she provided to The New York Times. Another, named SubMike00, sent $250. A user who goes by Peter Zapp sent $400, along with the message: “I’d do anything to be owned by you.”

Welcome to the lucrative world of financial domination, a form of B.D.S.M. that has flourished during the pandemic, when many sex workers and their customers have migrated online because of social distancing precautions. The concept is simple, even if the allure is not immediately self-evident: “finsubs” (short for “financial submissives”) send monetary “tributes” to a financial dominatrix, who could be any gender, in exchange for being humiliated and degraded.

“It’s controlling someone through their wallet,” said Mistress Marley. (The Times agreed to identify her only by her professional name to prevent stalkers from finding her.) “I love waking up every day realizing that submissive men pay all my bills and I don’t spend a dime.”

Trysts take place mostly online, though there can be in-person encounters. And the humiliation could be as fleeting as a few moments, or persist for hours during so-called draining sessions, when the dominatrix hurls a barrage of insults and demands that ends only when a monetary cap is reached or a finsub’s bank account hits zero — whichever comes first.

In its purest form, financial domination is not transactional. Sending money is the kink, and finsubs offer tributes without expecting anything in return. “The arousal is in the act,” said Phillip Hammack, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the director of its Sexual and Gender Diversity Laboratory. “It’s about that loss of control.”

Along with B.D.S.M. in general, financial domination has had wider exposure in recent years through social media and popular culture. On the Netflix comedy “Bonding,” the lead character, Tiff, is a graduate student who moonlights as a dominatrix; she meets a high-powered C.E.O. who gets aroused by having her spend $10,000 at a boutique. And on the Gen Z morality tale “Euphoria,” one of the show’s addled high school students, Kat, becomes a financial dominatrix as a way of reclaiming her sexuality.

The fetish is increasingly visible, even as the pandemic has restricted how sex workers can make a living. Just ask Mistress Marley, who previously made the majority of her income from in-person dominatrix sessions. She has made up to $5,000 a week as a financial dominatrix or “findomme,” she said, and provided The Times with screen shots of financial transactions.

“So many people are thriving off of this industry online,” she said. “I know this because I’m thriving.”

Mistress Marley earned a master’s degree in fashion marketing in 2018. While she was in school, she worked casually as a so-called sugar baby, an arrangement in which one person — usually younger — is supported financially by a partner, or “sugar daddy.”

After graduation, she found a job in fashion as a buyer for a large corporation. But when she wasn’t earning as much as she’d hoped, she Googled: “How to make money as a woman online.”

Among the first search results was a 2013 Vice article, “Financial Domination Is a Very Expensive Fetish,” about a Pennsylvania woman named Cleo Tantra who said that financial dominatrixes like herself could make “a few thousand a month.”

Intrigued, Mistress Marley scoured the web and took copious notes: favorite apps and social media platforms (CashApp and Twitter); their colorful aliases (Goddess Taylor Knight; Miss Melody May; Divine Goddess Jessica); what finsubs liked to pay for (manicures, champagne dinners and designer clothes).

A week later, she created a Twitter account with her new nom de findomme — Mistress Marley — and posted a simple message with no photo: “Who wants to buy me lunch?” Two days later, she said, she received her first tribute: $25 from an anonymous CashApp user.

The more Mistress Marley posted (not just on Twitter, but also on Instagram, OnlyFans and Patreon), the more money flowed. She uploaded seductive videos of herself in a black corset, dancing to Megan Thee Stallion. She snapped photos of Fendi purses and other gifts. She met finsubs in person and recorded the interactions.

By her second year, she said, she was making up to $2,500 a week. That’s when she quit her job in fashion.

As her following grew, she became bolder. In 2019, she attended homecoming at North Carolina Central University, a historically Black college in Durham, N.C., from which she graduated, in full dominatrix regalia: black leather corset, yellow snakeskin-pattern leggings and black suede platform boots.

But the most scandalous part of this stunt was at the other end of her leash: a middle-aged white man whom she said she met a few days earlier on FetLife, a social media platform for the B.D.S.M. community.

She walked the man across the campus like a dog, stopping occasionally to pat his balding head. A video shows onlookers gawking and snapping photos. One attendee shared a video on Twitter with the caption: “She brought her sugar daddy to homecoming.” Mistress Marley reposted it with a correction: “That’s not my sugar daddy, it’s my sub LOL. He pays for me to control him.”

Mistress Marley also puts her performance in a larger historical context. “For me, especially as a Black woman, I see my financial gains as reparations, because the majority, if not all of my clients, are white men,” she said.

By morning, the video had amassed over three million views, and her inbox was flooded with requests from finsubs and women who wanted to learn more about financial domination. Among them was King Kourt, 33, a medical data analyst and part-time secretary from Cleveland. (That is her professional name, which The Times agreed to use for safety concerns.) “I saw her video and instantly thought: ‘I want to walk a white man on a leash,’” she said.

Mistress Marley invited her to join Black Domme Sorority, a collective she started to help Black women navigate the world of financial domination. The group hosts brunches, charity events, sex tutorials and safety classes.

This made her the face of this kind of work, resulting in attention like a profile in Paper magazine.

“Findom feels safe because it’s online, and there’s no sex involved,” said King Kourt, who joined the sorority and said she now makes about $2,500 a month from 10 finsubs.

...

“In the capitalist society we live in, money is so fetishized, especially by men,” they said. “Men are taught from a very young age that they need to be breadwinners and they need to provide for women, for their families.”

“As a nonbinary person, to be able to take that power away from men really subverts those expectations,” Goddess Ambrosia added.

The desire to be financially humiliated is not limited to men. Some women find it arousing, too. “Women are taught to see men as powerful figures,” said a 28-year-old dominatrix from Brooklyn who has many female clients and who works under the name Miss Orion. “But my subs want to submit to me and give me their minds, bodies and souls because I am a woman, and they see that as powerful.”

Regardless of gender or sexual orientation, financial domination is ultimately about power.

“It’s a power exchange, just like in B.D.S.M., only it’s without ropes or chains — it’s with money,” said Joe Kort, a sex and relationship therapist and co-director of the Modern Sex Therapy Institutes in West Palm Beach, Fla. “The money is, in fact, the chains, because dommes are tying up subs financially. The eroticism for the subs comes from feeling owned.”

Cult Clare, 25, a TikTok creator from Brooklyn, dabbles in findom whenever she wants to feel bossy. “I really do enjoy the control,” she said. “It’s empowering, particularly as women, because we’re taught to constantly undervalue ourselves. Findom really gives you a space to say, ‘No, I’m worth this much, and if you can’t pay that, then get away.’”

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outline_link_bot · 2021-04-14T23:47:13+00:00

She Gets Paid Just to Humiliate Her Fans

Decluttered version of this New York Times's article archived on April 10, 2021 can be viewed on https://outline.com/E2wkDu

Title	She Gets Paid Just to Humiliate Her Fans
Author	Unexpected-Pringle77
Upvotes	7
Comments	2
Date	April 14, 2021 11:26 PM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PussyPass
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PussyPass/comments/mr2q1q/she_gets_paid_just_to_humiliate_her_fans/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PussyPass/she-gets-paid-just-to-humiliate-her-fans.830868 https://theredarchive.com/post/830868

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