There are a LOT of questions everywhere all the time from new submissives asking whether paying a tribute is a normal thing when looking for a personal or love-based F/m relationship.
Why do they ask this?
Often it’s because they’ve already handed over some money to someone and instead of it leading to a meeting and the start of a beautiful relationship, it led to, you guessed it, a request for more money. Or they’ve talked to any number of dominant women and at some point in the conversation, they all asked for money.
When it’s raised in discussions, some respondents to the question get all “well pro-dommes are a thing!” and “findom is a thing!”, and sure they are, but just hold on a minute.
Ethical pro-dommes and findoms are up-front and clear about what they’re doing. They NEVER randomly hit up submissive men for chit chat and then go ‘surprise, pay me!’
Ethical pro-dommes offering play-for-pay are professionals running a business. As such, they have a website, they have a professional presentation, they clearly state their session rates, they may require a deposit, and they go from there.
Ethical findoms offering more nebulous, less defined pay-for-interaction arrangements are also fully up-front about what they’re doing, with ‘findom’ displayed right on their profile.
Ethical dominants for whom findom is a kink (this as opposed to ‘pay-for-interaction’ findoms) will NEVER get into a conversation with a potential submissive and then just… demand money. Never.
With any ethical interactions of this kind, there’s no confusion about what’s going on, none of this bafflement that I see over and over from new submissive men.
And yes, I know I’ve used the word ‘ethical’ about 20 times now :P.
So what we’re left with is:
- Unethical pros or findoms
- Newbie Dommes who think this is ‘how it works’
- Jaded lifestylers who have decided this is a way to weed people out, or
- Scammers
The issue is that those that fall into the categories above are often hard to tell apart. Impossible even. And of course scammers rely on that, and trust me when I tell you that when it comes to asking for money, you are much more likely to be paying a scammer than you are to be paying a legit lifestyle dominant woman.
My advice to any newbie submissives is this:
If you’re looking for a personal or love-based F/m relationship, don’t give anyone on the internet any money.
Just don’t.
There are a lot more unethical people and scammers out there on the internet looking for you to pay them than there are genuine lifestyle dominants, and they rely on you wishing and hoping that you’ve struck that one lifestyler who really is-for-real-genuine and who just happens to want a tribute.
But trust me, 99.9% of the time, you haven’t.
PSA: Some ways that requests for money are presented include: a tribute to show respect, a gift card to show sincerity, $600-$800 to pay for ‘equipment for training’ (and they will tantalisingly list out fun toys in detail), money to book a hotel room (and they will point to a legit-looking BDSM hotel that has properties all over the world (it’s not, and they don’t)), a fee for putting together a contract, cost for training, as proof you’re not a time-waster.
. . .
7 comments
Nice educational post! Be careful because scammers are everywhere, not even in the internet
True enough :/.
Ferns
Excellent post and I hope it will be widely read. I’ve interacted with pros online who have assisted with my preferred kink, and have always happily tributed them. They were well deserving of payment for their time and expertise.
What gets me are the so-called “professionals” you see at every turn on Twitter these days who demand a tribute before they will even consider talking with you. That’s ridiculous in my estimation, and I avoid them like the Bubonic plague as I’m sure many men do. They may be dominants, but they aren’t my dominant and aren’t entitled to demand payment for discussing the possibility of a arrangement by which they would get paid. That’s simply part of the business model.
Findom is not a kink of mine, though I know it is for others. While I wouldn’t think of kink shaming anyone, I admit the motivation behind Findom is not something I remotely understand. All I know is the “Findommes” of Twitter are the worst offenders of all. They seem to believe every submissive guy is the same which to me only reveals how little they know.
Anyway, keep up the good work, Sweet As. :D
Thanks JK.
The folks asking for money may annoy you, but mentioning those who present their terms clearly up-font in the same breath as scammers is common and inaccurate. The former is behaving ethically (even if you don’t like it), the latter is not.
Ferns
Love this post! It’s crazy that scammers will invest so much time to groom someone into the perfect victim.
But, I also wonder if you have any thoughts on when this happens in the “opposite” direction. I’ve had pro-domme friends that turned out to really liked a client, and their client seemingly fell hard for them too. So pay for play continues for several weeks until the client asks, “What is this? What are we doing? Am I not special? Aren’t we something more?”.
To the pro-domme who genuinely enjoys this client, she’s only doing a disservice to herself if her interactions with the client are limited by how much the client chooses to spend and what specific services he requests.
So, she agrees to move forward in the dynamic, less the transactional parts. Or in other words, she’s working for free now. Everything is all fine and good for a while, but then the “sub” gets bored and moves onto someone else, to work the same scheme. This may not exactly qualify as “scammer” activity, but it sure is a mind fuck when it happens.
If scammers get a good mark, the payoff is worth it, I imagine. I also imagine that scam organisations have standard scripts that are really not much trouble to slightly customise and send out to engage men’s dicks so that they’ll pay for more :/.
“So, she agrees to move forward in the dynamic, less the transactional parts. Or in other words, she’s working for free now. Everything is all fine and good for a while, but then the “sub” gets bored and moves onto someone else, to work the same scheme. This may not exactly qualify as “scammer” activity, but it sure is a mind fuck when it happens.”
I’m sure there are some awful people who do this solely to get free service, but I also think moving from pro/client to dom/sub would be challenging on many levels that could cause this to happen.
Not least is the fact that no matter how well they get on, the bottom line for professional interactions is that it’s the pro-domme’s literal job to behave in ways that make her client happy, and obviously in for-real not-paid interactions, that’s not how D/s (or any relationship) works.
Clients fall in love with perfection, some version of their ideal domme, always ready to play, to be pleasing while pretending to be in charge, to be delighted by ‘whatever sexy fun times’ their client enjoys, and they do this really well every single time they see each other.
I can imagine that when reality hits and she has her own actual life, with needs and wants and desires, that’s a huge adjustment and suddenly she’s no longer ‘the perfect woman’. Now suddenly she doesn’t want to play every time they get together, or she’s moody because that’s who she is, or stressed because she has shit to deal with in her life, or she wants things that aren’t catering to his desires all the time, and probably plenty of times she just wants to chill on the couch and watch Netflix in her fluffy slippers when they get together.
That’s a HUGE shift in the relationship: Multiply that by all the normal life hours vs the time they were spending in sessions before and you have a huge adjustment to make.
So yeah, I’d guess then we’re in the realm of ‘relationships are complicated, shifting from pro/client to gf/bf is hard, and often things don’t work out’ as much as the more cynical ‘he’s running a scheme’.
Also for clarity: I have ZERO experience with this, I’ve just seen enough clients fall in love with their pro-dommes to know exactly how they experience those interactions, and it’s easy to see the challenges that a change out of paid sessions into real life poses.
Ferns