On the rare occasions that Tris engages consensual blackmail, they usually assume that they’re safe. The act – which requires dominatrixes to “blackmail” their subordinates in exchange for cash, using sensitive or humiliating information provided to them by the client, or “sub” – is supposed to be fun.
Of course, it doesn’t always end that way. Tris learned that the hard way several years ago, after they sent nude pictures of themself to a domme. “Without my consent, [the domme] tweeted these pictures of me, and in the tweet they said: ‘Unless I see £100 [$110], these won’t be taken down,’” recounts Tris, a 21-year-old non-binary findom sub and student from Scotland. (Tris, like all the subs interviewed for this article, asked Rolling Stone to withhold their last name for their privacy.) “I had a panic attack, and I sent it immediately, even though I didn’t have £100, because I was 17,” they continue. “I’m over it now, but at the time it was traumatic. I genuinely thought about killing myself.”
Findom, or financial domination, is a very online subset of the BDSM world in which mostly male subordinates worship mostly female dominatrixes by handing over their cash in exchange for humiliation and mistreatment. Tris engages in one of its most controversial and complicated practices: the perilous business of consensual blackmail.
The assumption for subs who engage in it, according to Tris, is that it’s all a harmless game. Although they willingly hand over personal details to be consensually blackmailed with – the phone numbers of their girlfriends and mothers, information about their place of work, sometimes even their bank account details — it’s done on the basis of fantasy. The dommes aren’t ever supposed to follow through on their threats. It’s meant to be a roleplay.
Subs who enjoy this fetish get off on the idea of being exposed, but claim they are left vulnerable to scams, mistreatment, and legitimate blackmail while engaging with it. Dommes from the scene, meanwhile, say that accusations about blackmail without consent are largely the product of miscommunication and clients who want to avoid paying them. It raises questions about whether the rewards of the practice are worth the risks it poses for both sides. “The professional dommes who verify your age and your kinks bring a lot of value. But findom is such an unregulated market,” says Tris. “The truth is it should be more regulated. There should be more rules around it.”
Inside the Kink
The appeal of consensual blackmail, from the perspective of subs, is the rush or high it gives them. But for some findom subs like Jake, a 27-year-old from Australia, their love for the fetish can become so intense that they start to behave in unsafe ways when pursuing roleplays with dommes. “I’ve said ‘I don’t want safe words,’ that I want it to be real, because at the time that’s what you think. Sending pictures of my face — even though I think it’s fine at the time — I know it’s not afterwards,” says Jake. “I can’t watch regular porn or anything like that [anymore] because it just doesn’t give me that sort of adrenaline rush. [Findom has] rewired my brain.”
Others claim consensual blackmail is a way to enjoy the fetish without feeling guilty for overspending. “I’d say 90 percent of people who engage in findom aren’t attracted to blackmail. The reason for blackmail being attractive to people is it kind of removes the guilt. You have no choice. It basically removes the responsibility from you,” says Tris, who agrees with Jake’s stance that the fetish can often be uncontrollable. “A submissive can become addicted to the dopamine rush of giving money, like a gambling addict,” they add. “Eventually it becomes a necessity.”
Experts, however, aren’t supportive of their stance. “People who have a financial domination fetish can be compulsive in relation to their fetish. [But] sex and fetish aren’t addictive. It is not a diagnosis in any psychiatric or psychological system,” gender and sex therapist Dr. Lori Beth Bisbey tells Rolling Stone. “Most compulsive sexual behaviours cause a person to feel shame. Many men into financial domination are aroused by being ridiculed and shamed. This is a large part of the turn-on.”
According to dommes like Princess Meggerz — who has worked professionally in the findom scene for the last decade — consensual blackmail is difficult to navigate, as it’s hard to understand where subs’ boundaries are. “There’s time where, in the moment, it’s the hottest thing ever [for the sub] because it was the furthest they’ve ever been pushed,” says Meggerz, who is in her thirties and lives in New York City. “Nine times out of ten, the email or phone numbers they give you are fake, but I’ve never been in a position where I’ve legitimately blackmailed someone. I don’t want to ruin someone’s life over a fantasy.”
Courtesy of Mistress Marley
Findommes are aware that scammers and unethical dommes are out there, and high-profile ones often struggle with fakes, who mimic their accounts to scam eager subs. “I’ve had subs send money to a cash app that isn’t mine,” says Mistress Marley, a 28-year-old professional dominatrix, findom specialist, and sex educator from New York. Her friends have sent her three fake profiles of herself in the last week alone. “Now not only has that sub sent money to the wrong person,” she adds, “the person pretending to be me has taken money that could have been in my pocket.” Moira Mona — a 31-year-old professional dominatrix and findomme from Amsterdam who engages in consensual blackmail — believes they are easy to spot. “There are a lot of accounts with pictures that are too good to be true, and their messages [on Twitter] are all identical, as if they were written by a bot. Like, ‘Give me money, you filthy pay pigs!’ – just generic findomme accounts,” she says.
Mona thinks that it’s up to subs to do their research before they engage with this sort of domme through the internet. “I feel for those guys that have been actually scammed, I really do. But I see a lot of guys seeing those too-good-to-be-true messages and pictures, and they totally go for it. They don’t think for a second,” she says. Some smaller findom accounts — run by dommes who use pictures of popular, attractive influencers rather than their own faces — have highly extensive blackmail forms which request everything from humiliating pictures and contact details of loved ones to copies of photo I.D. from prospective subs. “Engaging with that shows a total lack of judgment,” adds Mona. “Do your research.”
Tris thinks that such viewpoints are unfair. “The domme who scammed me deleted tweets once people had paid. There was no evidence she was blackmailing people,” they say. “I looked extensively at her profile [before I engaged in play with her]. How can the victim take responsibility if it’s not obvious?”
Scammers aside, the more pressing problem, from the perspective of dommes, is how subs use accusations of non-consensual blackmail to avoid paying up after scenes. “The majority of these blackmail guys want me to talk to them before they’re willing to pay me, because they don’t get the thrill until I threaten to use information against them — but it’s not even real information, and when you try to [consensually] blackmail them for the money, they just leave,” says Meggerz. Many other dommes have similar complaints. “You do have subs that will use it to get out of payment,” says Marley, who has had subs refuse to pay after she’s consensually blackmailed them online. “So you kind of have it on both ends, which sucks. It’s the reason why blackmail kink isn’t something I go into a lot.”
This is something that Jake, the Australian sub, admits he’s engaged in. “I’m honestly really not proud to say this, but I’ve gone through extreme measures trying to get out of paying. I would end up threatening [to call] authorities. I’ve threatened to kill myself,” he says. Jake even told Rolling Stone that he keeps several bank accounts he can transfer money between quickly, so he can ‘prove’ to dommes that he is out of cash when he doesn’t want to pay up — something he blames on his “addiction” to findom. “I’ve done it because I may not have had the money at that time. We’re going to try and get it whether we have money or not.”
Marley argues that subs should have to take responsibility for their decisions. “Making comments like that take away from your responsibility as an adult,” she says. “I think it’s very wrong to just withdraw consent and have the domme have to deal with it. There are legal ramifications that can happen with blackmail, if it gets that far.”
According to Mona, the real crime is that people are still focusing on the suffering of subs, rather than the dommes. Blackmail works both ways, and women in this world often suffer more than the men do. “I saw a guy bragging online about how he spent a week calling the police to report illegal prostitution at a domme’s address after she had to cancel an appointment with him,” says Mona, who has witnessed subs threaten to call their dommes’ offices, families, or even the authorities or child services, in order to punish them for perceived indiscretions. “If we could truly, openly talk about that, you’d realize we experience it way more than any of the clients.”
Courtesy of Moira Mona
Although dommes all share the viewpoint that they face – and take on – far higher risks than their subs, and believe that more ethical behavior on the part of their clients would help to tackle some of the issues at hand. “Dommes already have a hard time trusting subs. We already see a lot of subs as flakes or fakes that are there to waste our time,” says Marley. “That just makes it worse for the industry. It makes [ethical dommes] not want to interact with subs that do that.”
She still acknowledges that subs require protection, too, and she hopes they’ll start building groups to support themselves, like the dommes have. “Dommes have a lot of education. We have communities, we have groups where we teach each other to screen clients and look out for scammers,” Marley says. “I think subs need to be able to build their own community, where they can talk to each other for protection.”
Tris also hopes that, one day, more discussion between subs will occur. Maybe that way newcomers to the scene can be protected, and not face the same fate Tris did when they were young. “To do [consensual blackmail], you have to have a lot of discussion. You have to have a lot of boundaries set,” they say. “I think there needs to be more conversation about it, that doesn’t make the subs feel guilty or kink shame,” so they can connect with each other, and better protect themselves from scammers.
