I don't disagree with you about the the new crop of findom practitioners and the Instagram model thing. I am probably just as down on the twerking twentysomethings posting their brunch bills and asking for a sub to pay for it as you are.

I just think that there are high-level dommes who do this as a form of mental/psychological domination and, speaking from experience, those buttons can get pushed just as hard as a cane stroke. But, yeah, you have to have the stomach and will to go there, and I think that the findom scene in general is probably pretty depressing and on whole less "healthy" than face-to-face BDSM.



I would love to on the next trip to Paris! Both the OP and I are people who played face to face in the pro scene and now for whatever reason -- perhaps an antisocial one -- are gravitating to online. I would really like to get back to just being in the room with the person who is dominating me.

My possibly overly-judgemental feelings. But first, two bits of context:

• There are recovery groups for findom clients (or victims). You don't find that anywhere else in femdom, for the most part. If there's a foot fetish anonymous, I haven't found it. But there ARE such groups for clients and former clients of findom. The language they use often reminds me of 1. recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, and 2. victims of spousal abuse. The language makes it clear something isn't right in parts of this activity. Those in recovery are traumatized.
• Go find yourself a forum that's focused on, for example, camgirls, or strippers. I've read some, and find that discussion of how to be a findom is very common. These girls are major hustlers, and they're interested in findom as a quick hustle. The toxic language use and contempt with which they discuss clients is pretty eye-opening.

So, putting those things together, you'll understand why my basic impression is that much (not all) of findom is an absolute cesspool, of clients who are often addicted to the point of being self-destructive, and the toxic repulsive women who seek them out to exploit them.

Note, that doesn't mean I don't think findom play can be a healthy form of femdom. I've met any number of dommes who add it in responsibly. But to me, there isn't a split between femdom and findom. There's no femdom/findom split. The split is within findom itself. Some methods of findom are practiced responsibly and can be the healthy celebration of female domination that any other femdom practice is. And some methods of femdom are exploitative and toxic, basically the worst toxic people seeking out, manipulating, and exploiting men who aren't in control of themselves.

My guess is that the form of addiction that findom is closest to is gambling addiction. In both money itself is at the core of the rush that the addict feels.

This is s very interesting piece that you've obviously given a great deal of thought. You start with 2 paragraphs about findom. You follow this with 3 paragraphs dealing with "pornsexuality" contrasting it with face to face sessions. However after that you want to collapse pornscualty to findom. I am not seriously into findom though I have on a few occasions done things with a little bit of a vibe similar to findom. However I have gone through phases where I wandered into pornsexuality and eschewed face to face sessions. This was BDSM related but had nothing to do with findom.

I am not alone, that is for sure.

Ugh, yes. Have some dignity. I do want to separate myself from them.



This is true. There are some really good ones, like Sierra, for whom I have a lot of respect.

. . .that this may be inspired by a tweet that made the FemDom Twitter lose its collective mind.

This is The Tweet.

Pretty gross.

But we also all lost our minds over this one, too. (It was deleted and came back so there are not the 500+ comments including a debate that she was okay doing permanent damage, because he asked for it.) And that is "Classic Femdom," only done poorly.

People suck. I try not to be one of them and so should everyone else.

I think I saw a domme's reaction to that tweet. I don't want to mention her, because she doesn't really have anything to do with this, and might not agree with what I'm saying.

But her tweet was sort of like, the findom sucks, she's a shitty domme. For a while, I had been thinking that findoms and the woman who made the tweet were pretty different -- that they were living on separate planets, more or less.

I believe that there's a big divide between doing things face to face vs. never meeting in person. That's kind of the main idea on the table. People tend to be in one camp or another.

I know that the lines seem blurry -- it's pretty common for women who do in person sessions to do niteflirt, or to have tribute buttons on some site. But I'd be surprised if many of them are actually taking in much money through them. It's more like, everyone loves free money, and if some guy wants to pay, here's a way he can do it. But she's not really out there making it happen.

It's been a long time since I sessioned at all, much less regularly, but I was very into it for a long time. At one point I was seeing someone once a week. I used to visit NYC to session (I have since moved here) and on one trip I did three sessions in a single day.

But now I've been "stuck" in the findom world for a while. The idea of having a face to face session seems almost unthinkable -- I would be surprised if I ever do it again, despite the fact that it would, in face, be cheaper, and I live in a city with lots of dommes.

So for me something has changed, and it seems natural to think of the two things as being different, as my own relationship to them seems and feels quite different.

Also, FWIW, a lot of people have said, I think findom is part of BDSM. So do I. And I think it's a thing people should be free to do. I mean, I have to think that, as I do it. I wasn't trying to say that findom isn't BDSM, or that it's this thing that ought to be suppressed.

I don't really know anyone in the scene now, except for a couple of women I have been friends with for a long time. But a while back I did -- I met many of the most famous dommes in the world socially and had friendships with some of them. I'm not saying I knew them well enough to speak for them, obviously.

But in general, they had some area they were interested in -- fetishes, or bondage, or intense corporal punishments, etc. And they took what they did seriously -- they tried to learn about it, to develop their skills. They were proud of their professionalism. And they were genuinely interested in the interactions they had with clients. Not everyone, obviously, but in every case, the women I knew had clients that were important to them, and with whom they looked forward to sessioning, not because of the money, but because of the human interaction that took place.

I could list five or seven women who make POV videos who are stars of the findom scene -- what they're doing just isn't the same sort of thing. The whole thing is looking into a camera and talking. they make a lot of money from selling clips, and some small percentage of the guys who buy them send tributes, some of them large. But they never meet any of those guys, and the men never meet them.

I'm not trying to say it's worse, just that it's really different. It's a different sort of life, it has different sorts of rewards, different sorts of pitfalls.

And on my side of things, there is an even bigger difference between being the sort of guy who is open and engaged with women in person, face to face, who is exploring things with a woman, and a guy who is more closed off, and who is watching videos, and sending money.

(Apologies for not answering everyone individually... I think I'd just be saying the same things over and over again, though.)

I realize that most people probably aren't going to agree with me here.

But when people started making femdom porn (before my time), they were basically making a representation of things that people did together, or maybe that some guy wanted to do. So maybe there'd be a movie about corporal punishment, or ball busting, or boot worship, or whatever.

I know that there was a little cheating to make it more intersting -- the scenes tended to be more extreme, and sometimes ball busting (or whatever) looked more severe on camera than it really was.

But it was still rooted in at least the idea of people being together and doing something together. And this was underscored a bit by people who would post, sometimes, about wanting filming slaves for videos, or whatever.

The clips that come out of a site like HumiliationPOV are different -- they're mostly of women looking at the camera telling the viewer that he sucks. A lot of times they plug into the reality of what's going on -- that the guy is a loser who gets off watching clips exactly like the one he's watching now.

One set of videos is about face to face interaction, and even if you're afraid to do it yourself, it's still sort of aspirational -- you sort of think, boy, I wish I could do that.

The other set of videos is about the act of watching videos -- they tell you, this is who you are, this is your life, you should lean into this, by buying all of my videos and sending me money.

Again, for me, the big divide is between a scene that's organized around the idea of face to face interactions, vs. a scene that's organized around the idea of isolation and disconnectedness.

Early on -- I think this must have been in the late 80s -- I started to see a domme regularly. And it was like, she was cool with, and enjoyed, all of this stuff that I had been keeping secret, that I was ashamed of. And it was like -- there was nothing wrong with her, she was really beautiful, and very smart, and she had a great education. So it was sort of this liberating thing.

I don't feel like this other stuff operates in the same way in people's lives.

Or, at least, not in mine.

I pretty much agree with all that wrote, and I think it's hard to argue with. But I'd say that it's like this with a lot of things in the digital age -- things people used to do together can now be done virtually by people who are, for whatever reasons (which include brain rewiring), doing them in a more isolated way. I think part of online findom has to do with the same kind of delivery of dopamine hits and such that are baked into online gaming, the Facebook news scroll, etc.

Everyone is different. I do findom, but I don't watch findom clips (I still will look at the kind of conventional clips you describe), and hate any language like "loser." If the person I do findom with were to stop, I'm not sure I'd do it again with someone else. It's very calibrated relationship at this point. It's just that I have the same nagging feeling as you about my diminishing interest in face to face. Again, though, it's different. I used to see pro dommes, would enjoy my interactions, but only got to know them on the most minimal of levels, which was fine. The woman I do findom with -- half of our calls have no play, and while I won't call us friends, it's a friendly kind of relationship, which makes the times play is involved very startling. After our last spate of calls I mentioned something about how I couldn't do it all the time because of the cost. (It would be cheaper to session with the highest-rate domme in NYC.) She said that she had given me something I couldn't get anywhere else, and I made a reference to just seeing a pro domme for $300 an hour. She laughed and said, "Yeah, but she wouldn't mindfuck you like I just did." And she was kind of right.

As I wrote previously, I would like to get back to face to face because I think it would be healthier -- which, from the vantage point of me 20 years ago, is a statement I'd be surprised I'd be making.