I was wondering if anyone here has seen the film Hustlers, and what they thought of it, if they have.

I kind of feel like the film comes from a women's perspective, and that my take on it is sort of beside the point. I had a fairly strong reaction to the film, but I think that part of the film's overall message is that it's time to tune out perspectives like mine, and focus more on other perspectives.

But, you know, I'm going to give mine anyway.

The main take I have is that the film demonstrates how wide the gulf is between sex workers and clients, and how much genuine animosity there can be between the sides. The men in the film are stupid deeply misogynistic, and the women are basically amoral and exploitative.

This raises many obvious issues for me, a lifelong customer of the sex industry.


Another thing that's kind of specific to me, and affected my take on the film, is that nothing in the film seemed sexy at all.

A lot of people have talked about how the film shows sex work as labor -- that's how it came across to me. I guess it pierced the fantasy bubble. But that played into the first point I made above. There wasn't really anything appealing on the screen -- just a bunch of awful people trying to feed off of each other.

The last thing, which I guess is also kind of specific to me, is that I think the film has given me a new way to explain financial domination.

The film says, basically, this is what sex work is like for many women (I don't think it means to say it's that way for all women). For the customers in the film, that reality is denied, and a fantasy is eroticized.

I think it's too much to say that financial domination eroticizes reality. But the fantasy that is eroticized in findom seems to be closer to reality, at least the reality depicted in the film, than the fantasy the club's customers eroticize.

I mean, financial domination is really sort of saying, the picture of the world of sex work in the film is accurate, and that's what we're going to eroticize. Normal customers in the club deny the manipulation, they pretend the interest and affection coming from the women are real, and they eroticize that fantasy.

In findom there's no pretense that the woman likes you, or that she's not trying to manipulate you. And the contempt the women in the film have for the men they interact with isn't hidden, it's put out in the open. "Hey, this is who you are, and you are, in fact, awful -- that's how I see you."

So it is a kind of end game for my long history as a customer in various contexts. And once you're at that point, it's kind of weird -- where do you go next? Do you just keep doing it, or do you get sick of it and quit? Can you quit? Etc.