She Works Hard For the Money: A Financial Dominatrix’s Tips On Financial Planning

April was financial literacy month, so timelines were brimming with content around generational wealth, planting the seeds of entrepreneurship, bossing up, etc. People are getting their hustle on and turning their passions into profit. But posting is the easy part. What about all the paperwork that comes at the end of the campaign? Invoices, expenses, but more importantly, what about financial planning and taxes?

I noticed most of the chatter about finances and the business behind being a creator comes from vanilla content creators. That got me thinking about the gworls who dabble in spicier content. What happens if you have a profession that, um, isn’t exactly easy to explain on paper? For Black folks who work in sex-related fields, finance may not be sexy, but it is part of the job. How exactly do you add a flogger as a tax write-off? I had the opportunity to chat with Food Fetish, a financial dominatrix or “Fin Domme” — if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry, we’ll get to it — making waves on TikTok by teaching other women how to up get their foot in the door of #KinkTok and beyond. 

What I learned from Food Fetish is that the world of online and in-person kink is vast and there is a lane for everyone. The pandemic has only amplified this as sex workers have been forced to take their clientele online and find other streams of income in the midst of chaos.  Over Zoom, Food Fetish tells Refinery29's Unbothered all the tea on how she got her start in the FinDom lifestyle, keeping her “paypigs” in line, and how she gets her receipts in order. 

Food Fetish: FinDom is short for financial domination and it's a fetish where a submissive relinquishes their control or their power through financial means. And this can come in the form of gifts on Amazon, an Amazon Wishlist or gift cards. They can send you money. I'm in Canada, so we have e-transfer. That's how I get a lot of mine as well as other means, like Stripe or having a website. They don't necessarily have to meet you in order to get off; sometimes they don't even have to see your face. To be honest, when I first started I didn't show my face, but I was sending pictures with emojis over my face or having headless pictures and I was still able to make some money. It just goes to show that they didn't really care who they were worshiping — it was just what I was saying.

FF: I got into this in February of 2016. I was just sitting on Twitter, and my vanilla account had a substantial amount of followers because I actually really know how to grow social media accounts. (I understand the trends.) So I had a whole bunch of followers, and I see a hashtag that says #paypig, something that I had never seen that before. So I clicked on it and my jaw literally just dropped because I saw women on there just posting screenshot after screenshot of them getting money, small amounts like $5 or $2. Medium amounts like $20 or $25. And then there were some crazy amounts like $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 e-transfers. 

To me, it just seemed like they were saying, ‘Give me your money, you f*cking pigs. You don't deserve it as much as me. You go to work, you give me the money.’ And it seemed like they were sending it over. I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don't even like men like that. So yeah, this looks like something I want to get into. Get paid to be mean to men and get tons of money? Alright, let's do it! Sign me up! I spent three months just researching because I'm not the type of person to just jump into things. I understood that it can't be that easy because if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it, right? I watched documentary after documentary, and at that time a few documentaries had come out about financial domination, and it was mostly white women. I only saw one Black woman, so I thought, ‘What she had that I don't have?’ And the answer was nothing. 

FF:  So maybe in June of 2016, I decided to make my first Twitter account. And I was just taking pictures of me in lingerie without showing my face and posting them online, and they were getting like tons of retweets, but I wasn't getting real money off of the social media engagement. It took awhile for me to even see a $50 Amazon gift card, to be honest. And I thought, What am I doing wrong? Then, I actually began to study the psychology of why a submissive would like to give a dominant their money.

FF: I remember I was working this job and posting online, and I saw that feet were popular. I had stepped in some water when I was going to the office, so my little TOMS had started to stink. Just to see, I took a picture underneath my desk at work and captioned it, "My feet stink. Who wants to smell them?" And this guy messaged me like, "I want to! I have $100." I asked him to send it to me through PayPal, but he goes, "No, I have a wife and kids. She’s already caught me. I can't. Can I just come to you in person?" I had never met anyone in person at that time, so I said no, but he was insistent and promised that he would have the money. So I just told a co-worker that I was going for a cigarette break to go meet someone, and that if I didn't come back in 10 minutes, she should look out the window and see if I'm okay.

I went downstairs, and saw this white man with a nice BMW. When I get in his car, he's telling me that he's just a fucking pathetic loser and that he just wants to serve me. That if I'm ever out with my friends for drinks, I should call him and he'll pull up, pay for everything, and just leave. That I could belittle him in front of my friends and stuff — he was literally on his hands and knees. As I was smoking my cigarette, I spit on the ground, and I saw him just eyeing the saliva. I put two and two together, made four, and I'm just like, "Alright, go ahead," and this guy actually got into a push-up position and licked my saliva off the concrete. I was actually kind of disgusted, but I hid it on my face and said, “Good boy.” In total, the time it took me to get in the elevator, come downstairs, walk across the street, smoke my cigarette, and go back upstairs into the office was around eight minutes. I made $100. And I was like, Okay, yeah, I like this. I need more of those. So that's how I started my in-person domination career. 

FF: I found my subs everywhere randomly.  Once, I was walking back to the place where I lived at the time in Toronto, and this guy randomly stopped me and asked if he could give me a massage? When I ask how much, he says $100. So we go to the park bench not too far from where me and my friend are staying, and she's giving him the instructions on how to massage my thigh. I didn’t even know she was a Domme. 

FF: Yeah, actually, yeah. Maybe like 50% are white, and the other 50% are everything else combined. Some are brown guys, some are Black guys, some are guys that I would talk to on the street and look like they wouldn't be into kink. But then again, I don't look like I'd be into kink.

FF: One of the biggest misconceptions is that it's easy, and that you're going to sit there and say, "Give me your money!" and people are just going to give it to you. You have to be giving something in order to get something — that's what people don't understand. As much as I don't show my face, I go above and beyond in other ways because I'm not shy about my body; I don't mind being even nude or close to nude. Once you put something on the internet, it's there forever, which is why I decided to create my own lane in which I don't show my face and any distinguishing features. The other misconception is that financial domination doesn't require consistency. People don't think of it as like a skill. They think it's automatically something they should know how to do without putting in any education or without learning anything so that they can become good at it. They just want to copy without really put their own spin on things and think it's going to work out for them, which makes no sense to me. 

FF: People like to offer me ridiculously low prices for some extreme fetish-type content. And honestly, the way I deal with it is just by blocking them. I don't have to deal with anything. I used to find that when I would list my prices, they would just stop responding. Now, I require a tribute [of money] before they can even start speaking to me. It used to be $25, but I raised it to $50. They pay that, and then we get into their kinks and stuff. I actually have an unblock fee of $500. Sometimes they have a humiliation kink, and when you buy into that, they offer you a low wage or a low price, and you curse them out, and they like that. I don't bother. Just block.

With pricing, I started off low because I learned very quickly that you can't set it high, realise this is not working, and then set it lower. That just doesn't work. You have to set it lower. And as you get more popular and build your community, you can increase your price as well as increase the quality of your content. You're going to see what other people are doing, and you're going to analyse your data, see what type of content you put out that got the most likes and made you the most money is, and recreate that content. Do it like that, and you're going to increase your price. I also judged based on what other Black Dommes were doing at the time. But I can't offer prices like the white women — I just wouldn't get as much, and I know that.

FF: Yeah, there is a huge wage gap. I know how to grow my socials pretty quickly, but initially, I wasn't able to grow my Twitter very quickly at all. I saw this white woman — we got in relatively around the same time — and I had 100 followers while she had like 2500. Then I looked again the next month, and she had like 18,500, and I had around 500. I was like, whoa! She had an Amazon wishlist that was nearly sold out, and almost nobody was buying shit for me. It was so crazy. I even see other Black Dommes complaining that the [wage] gap is just too crazy... it's not fair.

FF: Yeah, because you can't really depend on your subs. Then COVID hit, a lot of things really changed me. You couldn't really depend on it as much because a lot of people suffered financially and weren't making a lot of money. I even shifted from being in-person to online. Now, people are kind of getting back into the groove of things. But at the end of the day, I think of it like a commission-based job. You're not guaranteed to get any money if you don't work, so it's always going to be hit or miss. I had a really, really, really good week last week, but it's not like that every week. So when I showed my success on TikTok, I also had to put a disclaimer and say, "Yes, this was a really good week. But no, not all of these weeks are like that." I do make good money, but not all of your weeks will be a $1500 week.

FF: I'm currently rebuilding my website, but I started a business specialising in custom luxury wigs that I dye and custom-make myself! Because the the customer service here is just so horrible — people will buy their hair and the hairdressers will swap it out with their fake hair — I saw a market for it. I also create digital products; I created an e-book to show women how to get into FinDom, because when I first started, it was hundreds of hours of trial and error before I somewhat got a hint of the recipe of the sauce. I wanted to save people from having to put in all that work before they see any real money. When I first created my main TikTok account, it wasn't necessarily supposed to be monetised like it is now, but that's another stream of income. I literally just started talking about how I got into it, and people started asking me how they could start as well. One of my followers has been taking my tips seriously, and she's made over $1,000 with 100 followers in two weeks!

FF: The formula works!

FF: I feel like it's important to create the content and educate because I want to show people that I'm no different from them. I listen to a lot of Young Dolph, and he once said, "If I can do it, you can do it — who the hell am I?" And literally, that is it. Who am I? I'm no different from anybody. I literally make money in my room. I don't even leave my room to make money! I have men who ask me if they can do it, and the answer is yes.There's this white man who gets Doms to submit to his feet, and I've never even seen this guy's face. "I'm bigger. Can I do it?" Yes, there are bigger Doms. There are Brown Doms, Black Doms, white Doms, Asian Doms. Like there's everybody! If you are a woman, and you want a women's sub, you can make it happen. If you are a man who wants a woman sub, you can make it happen. If you are a man, and you want a man sub, you can make it happen. There's literally something out there for everybody. 

FF: I'm already writing another e-book because I realised that content wasn't enough. This one's called The Six-Figure Fin Domme, and it's about how to transform your side hustle it into a six-figure business as a content model or just as a Fin Domme. I'm also starting to offer one-on-one services to coach anybody who wants or needs a little bit of extra support. I'm doing webinars as well, as I am looking into starting a social media space for kink. I had to learn to manoeuvre with what I can do and how I can word things, because I'm noticing that a lot of our pages get deleted for expressing ourselves on TikTok. So I'm looking into starting that up because I'm tired of us being suppressed.

FF: My life became so much better once I became a FinDomme. I kind of am submissive still, but I used to be submissive to people who did not deserve it, so that's really changed. Now, I'm a no-nonsense type of person; you have one chance with me, and I'm out, whereas I used to give chance after chance after chance and just stay around. I know my worth a lot more, and that's really boosted my confidence for sure. My head is huge now [Laughs]. And I feel like because of that, people notice me more. I'll be walking around normally and have subs just come up to me, and it's just because of my energy. They just know. It's made me smarter with money and with my time management. I’m way more organised. I think FinDom's just made me overall a more well-rounded person.